Crossing one valley of death is hard enough for any startup. For aviation startups, there are three!

Climate VC funding fell more than 3x from its peak in 2021

Michael Liebreich’s recent provocation on the Pragmatic Climate Reset raises many important points. One that stood out to me is that the climate movement has lost credibility by clinging to maximalist narratives while failing to deliver practical benefits. This inspired me to reflect on my own journey — ten years in climate tech yet still facing the gap between professional work and personal choices.

A short comparison of LDES technologies

Over the years, I’ve distilled some patterns into a five-step framework for finding your clients—tailored to the realities of FOAK and climate tech.

How to build a supply chain for your FOAK

The lessons of Natron Energy collapse

In the end, it had to be a political decision. After half a year of sifting through more than twenty locations and countless meetings with local officials, our future 8 GWh factory came down to two options. Tatarstan: a highly industrialised region east of Moscow, with a strong industrial park, permits ready, and—most importantly—right next to our main customer, Kamaz. Kaliningrad: a Russian exclave in Europe, wedged between Poland, Lithuania and the Baltic Sea, on the unfini

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.

Latest data on clean energy VC investments. Are we seen new bubble emerging?

What is the future of electric mobility?

Alternative business model for a battery factory

How diverse teams are really built.

What founders sometimes fail to realise is that as you scale up, you will spend less and less time working on your product and more and more time with your investors.

Two different points of view on climate investment. Both wrong.

This post is about how Duke went from idea to operational factory in under 9 months—and what practical lessons it offers for cleantech scale-ups.

Image is AI-generated. Scaling up sustainable aircraft is like scaling up nuclear power—a comparable challenge in terms of regulatory obstacles, timelines, and the weight of responsibility. At least, that’s how it seemed to me, looking from the outside. I was sure that the climate tech community could learn many lessons from the aviation startup experience, so I’ve asked an expert. I’ve just finished recording the next episode of WattsUpWithStartups with Dirk Singer, aviation

Why do many cleantech startups stall before they even start? They skip the hard part: talking to customers. When Polina Vasilenko founded HelioRec | BCorp , a floating solar startup, she didn’t just build prototypes and pitch investors. She went to the ports, the future clients. Image credits: HelioRec One hundred fifty conversations later, she had the data she needed: ✅ Ports want to decarbonise ✅ Rooftop solar isn’t enough ✅ Wind turbines? “Not beautiful” for city ports

Scaling a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) climate venture isn’t about ideas. It’s about execution infrastructure. And that infrastructure begins with people

Why pay more to achieve less? Really, why? Yet, you see this everywhere in climatetech. How come? A reduction in man-made CO2 emissions measures the success of all climate technologies. But many of them require two other climate technologies as inputs - wind and solar energy. Green hydrogen, SAF, and e-fuels all require huge amounts of clean energy. To reduce emissions using these technologies, you first have to build a wind or solar power plant, then add the costs of these t