Emin Askerov
Cleantech FOAK Advisor

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 “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

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

I'm deep into research on large-scale solar heating vs. heat pumps – and the findings are fascinating. At the household level, heat pumps dominate. They’re fast to install, scalable, and increasingly efficient. But when you move into industrial heat and district heating at a serious scale, the picture flips. Solar thermal projects start pulling ahead. At scale, solar heat beats heat pumps on operating costs, emissions, and resilience. Once built, the sun’s energy is basically

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

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 mobility” startup raising money or investors piling in some EV-charging solutions business, I hope that it's just me being wrong about the industry's future rather than hype-guided investors throwing cash at the most charismatic founder whose only plan is to spend investor’s cash.  Viktor Pelevin, in his cult classic “Generation π,” colorfully de

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 up against when you are scaling up your climate tech and building your FOAK.  Most climate podcasts focus on finance, policy, or shiny new tech. But real stories of scaling climate hardware? Rare. That’s why The Green Blueprint episode, “𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱’𝘀 𝗕𝗶𝗴𝗴𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗗𝗔𝗖 𝗙𝗮𝗰𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆,” caught my attention. Host L

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