CleanBeta

Khosla Is on the Dole

Despite his claims to the contrary published today on VentureBeat, Khosla is on the dole and his assertion to the contrary is the kind of wooden, legalistic interpretation of “dole” I would expect of a lawyer.

Mascoma and Verennium are two of Khosla’s principal biofuels investments and they are the only private-sector participants in the DOE’s biofuels initiative. Mascoma recently received roughly $50 million in funds from the Department of Energy to build the first commercial scale biofuels operation. Verenium also received a similarly large chunk of DOE change to build a biorefinery in February. That money is peanuts compared to the nearly $1 billion in federal research funds that have gone into the previously mentioned DOE biofuels initiative that have benefited Mascoma and Verennium exclusively. The Bioenergy Research Center (BRC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently created by the Department of Energy might as well be the Khosla, Inc. The board members of the BRC sit on the boards of Khosla’s biofuels companies with a few exceptions. The number of large grants Khosla’s scientists have received from Uncle Sam is easily a dozen and probably two. How is that not “on the dole”?