“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 demonstration unit in the USA. They have recently signed several off-take agreements, including one with Google, to build several commercial-scale SMRs of 75-MW each over the next decade. I’m not a big believer in SMRs generating any commercial amounts of energy in the next 10 years. But nuclear projects are among the toughest to plan, manage and build. This is why I was listening intently, and here are some of the takeaways: - Modularity reduces repeat risk, not FOAK risks (!) - Manufacturing constraints, including those up the supply chain, must be design inputs - Problems emerge in connecting different systems, not the core technology The episode holds more insights, so if you are in nuclear, SMR, or just building a FOAK, hit the “Play” button ! The Green Blueprint is a great podcast on FOAKs in the USA. If you are interested in how European climate companies deal with FOAK, “valley of death” and scaling up, watch or listen to my podcast WattsUpWithStartups !

This week, I was drafting a report for six months of my work for an early-stage energy and AI startup, so I thought, why not share what I can? So here it goes. The value from advisors to startups is usually customer or investor connections, and some PR representation. I can deliver very little of those. So why get one if he can’t deliver the usual advisor value? Let’s see what I did: • Stress-tested the core business logic across multiple markets and rollout scenarios, finally narrowing down the best geographical market for the first product roll-out.
 • Built a bottom-up financial model that forced necessary early conversations about unit economics, customer acquisition costs, and cash timing.
 • Reworked the pitch materials so that strategy, numbers, and execution risks were aligned, and investors noticed that immediately.
 • Acted as a sparring partner to the founder on priorities: what not to do in year one matters as much as what to do. The outcome was not just a cleaner deck or a better spreadsheet. It was a shared operating logic between the founder, first investors and his early team. In my case, having an advisor is more akin to having a pro-consultant on board, who, instead of jumping from top-MBA programs into consulting, has managed P&Ls for several industrial companies over the last decade. Do you use advisors, and if so, what for?

Once or twice a year, if you stay long enough in climate and battery scale-ups, you encounter a technology that politely asks you to forget thermodynamics, manufacturing constraints, and twenty years of painful industrial learning. Like a lot of other things, this year’s entry arrived early. The battery world is currently excited about Donut Lab solid state battery. Let’s outline the plausible range of outcomes: 1 Worst case: it’s a scam. Svolt has already called it out (you’ll understand why if you read to the end of this post). 2 Best case: it’s not really a solid-state battery in the way the industry understands that term. After reading Michael Sura’s exceptional technology deep dive , a far more charitable interpretation is that we’re looking at something closer to a supercapacitor bolted onto a conventional lithium-ion system. Now, to understand Donut Labs from a non-technology perspective, let’s have a brief look at credibility signals — always a useful exercise when physics seems unusually cooperative. Founder profile. 
The headline combines electric mobility and AI. Historically, people who put AI in their LinkedIn bio tend to have strong opinions about geopolitics, repost Elon Musk and Sam Altman, and explain the future of humanity better than Foreign Policy. Building and operating battery factories is, understandably, a relatively easy exercise. Time allocation.
 The founder is listed as active in thirteen organisations, as founder or advisor, including the Forbes Technology Council. This suggests exceptional time-management skills (hustle culture!) and that gigafactory execution has become remarkably asynchronous. Team composition. 
One engineer. 
Which makes sense. After the collapse of Northvolt, hiring large engineering teams is clearly overrated. Manufacturing can always be outsourced to a photovoltaic lab. Or a university cleanroom. Or optimism. Hype level. 
Impressive. No notes here. To be clear: this is not an attack. On the contrary, I am genuinely proud that Europe finally produced a battery startup that promises zero Chinese dependency, perfect performance, and effortless manufacturability — all at once. The battery exists, for now, primarily on a website, in press releases and in a motorcycle. But if I knew how to ride a motorcycle, I would probably pre-order one immediately. Progress requires belief. Happy Friday!

