Most founders think "execution risk" is one risk. Investors don't. They're worried about four: construction, ramp-up, supply chain, and team. And the reason so many FOAK pitches feel competent on paper but somehow fail to reassure is that founders answer as if it's one question. This week's piece walks through each of the four, with examples from ATOME's Villetta project, JR Energy Solution's nine-month electrode factory build, and what shifted at InterBattery in Seoul last m

The boardroom isn't the place where major decisions are hashed out. It's a place where major decisions are officially signed off. More like a ribbon-cutting ceremony. That I learned only when preparing to present at my first-ever board meeting, in the summer of 2012. I expected a full presentation, followed by a discussion, and then a decision. And while on the face of it all went according to this plan, one important thing was off - the decision had already been agreed befor

There's a new idea I came upon on how to finance FOAK factories: break the facility into three separate "shells" — the envelope, the piping and MEP, and the secret sauce — and finance each according to its risk profile. The envelope and MEP can supposedly attract debt; only the secret sauce needs equity. The math is appealing: a $100M equity requirement collapses to $35M. I've read the argument carefully (see the link to the original article). The logic of asset unbundling is

Your FOAK isn't stalling because of the technology, funds or the supply chain. It's stalling because of the team. Not the wrong people. The wrong leadership. I've seen this across wind and battery scale-ups: a founding team that was fast and decisive in the lab starts to fragment under the pressure of commercial scale. Here is the 5-Step Framework for uBilding FOAK Teams That Deliver.

Choosing the wrong geography can kill a FOAK, but being forced to choose too early almost certainly will. Lyten is moving manufacturing from the US to Sweden and Poland, while trying to keep its FOAK in Nevada. Freyr started in Norway, shifted to the US, and eventually walked away from batteries altogether. In today’s increasingly fragmented world, choosing a location for your FOAK can be central to survival. And too many founders are being pushed to make that choice before t

“Things that people assume are going to be easier are often way harder than they think.” If there was one quote about #FOAK, this would probably be it. And it doesn’t matter what you are building - an #SMR or a FOAK chemical plant. The assumptions you make about some steps being easy always come back and kick your ass. The quote comes from Kairos Power CEO Mike Laufer, in a podcast episode of The Green Blueprint. Mike and his team are currently building Hermes-2 - a 50 MW SMR

This week, I was drafting a report for six months of my work for an early-stage energy and AI startup, so I thought, why not share what I can? So here it goes. The value from advisors to startups is usually customer or investor connections, and some PR representation. I can deliver very little of those. So why get one if he can’t deliver the usual advisor value? Let’s see what I did: • Stress-tested the core business logic across multiple markets and rollout scenarios, finall

I used to think that US sanctions were reserved for criminals, dictators and Russians. Well, a few months ago, an ICC judge authorised an investigation into alleged war crimes by US personnel in Afghanistan. Then she was sanctioned. Her bank access was frozen. Amazon and Microsoft shut down her accounts. She was treated like an international criminal. If that wasn’t a wake-up call for all working with the USA, this January should have been. With Trump openly threatening tarif

A downloadable 5-step framework for finding clients for your FOAK startup

After 9 days of the free trial of 2026, can someone please tell me how to cancel the subscription? This week was entertaining: suddenly everyone became a geopolitics expert.
 Mostly AI / data / everything-cool profiles explaining global affairs — often from countries that haven’t had a serious geopolitical shock in 50 years. Fun. Briefly. My own introduction to geopolitics was less theoretical.
In 2014, I was CIO for five power plants in Russia. One ran on a Siemens turbine d

I’ve put together a list of 23 FOAK climate tech projects that are supposed to prove something in 2026 — not in decks, not in announcements, but in steel, concrete, electrons, molecules, and regulatory filings.

Without clean electrons there are no clean fuels

Getting public funds for FOAK in Europe is so hard that companies prefer to change location.

Europe keeps announcing “battery partnerships” with Asian players with great enthusiasm — but when you look closely, the only thing landing here in any meaningful quantity is concrete. A T&E/Carbone4 report, which came out this February and which I’ve missed, lays out what many of us working in manufacturing have suspected for years: technology isn’t coming, know-how isn’t coming, and the only thing being localised is the assembly hall.

Here is my 4-step FOAK Strategy Checklist

Construction sites and factory floors are places I’m far more used to than a laboratory. But last week I was in the Netherlands, meeting a client and visiting two universities to see how their new chemical product is getting ready for its demo project. And I have to say: I haven’t yet seen this level of preparation — on both the R&D and project sides. Every assumption challenged, every risk logged, every experiment linked to a downstream engineering decision. It’s the sort of

Nothing tests a founder’s sanity like having too many “very interested” customers. It’s like speed dating with homework. A few days ago, I spoke with an early-stage founder whose product was attracting a lot of interest. On paper, it looked like a dream: inbound requests from consumer electronics, defence, industrial automation, and even a few overseas corporates. In reality, it was a trap. The team had five people, no sales function, and most of their time was devoted to dev

Why VCs might be dangerous to FOAK projects and 5 steps to get VC money safely.

Your FOAK supply chain doesn’t start when you place the first order — it starts when you design your pilot. Miss that moment, and delays, overruns, and “unavailable parts” will follow. In my new post, I go through five steps to build your supply chain before your FOAK becomes real.

We need more capital to bridge the FOAK “valley of death” in climate tech — but not at any cost. Lately, I’ve seen two worrying ideas gaining ground: crowdfunding that asks ordinary people to “invest like VCs,” and proposals to channel pension money into the riskiest stage of startup growth. Both sound democratic. Both are dangerous.