Is your biggest bottleneck the product… or the team?

Emin Askerov
Jul 22
1 min read

“I thought building floating solar would be the hard part. It wasn’t. Managing people was.”

That’s how Polina Vasilenko described her early days at HelioRec.

She had already done the impossible: left oil & gas, invented a floating solar system for ports, raised over €1 million. But once she started hiring… things started to get much harder.

"When you do your business alone, you know more or less how to do everything, and once you hire people, they do it in a different way, and you need to understand if it is right or wrong, if they're making mistakes. You need to find out, you need to educate them, etc, etc. So more people, more problems, but you cannot grow without people .”

On top of that, her first team all came from the same background. It lacked diversity. The product improvements stalled. Deployments slowed.

So, she did what smart founders do—admitted the mistake and fixed it:

✔ Hired a COO with 20+ years in operations

✔ Brought in people with different perspectives

✔ Built clear onboarding, clear roles, clear mission

As a result, she got a stronger, more diverse team that could actually scale HelioRec beyond “garage mode.”

Here’s the lesson for hardware founders:

🛑 Tech alone won’t scale your startup

✅ The right people, with different skills and viewpoints, will

If you’re building a cleantech company, ask yourself:

Is your biggest bottleneck the product… or the team?