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 structured, evidence-based alternative: define outcomes first, assess candidates against those outcomes, and rely on past behavior rather than projected potential or personal chemistry. I used several of the techniques from Who when I was CEO of a lithium-ion manufacturing company. This was a capital-intensive, operationally unforgiving environment: factories do not tolerate “learning on the job,” and hiring mistakes compound quickly. I still made plenty of mistakes — some roles were defined too vaguely, some references were checked too late, and in a few cases urgency overruled process. But compared to earlier phases of my career, the difference was material. The discipline of scorecards, chronological interviews, and reference triangulation consistently outperformed the familiar alternative: hiring people you “like” after a good conversation. That is where the book is at its strongest. It does not promise perfect hires. It promises fewer bad ones. And in scaling organizations — especially industrial or deep-tech companies — avoiding one bad hire at a critical node is often more valuable than landing a theoretical superstar. What I also appreciate is that Who aligns well with reality at the FOAK and scale-up stage. When incentives are misaligned and pressure is high, personal affinity becomes a dangerous bias. Structure acts as a counterweight. It forces founders and CEOs to articulate what success actually looks like in a role, rather than projecting their own preferences onto a candidate. This is not a book about culture, motivation, or leadership philosophy. It is a book about decision hygiene. If you are building or scaling a company where execution matters more than storytelling — factories, infrastructure, energy, hardware — this is required reading. Hiring based on who you enjoy talking to is easy. Hiring based on who will deliver, repeatedly, under real constraints is harder. Who provides a practical framework for doing the latter.

Europe spends a lot of time talking about battery gigafactories. We discuss cell chemistries, subsidy schemes, factory locations, and how many gigawatts of capacity will be built by when. All of that matters. But a part of the battery value chain rarely makes it into these conversations, even though it has a disproportionate impact on cost, risk, and credibility. Battery chemicals. Not cells or packs, but the solvents, electrolytes, and precursors that sit upstream of every cathode line and every factory budget. This is where a large share of capital intensity, operational complexity, and embedded emissions comes from. This layer determines how expensive a factory really is once energy use, HSE requirements, and permitting are factored in. It determines how exposed “European” batteries remain to imports and geopolitical risk. And it determines how much CO₂ is embedded in every battery long before it leaves the factory gate. You can build cell assembly plants in Europe and still import cost, emissions, and strategic vulnerability if this layer stays external. Over the next few weeks, I will unpack this part of the battery story, using one very concrete industrial project as a reference point. Not as a promotion, but as a way to talk about how batteries are made, financed, and scaled in Europe. If Europe gets the chemistry layer wrong, the gigafactory debate risks becoming an exercise in industrial theatre rather than industrial strategy.

I used to think that US sanctions were reserved for criminals, dictators and Russians. Well, a few months ago, an ICC judge authorised an investigation into alleged war crimes by US personnel in Afghanistan. Then she was sanctioned. Her bank access was frozen. Amazon and Microsoft shut down her accounts. She was treated like an international criminal. If that wasn’t a wake-up call for all working with the USA, this January should have been. With Trump openly threatening tariffs and economic retaliation against anyone opposing the US takeover of Greenland, what should hardware businesses do? You do not want to discover mid-factory build that your supply chain is suddenly blocked or prohibitively expensive. Contracts, suppliers, banking access, and digital infrastructure can be switched off overnight, and you don’t have to do anything wrong. I would go as far as saying this: the US is becoming uninvestable and uncontractable for long-cycle hardware projects. The idea of a neutral, rules-based global business environment is gone. Has your business or project been hit by geopolitics lately?

What's the biggest myth  #FOAK  founders believe about getting their first  clients ?  “If the technology is good enough, customers will find us.” Sometimes they do. Most of the time, they don’t. I’ve seen world-class  #climate  and industrial technologies stall for years — not because the product failed, but because founders were pitching everyone, hiring the wrong sales profiles, and waiting for “inbound” that never came. Cold emails. Demo days. Visibility. All useful — occasionally. But not a strategy. After watching the same mistakes repeat, I distilled what actually works into a 5-step framework for how FOAK startups find their first real clients. It starts with a simple shift most teams miss: not all clients behave the same. Some are hungry. Some are cautious. Some are indifferent. Treat them the same — and you lose years. I’ve laid out the framework in the slides below. It’s not flashy and it’s not marketing theory. It’s how first conversations turn into real contracts in FOAK environments. If you’re building something that has to work in the real world — this will save you time. Let me know which step hits closest to home!

