Last September, at a Dutch battery conference, I asked a panel of speakers — all of whom were working with China one way or another — whether they had any contingency plans for a blockade or a Taiwan invasion. The room went quiet in the way rooms go quiet when someone says something everyone has been avoiding. Nobody had a plan. That silence is what this post is about. The Partnership Everyone Is Chasing After the failures of Europe's local champions — Freyr, Britishvolt, Northvolt, ACC and Verkor still struggling to complete their gigafactories — the consensus has shifted. The way forward, many now believe, is a Chinese partner. The PowerCo-CATL deal, the InoBat-Gotion project, and dozens of quieter startup tie-ups all reflect the same logic: if you can't beat them, build with them. This logic is not unreasonable. But it carries two problems that rarely get discussed with the seriousness they deserve. Problem One: The Technology Transfer Isn't Happening The stated rationale for most of these partnerships is access to Chinese manufacturing knowledge and process technology. In practice, very little of it appears to cross the table. A T&E analysis of several key European partnerships found no meaningful technology transfer taking place on the ground. Europeans — from startups to Volkswagen — seem largely content to let Chinese partners run their operations, which raises an uncomfortable question: if the knowledge stays in Chinese hands, what exactly are you building toward? For a FOAK project, this matters acutely. Your scale-up roadmap assumes you are accumulating capability. If the capability remains with your partner, you are building dependency, not competence. Problem Two: Your Equipment Has a Back Door This is the one that keeps me up at night on behalf of my clients. A recent FT piece on US restrictions against Chinese EVs highlighted something that deserves wider attention in the European battery space. The restrictions are not primarily about tariffs. They are about connectivity. You can use Chinese glass and plastics. You cannot use Chinese communication chips — because a modern EV carries dozens of cameras (including driver-facing ones), radars, laser sensors, and substantial onboard processing power. Around 90% of data from Chinese EVs is routed to servers in China. Battery management systems can be accessed over the air. Screen shot from a video game Cyberpunk 2077, showing hacking options for a car. Not so science fiction anymore The implications for national security are serious enough that Poland is moving to ban Chinese-made vehicles inside military bases, and British officials have been advised not to hold sensitive conversations in cars with Chinese electronics. The fact that China was the first country to restrict foreign vehicles' data transfers lends considerable weight to these moves — it suggests the risk is well understood in Beijing. Now bring this back to your FOAK facility. The same connectivity architecture that creates a surveillance risk in consumer EVs exists in the Chinese-made process equipment sitting in your plant. CNC machines, battery formation systems, BMS diagnostic tools — many carry OTA update capability. That access doesn't disappear because you signed an equipment supply contract. The Question Nobody In European Battery Space Is Asking At that Dutch conference, my question was met with polite deflection. People acknowledged the theoretical risk, then moved on. The underlying assumption seemed to be that geopolitical disruption was either too remote to plan for or too large to do anything about. Neither is true. There are concrete steps that FOAK founders and their investors can take: auditing the OTA exposure of installed equipment, building contractual and technical firewalls into partnership agreements, developing supplier alternatives for the most critical systems, and defining what a production continuity plan would look like if Chinese supply or remote access were suddenly interrupted. None of this requires abandoning Chinese partnerships. It requires treating them with the same rigour you would apply to any other material project risk. The Real Question for Your Board If a board member asked you today — "How do we manage the security and continuity risk in our Chinese partnerships?" — what would your answer be? If you don't have one, that's worth fixing before the question becomes urgent. Supply chain sovereignty and geopolitical risk are areas I help FOAK founders stress-test during scale-up planning. If this is a live issue for your project, let's talk.

