VentureBeat

Former state treasurer, Phil Angelides, will set up his own venture firm in Sacramento.

In an interview with Bizjournal, Phil Angelides says his firm will invest first in real estate and green building projects, where he has experience. Over time, he’ll invest in other environmental projects and products, he said. As treasurer, Angelides led the state initiative four years ago to begin supporting investments in green technology — which helped spark interest in the area by Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists.

Thus continues the revolving door tradition in Sacramento. Like many other pension executives before him, Angelides should find it easy to draw on his contacts at California state pensions, such as CalPERS and CalSTRS, to help him raise money for his firm. He served on their boards for years, overseeing investment decisions.

Hewlett-Packard agrees to cough up $14.5 million in response to the board-spying scandal that has hurt HP’s brand, but this raises fundamental questions about how board members are trained.

Still pending are criminal charges facing five individuals. These people, including the former chairman Pat Dunn, have supposedly been trained in Silicon Valley business etiquette for years, if not decades. An ethics officer Kevin Hunsaker is even one of those charged. If this can happen at a huge public company, what does it mean for the thousands of private companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere? As part of the deal, HP will overhaul its ethics training and create new internal processes to improve its adherence to the law and good business practices. But is HP really that exceptional? Think of all the private companies that have appointed board members who have little or no training on conduct, and presumably fewer constraints because of the lack of public company regulation. They can make decisions early on that will haunt them years later.

Pascal Levensohn, a valley venture capitalist who writes about board member best practices and ethics, writes that the lack of board member education is widespread. We never hear about all the lawsuits that get filed every year against board members, and are quietly settled. Some break out in the open, but even those are settled before we can learn the lessons about what happened and why.