For a long time, I wanted to believe in carbon capture. It sounds like the perfect solution.
Keep the industry running, clean up emissions later, no lifestyle changes required. Until I ran the numbers. Myth #1: Carbon capture is a climate solution. In reality, it’s an energy problem. To permanently remove and store CO₂: • DAC needs ~2–3 kWh per kg of CO₂ • Point-source capture needs ~1–1.5 kWh per kg of CO₂ And there’s a catch: those kilowatt-hours must be clean — wind, solar, hydro, nuclear — or the whole system becomes circular nonsense. Those same clean kWh could: • decarbonise power grids • electrify industry • displace fossil generation directly In almost every case, they deliver more climate impact doing that than being spent on capturing already-emitted CO₂. Then came the second epiphany. Myth #2: Carbon capture fails because there was no market. Until this year, CO₂ had no real price. Now it does. With CBAM, carbon lands at roughly €70–90 per ton for exposed industries. That finally creates a forcing function. But it also exposes the hard truth: • DAC at €500–1,000 per ton is still economically detached from reality • Point-source capture at €40–80 per ton might work — if those costs are achieved at scale, not just in pilots This is exactly what the Yara industrial CCS project is attempting to prove this year. And that’s why I’ll be following it closely this year and next. When I run carbon capture through my own frameworks: • It passes the climate impact test • It fails the energy efficiency test • And until CBAM, it also failed the market test Two failures out of three is enough. So here’s my current take: Carbon capture may be necessary. But necessary does not mean investable. For now, my bet remains negative — and the burden of proof is on execution, not belief.

After 9 days of the free trial of 2026, can someone please tell me how to cancel the subscription? This week was entertaining: suddenly everyone became a geopolitics expert.
 Mostly AI / data / everything-cool profiles explaining global affairs — often from countries that haven’t had a serious geopolitical shock in 50 years. Fun. Briefly. My own introduction to geopolitics was less theoretical.
In 2014, I was CIO for five power plants in Russia. One ran on a Siemens turbine due for maintenance. Crimea happened. Sanctions followed. Maintenance cancelled. Down payment frozen. That’s geopolitical risk — not as a post, but as an invoice. Today, one of my projects depends on Chinese suppliers while targeting Latin America. With the US rediscovering hemispheric discipline, that risk just moved from “remote” to “operational”. FOAK projects already live with enough uncertainty.
Geopolitics has a habit of showing up uninvited — and charging interest. How are you factoring this into your projects right now? The picture is of me, part of the sailing team, going into my first storm, just off the coast of Istanbul. Couldn’t find a better one.