What Europe should not be trying to do is beat China at its own game. It should instead try to bypass it. For years, the dominant narrative in batteries has been framed as a race: Europe versus China. Who builds more gigafactories? Who subsidises harder? Who controls raw materials? That framing misses the point. Europe is not positioned to outscale China in commodity chemicals, which underpin the battery supply chain. It is not going to win a volume war on standard NMP or ethylene carbonate (EC) produced at legacy cost structures. And it should stop pretending it can. Global NMP demand is roughly 1–1.5 million tonnes per year, with battery applications driving the majority. EC demand is similarly concentrated in Asia, embedded in a supply chain built over two decades of industrial learning and state-backed investment. Trying to replicate that system plant-for-plant would be capital-intensive, strategically late, and almost certainly futile. So Europe has to change the rules instead — something Brussels is actually good at. Take CBAM. This is not a political gesture. It is a structural pricing mechanism. Embedded carbon in imported chemicals will carry a cost signal. Scope 3 is no longer an ESG footnote. It is a procurement variable. That changes the competitive logic entirely. If imported NMP carries +5 tCO₂ per tonne in embedded emissions, and if that carbon is priced — directly or indirectly — the gap between "cheap Asian solvent" and "European alternative" narrows quickly. At some carbon price levels, it closes. Europe is not attempting to dominate commodity volumes. It is attempting to dominate the carbon-adjusted segment of the market. Call it Europe-first chemistry: chemicals designed for high energy prices, strict permitting, carbon pricing, and traceable supply chains. That is a fundamentally different optimisation problem. And it creates a defensible niche that China, optimised for volume and legacy cost structures, is structurally poorly positioned to serve. Companies like Alta Group are already positioned inside this shift. By redesigning catalysts and solvents to reduce embedded emissions and regulatory burden — while remaining drop-in compatible with existing gigafactory processes — the competitive advantage is not scale. It is a structural fit with European constraints. China wins on volume. That is not going to change. Europe can win on carbon-adjusted economics. That is already beginning. The question is not who produces more tonnes. The question is who produces the tonnes that fit the regulatory future. That future, at least in Europe, is already priced in. I work with FOAK and scale-up companies in cleantech that are navigating exactly this kind of structural transition — where the competitive logic has shifted but the operating model hasn't caught up yet. If that describes your situation, let's talk.

Every FOAK founder I work with eventually asks the same question: Should we approach corporate venture capital (CVC)? The honest answer is — it depends entirely on when. Last week, I was on a call with a founder, discussing who we should reach out to next in our search for funding for their first-of-a-kind (FOAK) plant. We were considering reaching out to CVC, since rank-and-file VCs told us they aren’t funding hardware scale-ups and their tickets are much smaller anyway. Our product is a speciality chemical, very high up the battery value chain. All of our potential customers are large chemical conglomerates, so CVC seemed like a natural choice. Then I remembered how I first ran into CVC in 2021. I was the CEO of RENERA, a Russian battery scale-up, 100% owned by Rosatom, a state corporation, and the sister CVC reached out to me for my expertise in batteries as they considered an investment in an early-stage battery startup. I was on full steam ahead with planning my gigafactory and, having looked at the tech, replied that the tech was fine and promising, but would have no impact on my project, as it would reach the necessary TRL/MRL in the next 5-7 years. I had an off-take in negotiations that required me to deliver over 2 GWh of cells much earlier. I gave my green light, and the CVC went on to invest something close to $2 million. My investment program aimed to secure over $200 million. Reflecting back on my experience and reading a recent article on the Hack Summit website (they’ve interviewed many CVCs), I have to say that CVCs aren’t a good fit for FOAK for two main reasons. First of all, they can’t provide the funds you are looking for. Their tickets are the same as most VCs, so a €1-5 million check won’t get your €50 million project very far. Second, having a CVC on a captable won’t guarantee you an offtake from the parent corporation. That you’ll have to do by yourself, as the decision on offtake is always taken by a separate team with completely different KPIs. CVC teams are judged on their portfolio returns, while procurement teams are judged on prices secured, speed and the quality of goods delivered. There is, though, a case where a CVC CAN help you with FOAK. Having a CVC as an investor BEFORE you go for FOAK (at pilot stage or earlier) will provide you with many benefits later on. First, their presence confirms the strategic value of the existing market and enhances your credibility with later investors. CVC interest signals to later investors that a serious industrial player sees strategic value in your technology. Second, CVC can be your champion inside a corporation, as the CVC’s manager’s internal success depends on yours. That’s rare in the corporate world, which sees startups at best as a nuisance and at worst, as a threat. You can leverage that to open doors to better procurement prices, offtake negotiations and early customer feedback. Getting that MOU or term sheet on offtake from the parent corporation can hugely boost your chances of a successful funding round for your FOAK. CVC money won’t bridge your FOAK valley of death. But they can make a good foundation for one. For the FOAK stage itself, the capital has to come from elsewhere: strategic industrials (a CVC parent might take interest), project finance, or public loan programs like the EU Innovation Fund. If you're deciding whether CVC belongs in your FOAK funding stack, this is exactly the kind of question I help founders work through. A free call is a good place to start.

