New Wave: We have the solutions. We 'just' need to scale them
In short
Climate founders are chefs who now have to make Big Macs
Jerome Ternynck, who scaled SmartRecruiters, told Hugo Rauch on New Wave that climate tech has plenty of proven technology and too little execution to scale it.
A founder, Jerome Ternynck said, is trained as a chef. The job is to invent, pivot and iterate fast enough to find product-market fit before the company dies. Once the product works, the job becomes making Big Macs, lots of them, faster, cheaper and better. Many founders are left behind at that point, and their boards hire a CEO. Jerome, who built SmartRecruiters and now backs ocean technology through Rypples, told Hugo Rauch on New Wave that this is where climate tech stalls.
A decade of climate innovation has produced many validated technologies and few scaled companies. Incubators, accelerators, early-stage investors, universities and grants all serve invention. Once a technology works and has a market, founders are left alone to build the company that will sell it. An invention that only a handful of people use, Jerome said, has done nothing for the planet.
Jerome learned the switch the hard way. SmartRecruiters began as a free marketplace for connecting people to jobs and, by its Series B, still had no business. It pivoted hard into an enterprise platform and was sold to SAP last year, by which time it handled about 200 million applicants a year. The lesson was to stop dreaming and start executing. For years Jerome met every quarter with six other software CEOs and a coach to challenge one another.
Boards also fired Jerome three times, at different companies, and each time reinstated Jerome when no replacement worked out. That history leaves Jerome wary of pushing founders out. "A founder is often wrong, but their heart is always right." The better course is to ask founders whether they are the best person to take their vision to planetary scale.
Founder-led sales is an art, Jerome said, but go-to-market at scale is a product, with features and defects that can be monitored and tuned. The product is the restaurant, not the Big Mac. It covers about 200 square metres on the corner of a crossroads, with its name on a big pole, a children's playground and 22 staff hired and trained the same way. Founders are usually product people, and the framing lets them bring an engineering mindset to selling.
Hugo challenged the playbook for hardware, which does not sell at the near-zero marginal cost of software. Jerome agreed that hardware raises the bar for execution but warned founders against becoming manufacturers by reflex. Jerome recalled asking a founder who planned a big factory whether they were a manufacturer or an inventor. Build the first units from off-the-shelf parts around a black box that holds the secret sauce, Jerome said, then hand assembly to a contract manufacturer once there is scale.
Money is the other gap. Venture capital, in Jerome's words a lottery-ticket business, needs companies that can return the fund, and climate produces few outliers. After years of R&D, a company that has de-risked its technology meets investors who cannot make 50 times their money on a 50 million valuation, while private equity and debt find it too early. It falls into the valley of death at the moment it is strongest in opportunity and weakest in its cap table and skills.
A founder is often wrong, but their heart is always right.
Rypples is Jerome's attempt to fill that gap. It is a holding company, not a fund, so it can act as a shareholder in the companies it backs. A conventional fund, living off its management fee, would have been easier to raise, Jerome said. Rypples also puts an operating partner on the board, a habit borrowed from private equity. It makes a first investment of typically 500,000, spends a year coaching the founders and writing a growth plan with them, and only then commits in full.
Capital, Jerome said, is commoditised at every layer of the stack. Execution is not. When Hugo asked how to keep founders from burning out, Jerome said, "We don't. This thing is hard." A founder replacing plastic bags with seaweed has to decide whether the goal is a million bags, a billion or a trillion. If it is a trillion and the founder cannot get there, the tough love is to hire a CEO who can.
Recorded live at The Drop 2026 for New Wave, hosted by Hugo Rauch, with Jerome Ternynck.