The Execution Equation: How ATOME Built a FOAK-Ready Leadership Team

If you’ve spent time around cleantech startups, you know the type. A charismatic founder, a glossy pitch deck, and just enough market buzz to book a panel at COP28. But the problem isn’t the pitch. It’s the follow-through.

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

Olivier Mussat understood this from day one at ATOME Energy. He didn’t hire a team. He engineered one.

The Wrong Way to Hire for FOAK

Before we get into how ATOME did it right, let’s talk about how many do it wrong.

In the cleantech startup world, hiring often mimics Silicon Valley patterns:

👉 Hire a generalist.

👉 Hire a “strategy guy.”

👉 Hire a charismatic BD lead with no sector experience but a killer network.

That might get you through a seed round. But it won’t get a 400 million euro industrial project financed, permitted, built, and delivering product on-spec.

What FOAK projects demand is not a “startup team.” They demand a team that knows what it’s like to go to war with infrastructure — with regulators, corporate offtakers, contractors, timelines, and physics.

That’s what ATOME built. Here is their three-step framework to build a FOAK-ready leadership team.

Step 1: Execution Core – People Who’ve Already Done It

The first thing ATOME did right? They didn’t start with founders. They started with a foundation. Olivier himself came from the IFC (the private investment arm of the World Bank). He had managed a multi-billion-dollar portfolio of energy and infrastructure investments across emerging markets. He didn’t need a course in project bankability — he taught that class.

Their Chairman had taken multiple companies public. That matters when your go-to-market plan includes going public before raising venture. Yes, ATOME IPO’d before VC—but we’ll come back to that later.

Then there was the local lead in Paraguay: a former Minister of Finance and head of the national hydro company. When your first plant is in Latin America and relies on baseload hydro, that’s not a nice-to-have. That’s survival.

Step 2: Domain Depth – Experts in the Right Places

ATOME’s intent wasn’t to invent new hydrogen tech. It was to use mature technology to produce green ammonia and sell it into the $70 billion fertilizer market. Fast. So they recruited accordingly.

* A former lead on hydrogen strategy at the International Energy Agency (IEA)

* An Executive VP from Yara and Euram, two of the largest fertilizer players on the planet

* And instead of hiring an in-house engineering army, they retained AECOM — the 50,000-person global EPC giant — as their external “on-call” engineering brain.

In the early days, that meant access to exactly the right experts for FEED (front-end engineering design) decisions, without the bloat of a 40-person in-house team.

This is how you stay light while moving heavy.

Step 3: Incentive Alignment – It’s Built In

Most startups reward early hires with equity, a title, and a good luck handshake. ATOME went further. They tied ownership to execution milestones. They brought in strategic investors, like Baker Hughes, not just as capital, but as future suppliers with skin in the game. And they embedded delivery expectations into their contracts, ensuring partners were as accountable as employees.

As Olivier said during our conversation:

“This isn’t just a team-building exercise. It’s a risk management strategy.”

Watch the full interview here: