The Do’s and Don’ts of Cleantech 3.0

I’m no Thomas Edison, but he sure was on to something with direct current (DC).

Edison was a prolific inventor and extraordinary entrepreneur with many of his innovations still in operation today. How exactly did he do that? Well, he wasn’t just someone who invented stuff. He had another aspect of his character that’s underappreciated—his salesmanship. And as everyone knows, in sales you get a lot of no’s. Having been a tinkerer and engineer myself in my formative years, I struggled with selling my wares for a long time. I didn’t want to face those no’s.

COMMENTARY

Then, in the ’90s, I took a job selling commercial lighting to real estate developers, big box stores, cities, and state agencies. In doing so, I was told “no” on an average of 20 times before making a sale. While those no’s affected me negatively at first, I eventually became immune and normalized them. They just became part of the process—a numbers game, if you will—that eventually led to a yes. At the end of the day, those no’s served me well and helped put me on the path to cleantech entrepreneurial success with a “never give up” mentality.

I’ve now been in the industry for nearly two decades, and I’ve experienced both the challenges and opportunities cleantech companies face, from navigating complex regulatory environments to selling to global integrated energy companies like ENGIE and BP. Yes, there have been many no’s along the way, but through those experiences, I’ve learned valuable lessons.

Here are some of them…

Do – Provide an “Easy Button” for Customers’ Pain Points: To stand out in cleantech, you need to offer a solution that does the heavy lifting—an offering that removes a major pain point while making the experience seamless. The goal is to provide an “easy button.”

Remember that Staples office supplies advertising campaign from almost 20 years ago? It was an instant hit and is still part of our business culture lexicon to this day. Why did it strike such a chord? It innately reflected how all of us wish to navigate decisions that are secondary to our businesses. Office supplies are not core to our business purpose, and, truth be told, clean energy shouldn’t be either. We need to strive for that “easy button” solution to power our world.

When building that easy button, it’s not enough to guess what your customers want—you must actively listen, learn, and adapt your offering based on their feedback. Success in cleantech isn’t just about offering a great product; it’s about thinking comprehensively through the entire customer journey, from the moment they choose your solution to the long-term operational relationship. When you build your product around the needs of customers, you’re not just providing a service; you’re making their lives easier. Being customer-obsessed is essential and helps build a sustainable business model with higher margins and a virtuous circle of customer and partner referrals.

Key Takeaway: Build an easy, hassle-free experience for your customers that solves their biggest pain points. Do what makes customers feel like they’re pressing the “easy button.”

Don’t – Equate Money Raised with Success: While securing a large venture capital (VC) round might seem like instant validation, it comes with significant strings attached. VC investors typically operate under the thesis that the top two players in a given market will capture 90% of the share, pushing startups to grow at a breakneck pace to claim the top spots. This pressure often leads to reckless spending and misguided scaling before achieving a true product-market fit. And when macroeconomic conditions turn sour, the entrepreneurs are oftentimes left to fend for themselves.

You know the classic story of the tortoise and the hare, where the slow but consistent tortoise ultimately beats the fast, overconfident hare in a race? It’s mostly like that in cleantech. The lesson is that perseverance and steady progress are rewarded, not flashy proclamations.

Having a fat bank account as a not-yet-profitable startup will also negatively impact company culture. Too many founders and employees mistakenly believe that securing a large round means their work is done, and they can hand off responsibilities to others. This approach rarely works. Staying lean and frugal allows you and your team to maintain control, avoid overspending, and adapt to changing market conditions. Instead of chasing large sums of VC money with expected 10X investor returns, focus on meaningful progress, conservative funding, and becoming profitable.

Key Takeaway: Stay lean, focus on getting to profitability, and avoid unnecessary spending. Raising capital is just the beginning—true success lies in building a financially sustainable business that continues to thrive and scale long after your exit.

Do – Build a Strong, Mission-Driven Culture: The road to success is paved with challenges, from regulatory hurdles to the long adoption cycles of new technologies. What keeps a company moving forward during these tough times is a strong mission and a committed team. Building a culture where everyone feels like they are part of a bigger purpose creates unity and drive. When your employees share a sense of “us against the world,” they are more willing to work through the tough times, innovate, and fight for the mission.