Over the past twelve to eighteen months, the automotive industry has behaved in a way that commentators find deeply unsettling: it has cancelled things. Depending on one’s accounting preferences, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five EV programmes have been scrapped, postponed, or politely redefined across 2025 and early 2026. For some observers, this was sufficient to declare that EV demand had finally met its limits. And yet, 2025 recorded more than 20 million EV sales globally - the strongest year of growth the sector has ever seen. The Shift From Policy To Profit Both realities coexist without contradiction. What we are observing is not the collapse of electrification, but the reintroduction of profit discipline into an industry that had grown accustomed to operating on policy momentum, subsidies, inexpensive capital and, occasionally, competitive theatrics. For nearly a decade, announcing ambitious electrification targets was good politics and good investor signalling. Scaling heavy industry, however, remains indifferent to signalling. When interest rates rose, Chinese competition intensified, and fiscal priorities shifted, finance departments began revisiting assumptions that had previously been treated as destiny. The resulting write-downs — some $65 billion across the sector — were less an ideological reversal than an overdue reconciliation exercise. If one looks carefully at the programmes that disappeared, the pattern is almost tediously logical. Large SUVs, premium sedans, long-range performance platforms — vehicles with expansive battery packs and correspondingly expansive cost structures — feature prominently. These were not the backbone of mass electrification; they were its most visible ambassadors. Meanwhile, entry-level EVs continue to expand, China’s domestic market continues to scale, and fleet electrification proceeds with minimal drama. The industry is not retreating from electrification; it is retreating from electrification that fails to clear a margin threshold. Why This Matters More For Batteries Than For Cars For automakers, this is portfolio management. For battery companies and FOAK gigafactory projects, it is more delicate. Many facilities were financed on the assumption that OEM demand would be both predictable and faithful to announced timelines. Platform launches were expected to proceed more or less as presented at investor days. Trade protection was assumed to provide a degree of insulation. With the partial exception of the last point, those assumptions now look less robust. Technology risk, once the central narrative, has been joined — and in some cases overshadowed — by commercial risk. FOAK battery projects amplify this vulnerability. They are capital-intensive, carry high fixed costs, endure elevated scrap rates in early ramp-up and often operate on thin initial margins while servicing meaningful debt. A 20 or 30 per cent deviation in expected volumes is not a rounding error; it can materially alter project economics. We already see this in contract renegotiations, in gigafactories being repurposed toward stationary storage for data centres, in postponed expansions, and in startups seeking alternative offtake channels, including defence sector. Heavy industry has always known that demand risk is more unforgiving than laboratory uncertainty. The battery sector is now reacquainting itself with that lesson. The Chemistry Selection Will Change - Maybe There are also implications for chemistry strategy. The cancellations have disproportionately affected vehicles built around high-nickel, high-energy-density configurations and large battery packs. Growth, by contrast, continues in cost-optimised chemistries such as LFP, in smaller vehicles, and in stationary storage driven by grid bottlenecks and renewable integration. When projects must justify themselves under stricter capital discipline, cost per kilowatt-hour tends to eclipse energy density as the dominant strategic variable. Technologies without a credible cost pathway will find customer acquisition increasingly strenuous, however elegant their performance curves. Who Will Survive A Classic Industrial Cycle? None of this resembles a systemic crisis. It resembles a classic industrial cycle. Capital flows in with enthusiasm, commitments overshoot, reality intervenes, portfolios are pruned, and durable players consolidate. The EV and battery ecosystem is moving from