After John Doerr made a big media splash last week by announcing the newly formed sFund, one of his rivals was clearly annoyed by Doerr's glitzy push back into social media investing-especially after hyping the greentech space over last several years. "What's up with a 60-year-old guy putting on a hoodie all of sudden," he quipped.

Hoodie? Allow me to digress. The black American hip-hop culture, now part of the mainstream and a dominant force in the youth economy, is the origin of the hoodie. Technically, a hoodie is a sweatshirt with a hood. The characteristic design includes large frontal pockets, a hood, and (usually) a drawstring to adjust the hood opening. The appeal of the hoodie is its promise of anonymity, mystery, and defiance. Like social media, hoodies are for the young, not old fogies, hence the reference.

Well, John Doerr may want to be mysterious and defiant, but he is clearly not looking to be anonymous. AlwaysOn's view is that Doerr is playing a hand out of his BMF Steve Jobs' favorite game of being publicly scarce until he needs attention-then bam! And he sure got a boom at his announcement last week. But as the buzz settled after his "hoodie" event, many questions arise. The most obvious question was what happened to the John Doerr who used to ride around on his Segway and proclaim that "green is the new red, white, and blue!"?

As we see it, Doerr's Achilles heel has always been that he often looks at potential market opportunities more with the fanaticism of a religious zealot rather than the cool and calculating eye of a seasoned entrepreneurial capitalist. In the early 1990s, his religion was "pen computing," and his big deal was called Go. It was a big deal, until Go figured out that handwriting recognition software was not that easy to develop, and people didn't want it anyway. In the mid-1990s, his religion became the "commercialization of the Internet," and you have to give him a lot of credit for being part of an initially small group of entrepreneurs and investors who made it happen.

In retrospect, backing Jim Clark and a then 21-year-old kid named Marc Andreessen and their fledgling company Netscape was not for the faint at heart. As one company insider told me at the time, until Kleiner Perkins invested (Clark was the sole investor at the time), Netscape was "50 engineers running around in different directions." Kleiner Perkins recruited Jim Barksdale, Mike Homer, and other top executives who ended up turning the company into a real enterprise.

Moving forward to the Segway (no pun intended), the buzz created by Doerr about the then-unknown product was hyperbolic. He speculated that the two-wheel, self-balancing electric vehicle invented by Dean Kamen would be "more important than the Internet". It become the fastest company to reach $1 billion in sales. And just as he did at last week's hoodie event, Doerr served up Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to proclaim: "...Cities will be built around this device." The Segway, of course, never lived up to Doerr's promise, and Kleiner Perkins' $50 million investment (the biggest single investment to date) in the company returned only pennies on the dollar after the company was sold earlier this year. In a sad, if not ironic event, the new owner, James W. Heselden, died last month after he drove a Segway off a 30-foot cliff.

Now on to the greentech revolution. Obviously the jury is still out. But we knew Doerr was beginning to hedge when we started hearing rumors that he was begging to get into Twitter a few months ago. Even at a late-stage valuation, Doerr could still say he was in on Twitter, after all, which is currently one of the big brands in social media. At some point, he obviously woke up and started to feel he was missing out on what he calls the Third Wave-social, mobile, the cloud, and commerce all coming together.

To be fair, Kleiner Perkins has been active in the space. It was an early investor in the first real social network, Friendster, which unfortunately flamed out as many who are the first in the market do. But without Friendster, there would be no Facebook. Kleiner Perkins has also invested in Zynga, which has been the fastest growing and most prosperous Facebook application to date.

At AlwaysOn, we are bullish on greentech, but we do believe, as the rest of the world is figuring out, that it is a much more capital-intensive business than investing in the consumer Internet, and VCs are still figuring out a model where they can play and win big. Kleiner Perkins also has many potentially very cool investments, such as Bloom Energy. But many insiders are saying that even this promising company may be over-hyped as well.

Our guess is that by investing too early in greentech, Doerr has been caught holding the investors bag too many times, and is worried that his legacy as a savvy investor may be in danger. We do know a few Kleiner Perkins entrepreneurs who have invested alongside recent Kleiner Perkins funds who are increasingly skeptical about future returns. As one of Kleiner Perkins' entrepreneur investors told us recently, "KP funds have not made much money since the Google fund."

At last week's hoodie event, Mark Zuckerberg made the calm, cool projection that he thinks "There is going to be an opportunity over the next five years or so to pick any industry and rethink it in a social way." We agree. We also buy off on Doerr's Third Wave theory in general and are betting our own company on it. So if the sFund helps John Doerr help make this happen, while also helping him hedge his green bets, we say: "Put on that hoodie and go for it John!"