????What can we learn from this? The average NBA draft pick of cleantech:
????? Raised $122 million in equity financing, which excludes grants and debt. The distribution is pretty broad, but I'd note that if you remove Q-Cells and REC as special cases, the floor is ~ $30MM. If a new business plan poses a lower lifetime cash requirement, there should be an airtight argument to justify that claim.
????? Went public at a ~ $900 million valuation, also with a broad distribution. If you assumed that investors owned, say, 80% of these companies at the IPO, the lot would have delivered a 5.9x return on capital invested.
????? Took 8.3 years from founding to IPO. If you're signing up to build a cleantech winner, reserve a decade. Note, however, that this elapsed time has shortened for companies that have gone public since 2010, where it averages 6.7 years. Start-ups in this later group received venture financing either right at their founding or soon after it, in contrast to earlier companies which often bootstrapped themselves for years before taking venture capital.
????? Survived a 1-in-50 success rate. These 18 companies received their first venture investment between 1995 and 2007. A quick VentureSource search indicates 986 seed/Series A rounds done in cleantech during that period. While there are doubtless further successes to come, particularly from start-ups funded in the later years, the yield so far is 18 / 986 or a 1.8% of start-ups funded.
????If we include some financial metrics, we learn a bit more. The average cleantech winner also:
