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.

Cleantech startups usually sell to mature industries, and these don't like new stuff. How can founders overcome change inertia? Ports, especially municipally owned ones, are notorious for resisting any change to how they operate. Here is a story from Polina Vasilenko on how to sell floating solar to municipal ports.

How diverse teams are really built.

How to transform from project to product.

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...

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...

I'm deep into research on large-scale solar heating vs. heat pumps – and the findings are fascinating. At the household level, heat pumps...

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...

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

Where do you get FOAK Expertise? From FOAK advisors, who have done a FOAK before. Meet the new branch of cleantech ecosystem - the FOAK assi

Do acquisitions of climate tech startups by Big Oil help or hinder energy transition?

I have no idea. Still, the question has been popping up in my head now and again for the last year. Every time I see some “hydrogen...

How selling experience and starting small lets you disrupt an industry.

A 3-step framework for scaling-up to FOAK

What Canoo failure can teach cleantech scaleups?

De-icing a frozen water tower in the middle of nowhere is not on anyone’s job description. However, this is a reality that you can come...

Venture investors watch the world burn and seek refuge in virtual worlds

The best guide so far on scaling up climate tech from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst

This January, I’m offering 20 free one-hour online consultations to startups and investors in the cleantech and climate tech space.