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

Today is the first monthly check-in on the 23 FOAK climate tech projects  I said I’d track publicly in 2026! FOAKs get talked about more and more, which is definitely a good thing! I’m following up on the developments of the largest and most interesting FOAK projects in climate tech. I first go over the good news, then the bad, and you’ll get an updated table at the end! The good news (actual execution happened) H2 Green Steel (now Stegra)  signed a long-term supply agreement

“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

Who: The A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street treats recruitment as an execution discipline rather than an exercise in intuition. The core argument is simple and uncomfortable: most hiring failures are not caused by a lack of talent in the market, but by sloppy decision-making. Interviews reward confidence, charm, and familiarity. Real performance, however, shows up later — in execution, judgment under pressure, and consistency over time. The book proposes a s

When I was working in Russia, January was always a dead month. Mandatory 8–12 days of holidays at the start of the year, followed by another one or two weeks of “extended” vacations. Clients, investors, suppliers — all happy to reconnect, but preferably sometime after mid-January. Even those back in the office moved slowly. Europe doesn’t have the same formal shutdown.
But culturally, January is still a soft month. That is — unless you’re working on a FOAK. In FOAK years, I w

FOAK and planning horizons

This is a review of key successful and key failed FOAKs in 2025

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

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.

Takeaways from FOAK panel at VDS 2025

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.

I spoke with a European founder developing his own battery cells. Just getting permits for the mixing and coating stages pushed his...

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...

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.

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