Transforming an energy-related innovation into a venture is challenging. For starters, it’s difficult to account for highly diverse and heavily regulated energy markets, causing early-stage innovators to make false assumptions about their innovation, customers, and business plan. Even if innovators are aware of the challenges in energy entrepreneurship, navigating the complex web of policies, regulations, funding sources, and paths to market can be overwhelming. That’s why energy innovators need support that’s tailored to the unique hurdles they face. 8 Lessons for Aspiring Entrepreneurs in the Energy Sector Over the past decade, 45% of people who gained access to energy for the first time did so because of new social enterprises. More than 86 off-grid startups incorporated in the past 3 years, and for the first time, the number of unelectrified people fell under 1 billion. 1. Start with the problem, not the solution. it’s easy to assume that a great idea will be enough to...
" Do things that don't scale" is a saying by Paul Graham. But how do you know which uscalable things to do? “Scaleable” means you’re building your startup 3, 5 or 10 times as fast as someone who’s doing the same work, but manually.They call it economies of scale. We’ve seen how tech giants (along with scalable startups) are in the topmost profitable companies and it’s no wonder: technology in itself means scale. We’ve also seen this tendency to focus only on scale, to the point where startup founders dismiss some ideas, simply because they can’t be scalable from ground zero. Yet the catch is this: building a startup that can generate a billion dollar in revenue or more means that you come up with a scalable plan and do the unscalable work until it reaches that point. Like a snowball effect; you roll a snow from the ground up to some point where it gradually gets bigger. But what if your startup fails? No market need’, ‘running out of cash’, ‘lac...