What the FOAK is going on?
7 lessons from our FOAK panel
👋 Welcome to Climate Drift: your cheat-sheet to climate. Each edition breaks down real solutions, hard numbers, and career moves for operators, founders, and investors who want impact. For more: Community | Accelerator | Open Climate Firesides | Deep Dives
Hey there! 👋
Skander here.
Last week, we gathered 200 investors, operators, climate-switchers, and Drifties for a rapid-fire panel on one of the toughest challenges in climate: building the first-of-a-kind (FOAK) project.
“FOAK isn’t only the valley of death: it’s the valley of everything happening at once.”
Forty minutes of rapid-fire questions (plus Q&A and breakout rooms) produced more take-homes than any tidy recap can hold.
Below, you’ll find the 7 biggest lessons and concrete next steps for investors, founders, and climate switchers.
👉 Want to catch the replay? It’s up in the community!
🌊 Let’s dive in
First, meet the crew
Before I dive into the learnings, let’s first give a shoutout to our panelists:
Deanna Zhang
Climate tech deal whisperer. Deanna’s worked across finance, energy, and strategy — she knows what gets funded and what just gets foaked.
Nik Baumann
Industrial exec turned climate operator. From scaling COVID tests at warp speed to tackling the Keeling Curve. Now helping corporates decarbonise and startups survive the FOAK phase.
👉 Dive into his field guide first
Tim Woodcock
Developer turned scale-up guide. Tim’s helped climate ventures go from lab to gigaton.
Rushad Nanavatty
Climate-tech innovation leader who heads Third Derivative and Rocky Mountain Institute, drawing on prior roles at WeGen and McKinsey to scale breakthrough decarbonization and urban sustainability solutions worldwide.
Want to dive into more case studies, interviews and the state of FOAK?
Also, a big thank you to everyone who joined: FOAK builders, investors, and of course, our Drifties. We tried to get to every question live, and we’ll follow up on the rest in the community.
Off to the learnings:
7 Learnings
First-of-a-kind (FOAK) projects are the bottleneck of climate deployment. They sit between venture capital and project finance, in a zone where risks pile up and playbooks fall apart. Yet they’re essential: we won’t hit net zero without scaling what’s never been built before.
Fork, Not Chasm
First-of-a-kind projects aren’t “bigger pilots.” It’s a standalone business that must survive real-world chaos, run P&Ls, and de-risk enough to unlock low-cost project finance. It’s not science anymore: it’s ops.
Financing Reality Check
Mega-rounds funded by venture capital dilute founders and mis-price risk. Instead, FOAKs need a blended capital stack:
Sub-$50M = VC equity + equipment finance + venture debt
$50M+ = structured equity + short-tenor debt + strategic offtake commitments
The goal? Position risk with capital that understands it.
Right risk, right instrument: Venture loves upside, infrastructure hates novelty. The gap in between now has a name - development equity - and angels, family offices and catalytic philanthropies are rushing in.
Bridging the Capital Canyon
We’re seeing the rise of a new asset class: development equity. Angels, family offices, and catalytic funds are stepping into the no-man’s-land between VC and infrastructure.
Project = Company
The team that built the prototype is rarely the team that scales the factory. Treat the project as its own startup: lean, fail-fast contractors early; deep domain specialists only once each risk retires.
Surviving Manufacturing Hell
Expect it. Budget for it. Plan for chaos. Prep every hire for the all-nighter season. Align internal teams and OEMs before the first machine ships.
Northvolt’s delays weren’t just about tech: they were about comms between Sweden and Shenzhen.
The Village Forms
Developer-as-a-service platforms like Mark1, FOAK communities like Node, and regional net-zero commitments are coalescing into the missing ecosystem FOAKs need.
Macro Headwinds ≠ Wall
Higher rates simply shift capital, they don’t erase it. Projects are already hopping borders to jurisdictions with faster permitting or sweeter incentives.
Okay, let’s make it actionable.
Here some quick todos for investors, FOAK founders and climate switchers:
Investors
Allocate 1-5 % of your climate sleeve to a development-equity note or fund
Sketch your first blended-capital term sheet
Schedule calls with corporates to seed a multi-buyer offtake club
FOAK Founders
A quick math lesson:
Under $50 million builds → blend VC equity + equipment finance or venture debt
Above $50 million → short-tenor structured equity + bridge debt that disappears once the plant survives its first year
Block a week in the calendar to build an institutional-grade model (base, lender, downside).
Run a fork-readiness audit: site, permits, offtake, supply chain, team gaps
Identify one modular-design tweak that shaves cap-ex or cycle time, and cost it out
Climate Switchers
There are a lot of skills that are relevant for FOAK - it’s all hands on deck
Reach out to Node or Mark 1 and volunteer for a FOAK diligence sprint
Update LinkedIn headline to the one super-skill you’re cultivating (EPC, TEA, supply-chain ops, etc.)
Want to learn more?
Mark 1 is a new “developer-as-a-service” platform spun out of RMI/Third Derivative and Deep Science Ventures.
Node assembles the FOAK ecosystem through invitation-only meet-ups and salons aimed at raising FOAK hit-rates.
V1 Climate Solutions is a specialist advisory firm that helps climate-tech startups, investors and project developers close the First-of-a-Kind financing gap by pairing hard-won FOAK know-how with bespoke capital-raising and market-insight support.
Reach out to Tim Woodcock in case you are building a FOAK. He is building something special for FOAK with Emergent Infra.
The village is forming. Show up early
Developer-as-a-service shops, FOAK communities, support organisations are finally here.
They’re built by whoever joins the call earliest.
Next up on Open-Climate:
June 4th: Climate Insurance: Taking Nonprofit private
Climate risk is scaling faster than traditional protection can keep up. Disaster losses are ballooning, humanitarian budgets are shrinking, and billions remain one cyclone away from ruin. It’s time to reboot insurance, finance, and response for an age of extremes.
Join us for a 60-minute LIVE Open Climate Session + rapid-fire Q&A with five experts already testing new ways to insure and finance climate resilience.
👉 Apply here: https://lu.ma/so9b78xl
June 18th: Unlocking Legacy: Family Offices & Climate
Public finance is slow. Venture capital is selective. And philanthropy, while vital, often avoids messy infrastructure and ops. So what about private wealth?
What happens when families, foundations, and individual asset owners decide to go all-in on climate: not just for impact, but for legacy, leverage, and long-term resilience?
👉 Join here: https://lu.ma/091z02kz
June 25th: How to market your climate company
Climate doesn’t sell itself. Impact doesn’t speak for itself.
And storytelling can make or break climate deployment.
👉 RSVP here: https://lu.ma/kqpcp4yu
July 1st: Who writes the First Check?
Before the Series A, before the grant, before the press, there’s a moment of deep conviction: someone wiring money into a risky idea with no revenue, no traction, maybe not even a name. That first check shapes everything that follows—who gets to build, what gets built, and who gets left behind.
👉 Join here: https://lu.ma/kqpcp4yu
For more: Community | Accelerator | Open Climate Firesides | Deep Dives
Did you miss a session? Catch the replay?
It’s up in the community!