The Polyglot Founder
Cleantech Innovators covers what it takes to scale an idea to deployment.
My current lens on how this happens is to equate scaling climate tech to mastering multiple languages. Monolingual founders can’t bring cutting edge innovations to the world. Too boxed into science lab norms, and you’ll scare the institutions needed to scale the invention. Too institutional, and you’re unlikely to be keeping up to date on what’s happening at the frontiers.
The founders who scale are polyglots who are fluent in science, institutions, and capital. This piece goes through the newsletter’s recent pieces through that lens.
The languages of scale
The first language is science. Inventing novel ways of applying physics, chemistry and biology to solve climate problems.
This newsletter doesn’t cover the science, there are better people for that. The focus here is more on the second and third languages: institutions and capital.
Heavy industry. Governments. Regulatory bodies. These are key institutional gatekeepers of climate tech deployment. It’s obvious that each institution is different from the other. It’s fascinating that they are different within each other. The chameleon is the best mascot for navigating them.
And capital cuts across the other two languages. Misallocate capital and you risk killing the entire operation.
The institutional dialects
i. Speak to the room, not the building
In a B2C business model, you ideally have one customer profile. For B2B and B2G, that approach won’t close the sale. The pitch to the CEO is very different from the pitch to the plant manager.
To get the PepsiCo contract, Aquacycl worked different rooms. All of them. They navigated PepsiCo’s corporate, procurement, asset management, sustainability, purchasing and site utility directors to get their contract signed. And the generic pitch will fail you:
“With every enterprise client that we’ve worked with, it’s the same deal,” she explains. “We have to sell separately, with different metrics, with different priorities.” “All those internal audiences have to say yes, and they need different messages that resonate.”
Orianna Bretschger, CEO and Co-Founder of Aquacycl
And while your high level connections can get your foot in the door, that’s only half the battle.
CarbonRe’s government contacts brokered introductions to the CEOs of cement companies. Yet they still flew in 15 engineers from 8 of these cement producers to build models side by side.
A grid tech startup used warm intros from regulators to get in the room with the CEO of a power utility. They still needed to customise their pitches to different parts of the org chart.
The C-Suite touchpoint gets you in the building, but that’s where the real work begins to influence the day-to-day operators using the product.
ii. Boring works
The second institutional dialect is credibility. Startups are a risk for conservative buyers.
The 2026 Startup and Scale Up Water Summit in Barcelona made this observation concrete:
Innovators at the Startup and Scale Up Water Summit left Barcelona with one golden rule seared into their brains: Water must always be flowing, and at the quality required. No exceptions.
Water utilities and industrials have no room to fail. If they fail, public health collapses.
Utilities are risk-averse by design. If a B2B SAAS malfunctions, you ship an update. If a public utility fails, lives are at risk.
The summit offered a counterintuitive fix for startups: be the boring, safe option. Startups should borrow credibility. Tier 1 contractors like Glanua have decades of institutional trust; a startup launching its first paid pilot does not.
The startup-contractor partnership is a good fit. Contractors access cutting edge innovations, startups access institutional buyers. For EU-based innovators, getting your technology recognised as a Best Available Technique (BAT) by INCITE is another badge that speaks the institution’s language before you’ve said a word.
iii. Follow the rules
The third dialect is regulatory fluency. In alt protein, the dossier you submit to regulators unlocks your right to sell anything. Submitting a weak one could bankrupt the startup. At the Bezos Centre for Sustainable Protein’s Annual Conference, Atova Regulatory Consulting warned that investors will pressure startups to submit it as soon as possible. The irony is that this could cause mistakes and delay the path to revenue even further. It pays to not skip the rulebook. Hire people who know it inside out.
Financial dialects
The third language is capital. Money is a language snob who will punish you for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
i. The early stage mismatch
The Missing Middle piece described this most starkly. A startup with strong product-market fit walks into a bank expecting excitement. Instead, you run into a structural mismatch:
Startups fail to escape the valley not because of their performance, but because of the structural mismatch of available capital once you graduate from small scale pilots:
Impatient capital: VCs want an exit in 5-7 years; hardware factories take that long just to build.
Wallet/belief mismatch: The VCs who believe in your tech don’t have pockets deep enough to build the factory. The bankers who do have the money are too conservative to play ball.
Safer alternatives: Bankers providing green finance prefer solar farms and battery energy storage (BESS) projects for their predictable cash flows.
CTVC calls this funding phase the “missing middle”: VCs can’t fund it, bankers won’t.
VCs operate on 5-7 year cycles. But hardware factories take that long just to build. Bankers want predictable cash flows but new tech lacks credit history. Funds like PureTerra Ventures were honest about this at the Water Tech Summit: If you’re still working to achieve TRL 6, your timelines may not line up.
ii. Conservative and patient capital
But startups would be remiss to just focus on VC funding. There are other forms of capital built for the long game. SKion Water leans toward long-term stewardship rather than exit timelines. In a case study from the Water Tech Summit, SKion Water didn’t even write a cheque. Instead, they engineered a joint venture with a European partner to provide the specific working capital a startup needed to fulfil its orders. Value creation without a direct investment.
Family offices with heavy industry ties play a similar role in grid tech. They understand the industry’s sales cycle because they’ve lived it themselves. They can ignore early traction because they know what’s coming and how to get to the finish line.
iii. Philanthropic and mission capital
At the Bezos Conference, Fábio Faria Oliveira of the Novo Nordisk Foundation made the case clearly: philanthropic foundations take on risks that others can’t. They are a necessary first step to progress impactful ideas from research to reality. Government bodies like UKRI and ARIA also deploy capital for the earliest phases of innovation.
The VC, philanthropist and banker speak different dialects of capital. Knowing what to say, and who to approach first, is the capital stack puzzle that a founder needs to master.
The unresolved tension
Reflecting on fluency, I posed this question to a room of writers and thinkers at a retreat this weekend:
If you’re a deep tech founder, should you become fluent in all three languages, or hire and seek co-founders for your gaps?
The closest we got to a consensus was that every founder should know enough to challenge an expert and answer FAQs across all three domains. But even this was countered with examples: Founders using AI to accelerate their fluency as they go along. A former politician hiring talented engineers to launch a nuclear energy startup.
I directionally agree that the founding team must collectively cover all three languages. But it’s not in a ‘stay in your lane’ mindset. Each founder should be fluent in one and comprehend the rest. Enough to know when something is being lost in translation, and to avoid crossed wires.
It’s easy to box yourself into a lane and call it specialisation. But do climate tech founders have that luxury? Is being a polyglot founder table stakes? I’m still figuring that out.
