Season 1 Recap: 70 Episodes, 51 Hours & 10 Key Lessons | The Grove

Nov 2, 2026 · 22:11 · Agriculture & Biochar

The Grove turns 70 episodes and 51 hours into ten operating lessons for climate tech founders selling into hard industries.

Season 1 as a 70 episode operating dataset

The Grove uses its Season 1 recap as a working dataset on how climate tech and other hard industry companies get built. Blake Newcomer frames the season through hard counts first: 70 episodes, 51 hours, roughly half a million spoken words, an average episode length of 45 minutes, around 40 founders, 20 investors, and 20 ecosystem participants. That structure matters because the recap is based on repeated patterns across operators, capital providers, policy voices, academics, utilities, and service providers.

"70 episodes in season 1. For a total of 51 hours," Blake Newcomer said. He also described the guest mix with enough detail to show why the lessons are broad without becoming abstract. Energy and water accounted for 30 episodes, industrial materials for around 15, with the rest spread across agriculture, ocean tech, and broader decarbonization conversations.

His method is simple: treat long-form interviews as pattern recognition. The 45 minute average mattered because he wanted each guest's personal context, company history, present operating choices, and next market move to sit in one conversation. The recap becomes less of a highlight reel and more of an operating memo. The Grove's first season shows that climate tech is usually constrained by capital fit, buyer trust, policy timing, field performance, and team quality, rather than by invention alone.

VC Is Only One Capital Tool for Hard Tech

The first operating lesson is capital design. Blake identifies a mismatch between the public attention around venture capital and the financing needs of hard tech companies. "VC is not everything," Blake Newcomer said. His point is not that venture capital is bad. His point is that founders need to match the capital source to the business model, timeline, margin profile, and deployment risk.

The framework is capital fit before capital pursuit. Venture funds need large returns inside fund timelines. Many hard tech companies require long development cycles, equipment, pilots, customer trust, and regulatory acceptance before scale. That can make venture capital useful in some moments and harmful in others. Blake groups grants, project finance, strategic capital, customer revenue, and other non-VC paths into the same strategic question: what type of money fits the next proof point?

This matters for founders who start with the fundraising story before they understand the business physics. In Season 1, The Grove repeatedly heard that hard industry startups may need capital stacks instead of a single funding lane. A founder may use grants for technical risk, paid pilots for market proof, strategic partners for channel access, and venture capital only when the company can credibly compound.

Policy Can Create Markets, Then Expose Them to Political Timing

Blake's second major pattern is that policy can create demand where normal market pricing has not caught up. In novel supply chains, new materials, grid assets, water systems, industrial processes, and other hard sectors, the economics can be distorted by high input costs, immature supply, or missing externality pricing. Regulation and subsidies can give a new technology enough room to mature.

He also warns that policy-created markets carry a timing risk. If a company's commercial case depends too heavily on a rule, incentive, or political coalition, the business can become exposed to election cycles that move faster than hardware deployment cycles. The framework is policy as market maker and policy as concentration risk.

That framing is useful because it separates two questions founders often blend together. First, does policy help reveal demand that should exist? Second, does the business survive if the policy support changes? For hard tech founders, the stronger position is to use policy as an accelerant while building toward customer economics that can stand on their own.

This connects directly to Blake's language on customer messaging. "Sell the economics and not the climate," Blake Newcomer said. For customers and investors, the climate benefit can improve the story, but the core purchase logic still needs to be cost, reliability, performance, risk reduction, or revenue. The companies that relied on climate identity first and unit economics second were more fragile after the post-COVID capital rush cooled.

The First Buyer Problem Requires Paid Pilots With Commercial Intent

The recap's most practical go-to-market lesson is buyer psychology in risk-averse industries. "Nobody wants to be the first buyer," Blake Newcomer said. Utilities and other critical industry customers often prefer to see several prior deployments before they accept a new system. That creates the classic hard tech trap: buyers want proof before purchase, but the company needs purchases to generate proof.

Blake's answer is to treat pilots as structured commercial instruments, not loose experiments. A strong pilot needs a defined scope, cost, ownership model, communication plan, success criteria, and follow-on path. He referenced Ben Silton's worksheet as a useful tool for this mindset. The central rule is that a pilot should answer a buying question. If the pilot succeeds, the next step should already be clear.

Payment is part of the signal. Blake argues that founders should generally pursue paid pilots because payment shows that the customer assigns real value to the technology. There may be rare cases where unpaid pilots help reduce technical risk, but the baseline should be commercial seriousness. His summary is blunt: pilots do not automatically become contracts.

The framework here is pilot-to-procurement design. Before deployment, the founder should define what the buyer needs to believe, what data will create that belief, who inside the customer organization owns the decision, and what agreement follows success. Without that structure, a pilot can consume time, staff, hardware, and credibility while leaving the company no closer to revenue.

Beachhead Markets and Utilities as Long-Term Buyers

The recap's commercialization ladder moves from beachhead market to adjacent market to core market. Blake describes the beachhead as a smaller part of the broader critical industry target where the performance bar is lower, the sales cycle may be more manageable, and the company can earn revenue while reducing technical risk.

His example comes from the episode with Steve Clouse about Brighter Living Ventures portfolio company Aqua Sense. Blake recalls that founder Oliver's company had been around for more than 10 years and used water purification technology, which Blake believed involved a laser method. Before gaining traction with water utilities, the company worked in vending machines and ice machines. The logic was disciplined: prove the system in a narrower use case, earn commercial contracts, grow the team, reduce risk, then move toward utilities.

That path links to another Season 1 lesson: utilities are difficult customers before trust, but valuable customers after trust. Their procurement, regulation, and operating requirements are complex. Once confidence is earned, they can become stable long-term buyers. For a hard tech company, that can justify years of patient relationship building, data gathering, and technical validation.

