The Color Of Money

Even with the passage of AB32, KP and other green-tech investors face big challenges in an energy field still tilted toward producers of fossil fuels. But for many of the KP partners, being green has become personal. John Doerr regularly tells the story of his young daughter angrily admonishing him and his generation for fouling the planet. Beyond Bill Joy's wonky fixation on the details of his superyacht is actually an obsession with solving the world's most pressing engineering challenge. And Ray Lane, who once thought he had joined a firm of "tree-huggers," now finds himself frequently pressing his pro-green rationale of national security and economic independence on his Midwestern hunting buddies--with the same mixed results that plague many converts to the green movement. "Some of them have been very moved," Lane says. "The rest of them tell me, 'Ray, you've been living in California too long'."

© 2006