Climate Drift: What the FOAK is going on? What it takes to mass deploy
In short
Project finance hears risk when founders say 'first of a kind'
Julian Ryba-White, a solar installer in 2006 and now with Devcapita, told Skander Garroum how hard-tech founders can win over the capital that builds plants.
FOAK, short for first of a kind, is a useful label when hard-tech founders talk to venture investors. To the capital that pays for plants, Julian Ryba-White said, it sounds very risky, something to leave alone. "The language of project development is a language that's designed to speak to project finance," Julian told Skander Garroum on a live episode of Climate Drift. Founders who want to get from their first plant to the nth have to learn it.
Skander introduced the guest as one of the few people in the room who had actually put steel into the ground. Julian was a solar installer in 2006, worked at SolarCity through its scale-up and stock market listing, then started a solar development company in Minnesota. Now with Devcapita, which helps companies get from venture to infrastructure, Julian sees the industry maturing as technology companies learn a hard lesson. To get an operating asset they have to go through a project development cycle, and that is not a product development cycle.
Julian's example was a bio-cement company. Its venture money took the technology from the lab to a pilot, then to a demonstration that customers would buy the product. Its first plant needs $40 million of capital expenditure and has to support itself on its own cash flows. Julian splits such a business into three. A technology company invents the technology and proves it works. An operating company runs the asset and pays down its financing, much like a commercial mortgage. Between them sits the developer, whose job is to meet the conditions a financier sets before paying for construction. Data centre developers are learning those conditions now, Julian said, as they ask whether they can get a site, power and a permit.
The language of project development is a language that's designed to speak to project finance.
Skander said few tech founders know this framework. Julian organises it around the project, meaning everything needed to finance and build one operating asset, whether a solar farm or a factory. An investor in a single project has capped upside, so they want limited downside, and the question shifts from how to make a lot of money to how to stop a capped return eroding. Large industrial companies share that kind of risk. BP and Shell, competitors, form joint ventures on projects. Venture-backed start-ups tend to do it all themselves.
The reward is cheaper money. Every venture dollar takes a piece of the parent company, and grants cannot carry a business plan. At the project, investors can see bounded risks, such as the offtake and feedstock agreements, site control and performance data from earlier units, and bet at a lower cost of capital. A company raising $55 million to spend $40 million on its first plant should start from sources and uses, Julian said, and begin that planning around TRL 6, or it may pilot for the wrong things.
The bar is high. Without project IRRs of 15% or more, preferably 20–25%, Julian finds it hard to see project-level capital coming in. A founder whose model shows 5% or 10% should still try to bring in some project equity, even $5 million, as a signal for the next project. But that founder may need to plan for three, four or five plants. Solar shows what makes the numbers easier. Its economics were clear, modular units made repetition and data cheap, and nobody has to secure its feedstock. Nobody argues the sun will be missing tomorrow. A plant that runs on food waste has to worry that someone else will buy it.
Most start-ups fail, Julian said, and that is just data. The years people spend deploying a technology stay valuable anyway. "If you worked at a solar company that went bankrupt, you were a hot commodity in the market." Devcapita wants ways to hold such people on hard-asset projects for three to five years, some of them paid $300,000 a year. That, Julian said, is the people side of the deployment gap. Solve it and there will be plenty of people who know how to raise the next stage of capital. That capital is not really missing. It is scarce.
Recorded live at The Drop 2026 for Climate Drift, hosted by Skander Garroum, with Julian Ryba-White.