Economics
Bright Days for NanoSolar
The Silicon Valley startup has just lined up $100 million in venture capital and plans to manufacture affordable solar panels using proprietary technology
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When NanoSolar was founded in 2002, the Palo Alto (Calif.) solar-energy startup drew plenty of skepticism. After all, the dot-com bubble had been reduced to a soap stain two years earlier, just months after 34-year-old NanoSolar founder and Chief Executive Officer Martin Roscheisen had sold his e-mail list service eGroups to Yahoo! (YHOO) for $450 million. Now he was jumping right into the next hyped-up sector: alternative energy.
It didn't help that NanoSolar's investors included Google (GOOG) founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Benchmark Capital, the venture-capital firm that struck e-gold with eBay (EBAY). What did a bunch of dot-com millionaires know about solar energy?