Gore's green Valley

Net Results: Silicon Valley is turning out to be Gore's Valley.  Al Gore, joint winner of this year's Nobel Peace prize and 2006 Oscar winner for his An Inconvenient Truth documentary, has snagged a very nice line-up of dream Valley jobs, writes Karlin Lillington.

He is a board member at Apple, a senior adviser to Google and he has just been named a partner with eminent Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

At Kleiner Perkins, Gore will advise the firm on green technology investments. This is not a niche area for the company, which in its time has backed some of the biggest tech company names, including Google, Palm, Sun Microsystems, Hyperion, Verisign, Travelocity, and Amazon. Kleiner Perkins plans to sink a full third of its $600 million (€404 million) funds into green technology start-ups.

Nor is Gore a stranger to green finance. With David Blood of Goldman Sachs, he co-founded Generation Investment Management in 2004, a London-based global equities company focused on putting money behind ecologically and socially responsible companies.

He is chairman of the company, which manages $1.5 billion in investments.

Along with Gore's new role, the arrangement with Kleiner Perkins will see prominent Kleiner venture capitalist (VC) John Doerr join Generation's board and will give Kleiner some space at Generation's headquarters in London. (This means Kleiner is now more easily accessible to any Irish green tech companies hoping to be the next big thing.)

Gore and wife Tipper have also bought a condominium in San Francisco, making it a lot easier to spend time on the west coast. All in all, not a bad outcome for the one-time presidential candidate.

Meanwhile, by 2009 Kleiner Perkins and other venture firms that line Menlo Park's Sand Hill Road - aka the boulevard of the VCs, where any Valley VC firm worth its salt has an office - will have a new hotel right on Sand Hill for putting up high roller investors, technologists, executives and visiting VCs.

The landlord is a bit unusual - Stanford University. Though a few Irish universities are in the hostelry business and let rooms during the summer, the Stanford effort is a decidedly more posh affair. The cheapest room will run to $465 a night at the $200 million five-star resort. For those with very deep pockets, there are five 2,500sq ft suites.

How can a university get away with those kinds of prices? Location, location, location. There are no hotels in easy distance of the VC end of gently sloping Sand Hill Road and very little land on which to build.

Or rather, there are acres and acres of beautiful oak-covered low rolling hillside hugging the edge of the coastal mountain range, but almost none of it can be built on, especially not with any kind of commercial venture.

Some of it is committed to preservation, while very tight planning protocols control the rest.

Conveniently, Stanford just happens to be the sole owner of the vast majority of priceless acreage in this particular region. After much wrangling with the city of Menlo Park, it finally got planning permission for the 21- acre resort and its 15,000sq ft of spas.

Apparently this is because the city was a bit more hungry for its 10 per cent room tax cut than it had been in the past.

Stanford itself won't be running the place. That job has been contracted out to the Rosewood group that runs other high end resorts and hotels in the US.

Even at those room rates though, one analyst told the San Francisco Chronicle that there would be no quick return on the massive investment. As the paper noted, though, Stanford itself has lots of cash to burn - $967 million in gifts in 2006 alone, to bring the university's overall endowment from donations to $14.1 billion.

That gives Stanford the kind of cash reserves many technology companies only dream of, and the freedom to do something as unconventional as opening a resort right on its own land.

This will give it a very nice place to accommodate major donors and those wanting to invest in the intellectual property the university regularly spins out.

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