After selling my second cleantech company, Amply Power, to BP in 2021, my team and I remained committed to our core mission. While working at BP, we steered its transition toward clean energy initiatives and brought in major partners like Hertz and Tesla to join us. Together, we aligned our efforts with the global shift toward decarbonization, driving a greater collective impact.

Having a mission-driven culture also fosters a positive work environment where people feel their efforts make a real difference. This is especially important in cleantech, where the work you do contributes to solving some of the planet’s most pressing problems. When your team feels this level of alignment, their motivation and dedication will directly impact your company’s long-term outcome. If you’re in it for the right reasons, your mission will drive long-term impact even after your exit, leaving a solid foundation and a lasting legacy.

Key Takeaway: Develop a mission-driven culture within your team. Build camaraderie and a shared sense of purpose to foster resilience and drive your company toward long-term success.

Don’t be The Lone Soldier – Embrace Strategic Partnerships: In Cleantech 3.0, partnerships and leveraging existing technologies can open doors to new opportunities and help your company scale faster than it could on its own. Whether you’re working with industry giants or forming collaborations with other cleantech innovators, strategic partnerships are key for growth.

When I first launched Green Charge Networks in 2009 (one of the first companies to commercialize energy storage solutions), we focused on partnerships and pilot projects with brand-name customers like 7-Eleven and UPS. By securing these early wins, we were able to prove that our technology was commercially viable. Once we had that market validation, it became much easier to attract larger investments and scale the company.

Key Takeaway: Cleantech companies need to build credibility through partnerships to validate their offering, making it easier to secure funding and scale.

Now, Back to Those No’s

Throughout my personal cleantech journey, there’s been one “no” that keeps rearing its ugly head—the “no” or slow-roll by regulatory entities to approve service upgrades and interconnections. We can’t continue to innovate and deploy technologies like AI data centers, bitcoin mining, and EV charging without access to enough electricity. While the AC grid, utilities, and their regulators have powered our world for over a century and served their purpose well, they’ve now become a bottleneck for the rollout of many cleantech solutions.

By now, the battle for the lowest cost of energy generation has been won – it’s solar + energy storage in most parts of the world. A new solar plant built today costs less than the operating and fuel costs for an existing coal plant. The next frontier is in energy delivery – routing the generated electricity to the load centers efficiently and quickly. Currently, interconnecting a new power plant takes more than five years, and utilities are struggling to serve the big loads that have popped up in recent years. Energy delivery, transmission, and distribution grids are the next set of problems to solve in order to transition to clean energy at scale.

Long ago, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla famously battled over alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC), with Tesla’s AC ultimately winning because it was more efficient for long-distance transmission. Traditional architecture has been a small set of central generators farming out power in one direction only to all corners of the grid. In the past, there were big loads, but not many, and certainly power never flowed backwards. Throughout the grid, utility assets and power equipment were designed to last for decades. No joke, there are utility transformers operating in New York City that have been there for 100 years!

Fast forward to today: we have an explosion of distributed generation and large, peaky loads throughout the grid. Power electronics (like solar inverters) only last years, not decades, and because of the intermittency, automated rapid response controls and software are now necessary to keep supply and demand in sync. Customers in the power sector, from grid operators down to businesses and homeowners, are now facing an incredibly complex and expensive energy landscape (try reading the average tariff rate schedule from your local utility!).

“No” was the answer in Edison’s days to distributing power using direct current, but today’s DC technologies have made it the more efficient medium. With it, cleantech 3.0 can finally be about real-world deployment.

So how do we do that?

Stay tuned…

—Vic Shao is a serial entrepreneur and leading cleantech innovator with two decades of experience in energy and electrification. He founded and successfully exited two companies: Green Charge Networks, a pioneer in energy storage, acquired by ENGIE in 2016, and Amply Power, a provider of fleet electrification infrastructure, acquired by BP in 2021.