youthful exuberance toward adulthood. Historically, this phase is uncomfortable but clarifying. Weak structures are exposed; resilient ones strengthen. The companies likely to navigate this reset share certain characteristics: credible cost-reduction roadmaps, diversified customer exposure, modular capacity expansion rather than heroic upfront builds, optionality for stationary storage, disciplined capital allocation, and teams capable of executing under constraints. Those more exposed often display the opposite: dependence on a single OEM, premium-only positioning, long commercialisation timelines, large front-loaded capex, and limited differentiation in cost. Final Thought And A Wild Card Electrification itself is not slowing. What is changing is the type of electrification that survives scrutiny. The winners will not necessarily be the most energy-dense or the most technically ornate. They will be the technologies and business models capable of reducing cost while scaling reliably. Industrial history has a consistent, if slightly unromantic, preference for pragmatism over elegance. There remains, of course, a geopolitical dimension. Any significant disruption around Taiwan would reorder battery supply chains with remarkable speed. In such a scenario, chemistry choices may be influenced less by optimal performance and more by insurance logic. Manufacturers would pay a premium to reduce exposure to concentrated supply chains, even at the expense of theoretical efficiency. Geopolitics has a habit of rearranging technical orthodoxy. For battery startups and investors, the central question is therefore not whether electrification continues. It does. The more pertinent inquiry is whether the underlying business model is resilient to demand volatility and geopolitical friction. The next phase of electrification will reward those who prepared for that environment rather than those who assumed it would never arrive. If you operate in batteries, materials or EV supply chains, it would be interesting to understand how customer behaviour and investment appetite are evolving from your vantage point.

The FT article on GM’s lithium manganese-rich (LMR) push reads, on the surface, like a familiar innovation narrative: bold leadership, unproven chemistry, long timelines, big upside. That framing misses the point. GM is not choosing LMR because it is elegant. GM is ending up at LMR because its option set has collapsed. Let’s look at the context. US support for EVs has weakened. Incentives are being rolled back. Sales are falling well short of expectations, with EV volumes down sharply after the 2021–22 peak. GM alone has already taken $6bn+ in write-downs tied to its EV transition. At the same time, Chinese manufacturers — BYD being the obvious example — continue to scale. They offer vehicles that are cheaper, increasingly competitive in quality, and vertically integrated across batteries, materials, and manufacturing. They have cemented a structural advantage. For a Western OEM, this creates a three-way constraint: 1 You must reduce costs to compete with Chinese vehicles. 2 You must reduce reliance on Chinese battery supply chains. 3 You must offer consumers something affordable and competitive with an ICE car now — not in a decade. There is no chemistry on the shelf that satisfies all three. LFP is cheap and proven — but dominated by China.
High-nickel chemistries deliver performance — but remain expensive and input-constrained.
Solid-state is not ready at scale for automotive, and probably won’t be there in the next decade. That leaves LMR. LMR is not new. The industry knows it well — and has avoided it just as consistently. Voltage fading, durability issues, and manufacturing complexity kept it out of mass production. Every major battery maker has looked at it and walked away. GM has decided not to. This decision tells you just how desperate things are. Kurt Kelty, hired to spearhead GM’s EV effort, put it plainly:
“If LMR has failed, then I have failed.” That’s an unusually direct statement for a public OEM executive. It reflects the reality: this is not a pilot or a side bet. GM is staking its ability to stay globally relevant in EVs on a chemistry that has never been proven at scale. From a board perspective, this is a brutal position to be in. Do nothing, and you drift into irrelevance outside a shrinking ICE-only US market.
Follow incumbents, and you stay structurally uncompetitive.
