Content area
Full text
Firelake Capital's Fred Kittler is betting big on Silicon Valley's next wave: environmentally friendly technologies.
ARE THERE SECOND ACTS IN American lives? Ask Fred Kittler, co-founder of Velocity Technology and Communications Fund, a hedge fund focusing on the high-tech sector that in 1999 was up 262 percent, after fees.
Kittler believes a relatively new investment sector called cleantech is about to take off, and with it the returns of his new hedge fund, five-year-old Firelake Capital Management, based in Palo Alto, California. Its Firelake Strategic Technology Fund is one of the first hedge funds to embrace cleantech -- a category of alternative technologies in energy, water, transportation and manufacturing that deliver environmentally friendly products at lower costs than do current offerings. Of the 40 companies in Firelake's portfolio, 15 belong to the cleantech sector -- investments in privately held companies that Kittler believes have the potential to deliver enormous returns when they go public or are acquired. To balance the risk of such early-stage investments, the bulk of the portfolio...