Bill Joy on Reinventing Silicon Valley -- Again - Page 2

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At Kleiner Perkins, Joy said he focuses on finding ideas that could make things ten times better. "If we're not trying to get the 10x, if we settle for 10 or 20 percent, there's no chance we'll achieve what we need to in the next 20 or 30 years," he said. He expects three out of four of these investments to fail.

Acknowledging that oil and coal are so cheap that they out-compete renewable energy in today's market, he said we have to make a societal decision to protect innovators from the cyclical nature of commodities. A drop in the price of petroleum "can wipe out a whole generation of startups trying to bring us renewable fuels. The government can help by creating a standard that some percentage of fuel must come from renewable energy," Joy said.

He believes that advanced fuels made from plants that don't compete with food production and can be blended with gasoline will be important in the near term, if manufacturers can invent the chemical processes to do it reliably and to scale. Wind and geothermal energy using advanced drilling technologies could combine to give us all the energy we need.

World-changing ideas

While Silicon Valley may have run on greed in the '80s and '90s, Joy doesn't think the next wave of innovation will be motivated by money. Today's entrepreneurs are passionate about dealing with the carbon footprint and health of the ocean, he said. "They have world-changing ideas.

"The last percentage point of ownership in the company isn't the decision," he said. "The decision is, how do we make this dream come alive?"