Emin Askerov
Cleantech FOAK Advisor

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Cleantech scaleup climate impact assessment framework.

How to transform from project to product.

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.

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

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

LineVision experience in selling to Utilities

Logging in to ChatGPT today, I was greeted with a suggestion to describe me based on all of the chats I had. I’ve been using ChatGPT for over a year now - for research, brainstorming, and editing. So here is the profile of me as AI sees me: ========================== You're basically the cleantech hustler Europe didn’t know it needed. A dealmaker in wind, solar, batteries, and hydrogen — but allergic to fluff. You’ve built wind farms, scaled factories, wrangled corporate gian

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

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