Tony Blair to Join Khosla Ventures - NYTimes.com

Tony Blair to Join Khosla Ventures - NYTimes.com: "Blair to Join Venture Firm As Adviser on Technology
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Published: May 24, 2010

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SAUSALITO, Calif. — Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, is turning his attention to Silicon Valley. Mr. Blair is becoming a senior adviser at Khosla Ventures, the venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, an investor and a proponent of green technology.

Khosla Ventures, which Mr. Khosla founded in 2004 after leaving the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, made the announcement here on Monday at a meeting of its investors. The firm is investing $1.1 billion in clean technology and information technology companies.

Mr. Blair will offer strategic advice on public policy to the firm’s green portfolio companies. They include Calera, a manufacturer that uses carbon dioxide to create cement products; Kior, which converts biomass like wood chips into biofuels; and Pax Streamline, which aims to make air-conditioning more environmentally friendly.

“The more I studied the whole climate change issue and linking it with energy security and development issues, I became absolutely convinced that the answer is in the technology,” Mr. Blair said in an interview.

Mr. Blair worked on international climate change policy as prime minister, and now leads the Breaking the Climate Deadlock initiative, through which he aims to help shape international climate policy.

Silicon Valley and Washington have a distant and at times adversarial relationship. That is fine when it comes to information technology, Mr. Blair said, because government is not its driving force.

Green technology is different, though, because governments are trying to use it to achieve policy goals. “Technological breakthroughs that are economically viable — for governments, that’s the holy grail,” he said.

Mr. Khosla said that people who worked in technology underestimated the importance of working with policy makers, and that Mr. Blair would help bridge that divide.

Like Al Gore and Colin Powell, who are advisers at Kleiner Perkins, Mr. Blair will lend his name to projects, make introductions and dole out advice, but will not be involved in the firm’s day-to-day activity.

For example, Mr. Blair said, he could potentially help to broker a deal for one of the companies to build a demonstration plant in a particular country.

Khosla Ventures, based in Menlo Park, Calif., generally invests between $5 million and $15 million in technology start-ups, and also invests smaller amounts, around $2 million, in what Mr. Khosla calls “science experiments” — green-technology ideas that are so risky and early-stage that they will likely fail.

Its goal is to help build technologies that do not require government subsidies to survive and that are economically viable in countries like China and India, Mr. Khosla said.

“We are not trying to do incremental things,” Mr. Khosla said. “We are trying to do things that are the stuff of dreams.”

Khosla Ventures is increasing its green-tech investment as most venture capitalists have been scaling back on such investments, particularly those that require building factories to produce alternative energy.

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