This year, I’m doing something simple and public. I’ve put together a list of 23 First-of-a-Kind climate tech projects that are supposed to hit meaningful milestones in 2026 — commissioning, certification, first operations, or first proof that the business case holds outside a slide deck. I’ll be monitoring these projects throughout the year and sharing monthly updates on what actually moves, what stalls, and what quietly changes scope. Below is the starting snapshot. FOAK projects I’ll be tracking in 2026 What this table already tells us 1. Steel, hydrogen and CCS dominate — again (facepalm) Heavy industry decarbonisation is still where FOAK capital clusters: • DRI steel, • hydrogen supply chains, • carbon capture and storage. That’s not because they’re easy — but because people thought they would be easy. 2026 might well become the year where dreams of hydrogen, CCS and green steel finally crash against hard reality. Green steel though, might avoid this fate in the EU, thanks to CBAM going full-steam. 2. Integration risk outweighs technology risk Very few of these projects are betting on unknown physics, although many CCS and hydrogen do believe they can change its laws.
Most are betting on: • EPC discipline, • supply-chain reliability, • permitting, • offtakers having nerves of steel, • and the ability to survive delays without balance-sheet collapse. In other words: classic FOAK failure modes. 3. Regulation and certification loom large Projects like aviation hydrogen, nuclear, CCS hubs — they don’t fail in labs.
They fail in when regulatory approvals last longer than investors’ patience. Which brings me to the ones I’ll be watching especially closely. FOAK Projects I’m personally watching — with raised eyebrows Lyten taking over Northvolt’s facilities
 This is one of the most interesting experiments on the list.
Not a greenfield dream — but a brutal attempt to make someone else’s broken factory work with a new chemistry.
If this succeeds, it will say more about execution than battery science. ZeroAvia 
This year feels existential.
Certification timelines, cash burn, and customer patience will all collide.
Hydrogen aviation doesn’t get infinite “almost there” years. Climeworks 
Direct Air Capture is past the storytelling phase. Last year dismal results put forward simple and uncomfortable question:
Can Mammoth operate reliably, predictably, and economically — or does scale just magnify the problems? NEOM Green Hydrogen
 A masterclass in ambition and capital availability, or, I’d say, ability to separate capital from investors. 
Also a masterclass in how many things must go right simultaneously.
I’m not watching for technology — more for governance, interfaces, reality checks, and how to keep a smooth face in a loosing game. Commonwealth Fusion
 Fusion is like Schrödinger’s cat - it is simultaneously alive and dead. This year I’m watching how CMF will be inflating its promises as it inevitably heads for collapse. How I’ll use this list • Monthly status checks • Quiet changes in scope and language • Delays vs real progress • And, occasionally, calling things what they are No cheerleading. No doomposting. 
Just FOAKs as they are — fragile, expensive, necessary. If you’re building, financing, or betting on FOAKs:
you already know the truth (or should) — execution is the product. More to come this month.

Art by ©Kira Askerova One constraint I keep running into in FOAK and scale-up work — and more broadly in climate and energy transition — is the planning horizon. Climate change doesn’t just stress our systems - it breaks our intuition about time. Outcomes are shaped over decades, sometimes centuries — not five-year plans, not annual KPIs, not even political cycles. That alone makes climate one of the most complex global challenges we’ve ever faced. Most other existential risks are easier to reason about.
 Pandemics, nuclear escalation, AI misuse, food shortages — they all carry immediacy. Clear and present danger. Fast feedback. Escalation you can see, track, model, and manage. Their signals are loud. With the climate, everything is inverted.
 Causality is delayed. Feedback is weak. Even measurement is contested. We argue over baselines, scenarios, and models — while the physical system keeps moving, indifferent to our debates. At some point, this turns into a more uncomfortable question:
How do you act on a problem whose time horizon exceeds a human life? I sometimes use fiction to explore questions that are hard to stress-test through frameworks or slide decks alone. With that in mind, I’ve published a short speculative novella, Planning Horizon, and made it free to read. It’s a story about startups, climate decline, technology, and revenge. Oh, and yes — there are vampires! The story is free to read, and I publish it under a non-commercial license. Share if it resonates. English and Russian language PDFs are attached.

Without clean electrons, there are no clean molecules. China is consolidating its leadership in clean technologies by taking a logical next step and going big on clean fuels. The Financial Times published an article on Monday showing that most of the clean-fuel projects (ammonia/methanol/aviation) that have reached FID or are operational are in China. The companies driving these projects are all familiar to anyone who has worked in the wind industry: Envision, Goldwind, and Mingyang. All of them are Tier 1 wind turbine manufacturers, now pushing into clean molecules. A total of 54 commercial-scale clean-molecule projects are either in operation or have received finance. If China completes all its planned projects by 2030, it could produce around 20 million tons of green ammonia, displacing about 10% of the global ammonia market. I have a feeling that this ammonia will be sold at exceptionally competitive prices. So here is another Chinese lesson for Europe - a solid base in renewable energy and batteries is a prerequisite for all other clean technologies. Unless we overbuild wind and solar, we will be importing green ammonia and clean aviation fuels from China. You can’t engineer your way around scale.