Fred Destin

The rock star wannabe turned venture capitalist, the “uncle” to many a rising star in the European venture market, George Coelho has left Balderton and focus on the emerging opportunity for the next 250 years, i.e. cleantech, with Good Energies.

George will be a Managing Director heading up the venture opoortunities from Zug.  He was a founder of Benchmark Europe and behind companies such as Kalido, Orchestria, Video Island (Saul Klein’s business which merged with ScreenSelect and later Arts Alliance’s Lovefilm) and as I understand it Codemasters (though I think Ynon was on the board).  George was previously with ETF Group as CIO and with Intel Capital as head of the international strategic investment group.  He is also hilarious.

<— Can you recognise this man ?

From where I am sitting this make a lot of sense; when you were the Managing Partner of Benchmark Europe, moving to another fund seems to make limited sense.  Moving sideways to a next-gen investor that also allows you to work out of Switzerland (George is based in Lugano) is undoubtedly a logical next move.  I wish him best of luck !  After all, clean tech is overhyped, overfunded and overexposed (as one example the SPPV index of solar businesses was up a whopping 2,300% over the last 4 years), so it will take all his wits to keep the right deals rolling in.  Good Energies was ranked as NEF’s top cleantech investor in 2007 (ok, by number of deals :-)), so this should be a good platform from which to rise above the noise.