Five years and three projects: the real timeline behind a FOAK
On 15 November 2021, Norway's minister of trade and industry visited Kristiansand to tour Vianode's "industrial pilot" — a facility making 200 tonnes of battery-grade synthetic graphite a year, up from 10 kilograms at the company's original lab setup at Elkem. The following year, Vianode committed to a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) plant at Herøya with a capacity of 2,000 tonnes. When I interviewed Andreas Forfang, a Vianode executive, for my podcast, he told me some investors called the Kristiansand facility a demo; others called it a pilot and treated the original 10kg setup as a mere lab.
Some investors miss the middle step entirely. Others insist on taking it step by step: "there's a pilot, there's a demo... and then there's the real FOAK." Whatever the label, Andreas is convinced the approach — growing capacity gradually, proving lab results hold at each larger scale — was the right one. The journey that began with a lab pilot in 2019 ended with the Herøya plant opening in 2024. The FOAK timeline took five years and three plants, from bench to factory.
Conference panels rarely spell this out. Say "FOAK" at an industry event, and you could be forgiven for thinking it's a single, heroic construction project: raise the money, pour the concrete, ship the product. In practice, every founder I've spoken to who actually reached FOAK spent years first on pilots, then on demonstration units. Call it what you like, but it is the number of steps you take and the years they take that make a FOAK.
Why you can't just build big
Picture a lithium-ion battery lab. A technician hand-assembles cells with one to five amp-hours of capacity, a few at a time, over several days. A gigafactory turns out over a hundred cells a day, each with thirty to sixty amp-hours of capacity. Unit size grows thirtyfold; output grows more than a hundredfold. And that's a modest jump by industry standards.
A123 Systems, a well-funded lithium-ion battery maker spun out of MIT, ramped its Livonia, Michigan plant to supply automotive customers including Fisker's Karma. A miscalibrated welding machine at that plant left a misaligned component in one line of cells — the kind of fault a smaller pilot line, running slower and watched more closely, is far more likely to catch before it reaches a customer's product. It didn't get caught. Fisker recalled the Karma, A123 recalled the batteries at a cost of about $55m, and the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 16 October 2012.
A123's engineers knew full well how to make good cells. It's that a fault which shows up rarely on a small line shows up constantly on a large one, and a company running flat-out to serve automotive volumes has far less room to catch it than one still deliberately taking its time.
Software companies mostly get to skip this problem. A coding mistake costs about the same to fix whether you're running it for ten users or ten million. Hardware doesn't work that way: the cost of a mistake scales with the size of the batch it's in. Fixing a fault in 100 litres of contaminated material while you're still perfecting a process is routine. Fixing the same fault after it's spread through 2,000 litres, or through a production run already committed to a customer, is a different order of expense entirely.
How many steps, and how big
Investors have different views on the exact shape of the ladder. Yair Reem of Extantia talks about just two stages: pilot, then FOAK. The US Department of Energy's Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations lays out five: pilot, large-scale pilot, early demonstration, late demonstration, early deployment. The version I've found holds up best across many projects is the three-stage approach described by Mario Fernandez of Breakthrough Energy Catalyst:
Build a pilot at roughly 2x the scale of your lab.
Build a demo at 5–20x the scale of your pilot.
Build a FOAK at roughly 10x the scale of your demo.
Each step earns its size from what you need to learn at it, not from what you can afford or what looks impressive to investors. A pilot has nothing to do with proving volume, speed or commercial quality. Its job is narrower: notice what changes in your core technology at one order of magnitude up; learn what equipment exists at that scale; get a feel for production speed, and for the space, safety and quality demands the next steps will bring. Get any of that wrong, and you can still shuttle back and forth between pilot and lab before it costs you anything serious.
The demo is a different animal. This is where you try out the manufacturing processes you'll use at FOAK, de-risk the technology as far as you can, give investors and customers something they can walk around and kick the tyres on, and start building the project-management team and systems that will carry you through construction. It's also your last real chance to change your mind about the production process. Once you're at FOAK scale, alterations are too expensive and too late.
The FOAK itself has its own, narrower objectives: hit the process, volume and quality KPIs your customers require; finalise a facility layout you can replicate one-for-one; codify your industrial processes, safety included; and map a credible route to profitability for the plants that come after.
Notice what's missing from that list — a profit target for the FOAK itself. FOAKs essentially never make money. You are almost guaranteed to overshoot both capital and operating costs while still delivering to customers at a price you agreed months or years earlier. The point of the exercise is to prove you can deliver, reliably, at the standard of a company that's been doing this for decades.
Plan the next stage while you're still building this one
The FOAK is a journey, but doing it in strict sequence is a trap. Finish the pilot, then raise for the demo, then plan the demo, then source it, then build it, then demonstrate it, then repeat for FOAK. Do the maths on that, and you're looking at roughly two years before demo operations even begin, with most of your investors' patience and cash spent well before the first shovel goes into the ground.
The fix is to plan the next stage while you're still building the current one. Start planning your demo the moment your pilot launches. Start planning your FOAK — location, permits, suppliers, team — the moment your demo is running. By the time funding for the next stage lands, you should be ready to pull the trigger immediately, not start planning from scratch. This single habit, more than any individual technical decision, determines whether a scale-up survives its own timeline.
What threatens a FOAK timeline
Ask investors what worries them about a FOAK, and many will mention technology risk. In practice, by the time you've genuinely completed a pilot and demo, your technology risk is usually low — you've hit your KPIs and run the equipment for hundreds of hours. What sinks FOAKs, more often, is everything around the technology: the location picked without weighing customer proximity, supplier access, politics and physical infrastructure properly; the supply chain nobody started building until it was already too late, because lead times don't shrink just because you're in a hurry; the team promoted internally instead of hired at the seniority a construction-scale project demands; and the EPC contractor chosen on price instead of reputation, with the fixed-price agreement that was never really on the table discovered mid-build.
None of this is exotic. It's land, concrete, steel, permits and people — the same categories of risk every serious construction project carries, dressed up in whichever chemistry or physics your particular climate technology involves.
The discipline to freeze
If there's one trait that separates founders who make it to FOAK from those who don't, it's the discipline to freeze a design at the right moment and stop improving it. Every stage tempts you to keep iterating — the process is nearly right, just one more tweak. Hardware doesn't forgive that instinct the way software does. You don't get to pivot after you've poured the concrete. The whole point of stepping through pilot and demo first is to spend your iterations where they're cheap, so that by FOAK you have the discipline and the evidence to stop changing things and simply deliver.
And this applies post-FOAK. The pilot-demo-FOAK path is a path of greatest learning. Taking time to distil lessons learned from each stage sets you up for successful Nth-of-a-Kind projects. Despite all the risks and hardships, the FOAK path is only a start.
