Forbes interviews venture capitalist Charlie Harris. He is the Chairman of Harris and Harris (NASDAQ:TINY) a venture capital fund which is focused on funding nanotech companies. He is bullish looking forward from today for a couple of reasons
1. We have an eight year back log of good companies and ideas due to a poor IPO environment, we have had an eight year drought in IPOs but still lots of good ideas out there.
2. Clean tech theme has a lot of room left to grow
3. The recent financial crisis has revealed and removed a lot of risks
4. The best businesses are started in times of economic distress. Dislocation equals opportunity. Companies that start during financial distress have tremendous discipline to survive.
Somewhat surprisingly for a person with 100% of his fund invested in nanotech, he does not see nanotech as the leader of a next IPO bookm. He seems to see nanotech as an enabling technology (my words not his) so you will see nanotech enabling clean fuel, cancer drugs and so on, and these individual spaces could boom, but not an "all things nanotech" type boom.