How to transform from project to product.

Can you find unicorns in water? There is a hype around water tech startups. Climate is changing, and some countries, such as Turkey, where I currently reside, could face severe water shortages. The recent documentary by Sir David Attenborough spurred more enthusiasm for investing in water startups. I am all for Sir Attenborough’s art and insights. But art is one thing, and investments are another. The only possible unicorn in a water business would resemble Water and Power Co

They IPO’d before raising VC. Here’s why that was genius. ATOME Energy didn’t follow the usual startup playbook. No pre-seed. No seed. No “100-slide deck for Sand Hill Road.” Instead, they went public. Early. That’s not just bold - it’s strategic. 💡 Why? Because in capital-intensive, FOAK-scale cleantech, your biggest bottleneck isn’t idea validation. It’s credibility. To secure $400M in project finance, off-take agreements, and long-term power deals in emerging markets… You

You don’t need to have a financial degree or a background in finance to understand the key principles of funding a FOAK.

Off-takes are the holy grail of climatetech FOAKs. Conditional off-takes are the norm. Is there another way?

Don’t play with the government. That’s a rule my father taught me. He built his business in the 90s and early 2000s in Russia. He knew first hand that the government will screw you over faster than your private sector partner and in worse ways. For a long time, I thought that this rule applied only to authoritarian states like Russia, where the law is weak. The current passing of the “Big Beautiful Bill” in the US now shows that it is true for the West as well. The Inflation

Hear Olivier Mussat, the CEO and founder of ATOME, about the role of fertilizers.

A review of possibly the most comprehensive collection of real-world examples for getting cleantech from the lab to steel-in-the-ground scale. If you’re in the weeds of building a FOAK (First-of-a-Kind) project, or advising someone who is, this report deserves a place on your desk.

A climate tech idea that needs more energy than it saves? That’s not innovation. That’s a waste.

Climeworks is back in the news—and not for the reason they’d like. Reports from Heimildin and others claim that their latest DAC (direct air capture) facility might not even cover its own emissions. That’s a brutal blow for a company that promised to remove 1% of global CO₂ by 2025. Their CEO Jan Wurzbacher published a response . He acknowledged commissioning problems, but didn’t refute the claim that the total carbon footprint may be net positive. That’s a hard pill to swal

During my time scaling up climate tech, I wouldn’t touch government grants. Even when they could clearly reduce my capital costs, help to avoid dilution and generally help to speed up a project. In Russia, dealing with government money means that sooner or later, you’ll have a budget controller knocking at your door, whose sole purpose is to find out how you misused public funds, so that he can ransom money from you or throw you into jail. The jail could actually be the first

Working capital is a big challenge for B2C solar and storage startups. Or is it?

Everyone wants to decarbonize industry. Not many talk about what happens after the pilot works. Scaling hardware isn’t linear. It’s exponential — in pain. Case in point: Via Separations Their FOAK gamble? Scaling their membrane-based heat separator 100x at a commercial paper mill in Alberta, Canada. * The science? ✅ Solid * The pilot? ✅ Promising * The scale-up? ❌ A swamp of unexpected engineering nightmares: 🔧 Labour costs exploded — getting a good welder on site during sno

We don’t have a cleantech innovation problem — we have a FOAK execution problem. Over the past year, I’ve been building something I wish I had when I started scaling my first climate tech venture: a practical, experience-based framework for getting First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) projects off the ground. In my latest article, I’ve pulled together my 50+ posts into a structured overview that maps the FOAK journey—from the moment you decide to leave the lab to the day your NOAKs are r

A new, comprehensive guide to FOAK in cleantech

Airbus just quietly moved the launch of its hydrogen-powered plane from 2035 to 2045. In corporate speak, that’s not a delay—it’s a polite way of pulling the plug without admitting failure. After €1.7B spent, even Airbus is starting to realize that hydrogen aviation may be a science project, not a business. I called this a year ago, when Universal Hydrogen filed for bankruptcy after burning through $100M. That was a 20-minute or $100M crash course in hydrogen physics. Airbus

LineVision experience in selling to Utilities

Data shows that 10x returns are extremely rare in the climate tech

Green hydrogen was supposed to be the next big thing—but where’s the business case?

How to chose and EPC for your FOAK