What I find really intriguing about this is Thiel's participation - it's one thing to get funding from Khosla, who is a cleantech cheerleader, it's really amazing to get funding from Thiel, who is a cleanteach skeptic.
The Thiel quote made it sound like he invested in it because DoE rejected it. I'm not sure if having such an ideologue as an investor is a good idea, especially in the heavily regulated energy sector.
If the DoE rejects you your choices are limited to those that would still fund a company after that rejection.
If that includes Peter Thiel then I'm all for it.
Him being a skeptic of clean tech is a validation of sorts, you can bet that this kind of money isn't thrown around likely and that they had the basic physics checked before the investment. If someone would have been able to raise serious practical doubt about the feasibility then likely there would have been no announcement today. Yes, there is still risk, and there are likely lots of unknown factors. But this is technology development. I'm pretty sure the world will be at their feet if they manage to get the device into production at scale, no matter who the investors were.
And names like Thiel, Gates and Khosla certainly don't hurt.
You trust a short quote in a news article to be an accurate indication of anything? Have you ever read an article reporting on something that you know first-hand?
I'm willing to trust that he said it to the reporter who then printed it.
And for the record, silly rhetoric about boots on the backs of the taxpayer is completely out of place in an article where he should be pimping his investment. It does make it look like he invested for negative sentiment towards the gov't rather than positive sentiment towards the company.
To be fair - you end up having to make statements like that a lot in this industry. Like it or not, there have been some very large, high profile failures lately (Solyndra being one of the more prominent, but certainly not the first or last). There is a stigma developing regarding "clean / green tech" that we continually have to fight because of these failures, both in terms of the general industry, but even more so if you have any connection to public money, and often even if you don't.
