I couldn't agree more with Sam about the importance of energy for our civilization. Kudos to him for putting his efforts towards important stuff.
I have mixed, but mostly positive feelings about venture capital and energy startups. The fact is, it's a tough space. Large capital requirements, prototyping cycles often measured in years, and a low success rate. Everyone is still waiting for the energy unicorn to put Google, Uber, Yahoo, et al. to shame. And energy startups don't benefit from many of the things in SV that infotech startups do, such as ecosystem synergies and being co-located with all the new cool stuff in your industry. This is especially true with regards to one of SV's great strengths, the freedom to fail.
Where SV shines is in the short times from idea to testing. In most of the nuclear energy industry, going from idea to tested prototype can take decades. I think we all know the importance of short debugging and feedback cycles. Hirsch harped on this a few years back, and it's still a good point. Look at ITER, which were were talking about back in 1995. ITERative, it is not.
Some observations:
1) The teams and funding are a bit larger than they used to be. This is probably a good thing. The design turnaround time is a bit better, but not by much though. It's necessary to tweak a design once you have built it to learn from it and see what its ultimate performance can be. But it's all-too-easy to spend a year or two doing that. Do that a few times and then you're out (of money, time, your mind, what-have-you).
2) Location. There is no advantage to locating an energy company in SV except for proximity to funding (and Stanford, I suppose). We located by the NHMFL in Tallahassee. It's cheaper, and the magnet guys would moonlight for us. However, working with Tim over 3 time-zones had its challenges. I don't think we got the benefit of having a great VC as much as some of his other portfolio companies did (no complaints about him, just the distance). Some things are just hard to explain over the phone. But SV still isn't the right place. I think that there is a big opportunity for VCs to improve how they provide the value-added stuff that they do (beyond providing money) remotely, and energy is the space that needs it most. I don't know the VC job well enough to provide good suggestions, I just know there is an unmet need here.
3) Because the failure rate for startups is so high, it's important to have a decent failure path for the people involved. For software devs, SV jobs often provide a soft landing. Energy guys don't have that easily transferable skill set. So, fusion largely consists of old hands who are willing to spend 20 years ramming a single design through, and a bunch of young redshirts who are sure that they can beat the odds. When every design failure becomes a career failure, people aren't incentived to radically iterate designs quickly. Luckily for me, I learned radiation measurement and protection on-the-job (hey we have neutrons! How many neutrons? Woo hoo! Wait, oh shit!) so that skill transfered over into medical physics quite readily. But imagine what SV would look like if almost every software startup founder who failed once had left the software industry.
I wish good luck to Helion, UPower, and all the other teams fighting the good fight.