Bet on an unproven chemistry, and you absorb execution risk that the industry spent a decade avoiding. None of these options are comfortable and none are obviously wrong. LMR promises a middle ground: lower reliance on nickel and cobalt, cost closer to LFP, performance above it — at least on paper. If it works, GM narrows the cost gap without surrendering control of its supply chain. If it doesn’t, the downside is not limited to a single platform. It reinforces the broader problem that Western OEMs are facing: the gap with China, which is not just about subsidies, but about industrial systems that compound advantage over time. That is what makes this decision interesting — and uncomfortable. I see this as not a story about one chemistry winning or losing. I see this as a case study in how strategic choices look when every safe path is gone. And I don’t envy today’s automotive boards. They are operating in a world where: • industrial policy is unstable, • supply chains are geopolitical, • consumers are price-sensitive, • and competitors are way ahead. In such a world, betting on LMR is not bold; it may simply be the least bad option left. Whether that is enough — and whether it arrives in time — remains an open question. Link to the original FT article (paywalled): https://www.ft.com/content/178c1115-05ab-45ef-b18f-7dc3869db3ff

Choosing the wrong geography can kill a FOAK, but being forced to choose too early almost certainly will. Lyten is moving manufacturing from the US to Sweden and Poland, while trying to keep its FOAK in Nevada. Freyr started in Norway, shifted to the US, and eventually walked away from batteries altogether. In today’s increasingly fragmented world, choosing a location for your FOAK can be central to survival. And too many founders are being pushed to make that choice before the FOAK has proven it can run. This is not something that founders usually come up with. That push usually comes from the board. “Let’s take advantage of the IRA!” “No, let’s get some of the EU scale-up fund!” “What will you do when the dollar weakens?” “There is no market for EVs in the US anymore!” You are not sure if your product will work at scale, and you already asked to change location! And changing location is hard, as every country has different: • permitting regimes, • labour markets, • supplier availability, • government support. At the FOAK stage, those assumptions are untested. Once you pick a country, you inherit its constraints — whether or not your process is ready for them. Founders know - geography is often chosen to satisfy governance, signalling by key investors/customers, or incentive requirements, rather than execution reality. And reversing that decision is expensive. Not just in capex. In time, credibility, and team fatigue. The hard call isn’t “US vs Europe” or “Norway vs Poland.” It’s whether to commit before the factory itself has stabilised. Delaying the decision makes you look hesitant. Committing early makes you lock in risks you don’t yet understand. That’s the point at which the founder starts to conflict with board expectations — and where many scale-up plans begin to accumulate hidden debt.

Today is the first monthly check-in on the 23 FOAK climate tech projects  I said I’d track publicly in 2026! FOAKs get talked about more and more, which is definitely a good thing! I’m following up on the developments of the largest and most interesting FOAK projects in climate tech. I first go over the good news, then the bad, and you’ll get an updated table at the end! The good news (actual execution happened) H2 Green Steel (now Stegra)  signed a long-term supply agreement with Thyssenkrupp. This is good news, as Stegra narrowly avoided bankruptcy at the end of last year. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/swedish-steel-startup-stegra-signs-deal-supply-thyssenkrupp-materials-2026-01-12/ https://www.norran.se/english/engelska/artikel/stegra-a-multi-billion-kronor-lifeline-within-reach/rmpymv1r Linglong One (ACP100 SMR)  completed a successful non-nuclear steam-run test in late December. I’m putting it here, as I’ve missed it a month earlier. It is worth noting that the project has been under development since 2010, the design of the 125 MW SMR passed a safety review by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2016. The plant is expected to start commercial energy generation in the first half of 2026. Can’t wait! https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinese-smr-completes-non-nuclear-steam-start-up-test Kairos Power in the USA cleared a non-trivial bottleneck by securing HALEU nuclear fuel  from the DOE for its 50 MW SMR. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/federal-government-to-send-kairos-power-enriched-uranium-for-reactors/ar-AA1UJ1El 1komma5 DAC signed an agreement with Bain & Company to purchase 9000 tons worth of CDR credits over the next three years. Good for them, but why on Earth do B&C need those is a mystery to me. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/1pointfive-and-bain-company-announce-agreement-for-direct-air-capture-carbon-removal-credits-1035706632   NEOM Green Hydrogen  proudly crossed the “90% built” line. It was also the only project of the infamous “The Line” that survived recent cuts. https://fuelcellsworks.com/2026/01/13/green-investment/neom-s-green-hydrogen-megaproject-reaches-90-percent-build-milestone     The warning signs (already visible in January) Commonwealth Fusion  is playing around with AI mock-ups of its 400 MW SFR (small fusion reactor) and planning for commercial delivery in 2030. This could have been in the “Good news” section, but come on, after reading the news on Linglong One, who on Earth will believe them? https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/cfs-accelerates-commercial-fusion-with-siemens-nvidia   ZeroAvia  stretches timelines and rejigs certifications after last year’s layoffs and securing another funding round. https://www.flightglobal.com/aerospace/zeroavia-rejigs-za600-certification-plan-after-funding-constraints-force-sweeping-layoffs/166056.article Lyten taking over Northvolt’s facilities has been going nowhere so far, while Lyten has been pulling out of the USA. https://industryradar.com/sweden/corporatenews/lyten-acquisition-of-northvolt-delayed/ https://www.norran.se/english/engelska/artikel/skelleftea-boost-lyten-bets-on-ex-northvolt-assets/r511wqnj   Eavor-Loop (Germany)  a thermal energy startup, delivered electricity to the grid  from a closed-loop geothermal system. This should’ve been in the good news section, but with an output of just 0,5MW out of planned 2 MW, Eavor-Loop seems to face the same ramp-up difficulties as Climeworks did last year. Read an insightful deep dive by Michael Barnard here: https://cleantechnica.com/2026/01/15/when-next-generation-geothermal-meets-first-of-a-kind-reality/   The noise – companies stirring up news, but making little progress Net Zero Teesside  in the UK made it to the news this month after striking a deal for 7000 tons of steel for its project with MMEC, a Chinese steel supplier. The company caused a public outrage over sidelining UK steel producers. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/use-of-chinese-steel-for-multi-billion-pound-net-zero-teesside-project-branded-slap-in-face/ar-AA1UuVAp     Early conclusion (subject to revision, monthly) For me, the most exciting result of the month comes from China, with Linglong One completing non-nuclear tests and gearing up for the market. The disappointment of the month is Eavor-Loop, failing to generate any significant amounts of energy. Thermal power generation has been much hyped last year, only to stumble at the first launch. I’ll keep tracking these projects every month: what changes, what slips, and what gets renamed to sound like progress. Just tracking FOAKs meeting reality. February update coming first week of March!

My friend Jean Gravellier once drove me around the Dunkirk area. I’ve seen the ArcelorMittal steel plant, the nuclear power station, and locations for future battery gigafactories. “Why there?” I thought. So many polluting industries, all in one place? There are many reasons, but one is permitting - businesses with a higher environmental footprint go where it is easier to get approval from local governments. There is a reason that many battery companies in Europe are in Hungary. There is one particular solvent used in making lithium-ion batteries that requires tens of millions of euros in capital expenditure, several million euros in operating costs, and many months or years to navigate permitting procedures. This is NMP (N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone). It is used to bind together various components of the cathode, creating a slurry, and after pasting a cathode slurry on aluminium foil, you need to dry it and safely divert NMP. The drying process is one of the two most energy-intensive stages in lithium-ion battery manufacturing. It is also hazardous to human health, so extreme caution is required. All gigafactories have dedicated systems for handling NMP - dedicated ventilation systems, solvent recovery units, wastewater treatment, additional permitting, and a permanent HSE burden. NMP demonstrates that discussions about battery competitiveness, like LFP versus NMC, are incomplete. Some of the most consequential cost drivers sit much earlier in the process, in places that rarely make it into public announcements or pitch decks. Removing NMP from the equation would make battery making process much less toxic and eliminate tens of millions of euros in capital and operating costs, and speed up the roll-out of EU gigafactories. But that’s not all. In the next post, I’ll look at why this solvent question becomes even more problematic once you factor in localisation and Europe’s dependence on imported battery chemicals.

“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.