Blake also emphasizes that the sale is not the finish line. Deployment can be the bottleneck. A company can win interest, raise money, sign a contract, and still fail if field installation, service, training, customer success, or performance monitoring breaks down. This is why his hardware lesson is simple and severe: "Hardware takes longer. Costs more than planned," Blake Newcomer said.

The operating implication is that founders should budget time, capital, and people for post-sale execution. In hard tech, go-to-market includes what happens after the purchase order. The company has to deliver the system, make it work in messy field conditions, support the customer, and turn that deployment into proof for the next buyer.

Frameworks from this conversation

  • Capital Fit Before Capital Pursuit
  • Policy as Market Maker and Concentration Risk
  • Pilot-to-Procurement Design
  • Beachhead-to-Utility Commercialization Ladder

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  1. Hello, welcome to the last episode of the Grove for season 1. Uh I wanted to make a recap episode on this season because as life goes, I think the last 12 months due to the fact I was doing this podcast has been an incredible ride.

  2. Uh the amount of people that I've met, the amount of uh true connections I feel I've made, the amount of physical spaces that this has allowed me into, uh the things that I have learned. It makes me look back like uh the audacity of uh myself, you know, 1 year, 2 years ago

  3. saying that I was uh you know, going to do this work and go to market uh in climate tech. It's just amazing what I don't know. And it's and it's also amazing uh speaking to you right now, uh the things that I know I still don't know. So, I I just I want to encapsulate

  4. this moment in time because uh until recently there wasn't a plan to do a season 1 or a season 2 or anything, but um this just felt like an important time to uh stop and reflect and uh yeah, draw a line in the sand. There was a season 1, there will be season 2,

  5. there will be a lot of differences as you could see. So, just quickly uh on season 1. So, we have hard numbers, uh some things that I'm grateful for, and 10 of uh the most common themes through lines of building uh in uh critical industry and hard tech. So, first So, the numbers.

  6. 70 episodes in season 1. For a total of 51 hours. In those 51 hours, half a million words were spoken. That seems like an insane number to me. And I know it says 51 hours, but I want to know if I took right now and I went back the future.

  7. Half a million words, how long ago would that be? So, someone can answer that. Uh the average episode length is 45 minutes. So, I am proud of that. I enjoy the longer episodes because I feel it's important to get uh in order to talk about what's happening right now with a business and the

  8. decisions that they're making. I personally think it's important to understand someone's personal context. So, how they got to the present moment of where they are in their company, starting a company in the first place. Uh we've had people that are starting their companies in college and we've also had people that have scaled

  9. and exited three uh startups. We have people that have had a 20-year 20 plus year uh corporate career and then decided to launch a startup. So, all very different places to be um on this journey. But, uh in order to cover that sufficiently and then the context of of uh what has happened prior

  10. to now in the business, I think it's important to talk about uh what's happening now in the business and where they're moving forward. So, yeah, so that is cool. We will be experimenting with different episode lengths. I think for distribution um you know, it's it's optimal to cut things into uh into shorts and uh summarize things

  11. into shorter episodes. So, we're experiencing more with that, but I personally enjoy the the longer form content. Uh the spread of people that we had. So, roughly, uh cuz there are multiple people uh in some of the episodes, we had 40 founders. So, shout out to all the founders making time to be on the

  12. podcast and tell their story in the middle of building their companies. We had around 20 investors, uh which I think is important. Uh not just VC investors, which is a big theme, uh but investors in the sense of uh other types of money and other ways to uh to fund your business. And then 20 people uh

  13. part of the part of the greater ecosystem. So, um industrial players, policy makers, academics, service providers, uh people like that to get their perspective. As far as industry goes between energy and water we had 30 episodes total, so I think you can tell where my favoritism lies.

  14. The other big category I'd say is industrial materials at around 15 episodes so the rest of the episodes had to do with agriculture, had to do with ocean tech, decarbonization in general some of the bigger picture conversations around industry. With that context now I want to run through the 10 lessons that we took away from the 70 episodes

  15. of season 1. So the first one was overwhelmingly talked about because it's so important and that is financing. And so a huge theme to take away from season 1 if nothing else is the fact that VC is not everything. VC is so sexy and gets so much of the press but when it comes to critical industry, when it

  16. comes to hard tech there are more effective ways to finance your business. If you do not fit a VC business model VCs need crazy returns on their money. That's the whole point of the vehicle and a lot of times in hard tech those returns they don't come back to that degree and they also

  17. if they do at all they take longer periods of time than VC is built for. So there are other ways to do it and a lot of founders at least early stage that I speak to they know more about VC than anything else and I hope you know, throughout this season and in following seasons we

  18. can do more to let more people know about alternative means of financing cuz I was the same a year ago. I really knew about VC and grants and that was about it. So first thing is financing. Second is the fact that policy can make or break a market. So a lot of times in deep tech, as you know,

  19. there needs to be the environment where the technology can develop in the market, and a lot of times the economics are not there for supply and demand to operate in a normal way because the prices of supply chains they're often novel supply chains, maybe they're using novel materials that are still high or

  20. volatile in price. So, a lot of times markets need to be encouraged or created by regulation and subsidies, but other times policy can prop up a market to such an extent that the success of a particular innovation becomes too dependent on politics. And, you know, new political leaders come in and out all the time, and typically a deeper

  21. technology in a critical industry needs a longer time period to to develop. So, a policy can make or break markets. Um, nonetheless, it's key in the journey of hard tech development. Third, nobody wants to be the first buyer. A lot of times in these industries, the buyers are extremely risk averse, uh, especially in utilities. We have a lot

  22. of conversations around utilities. And, with a new technology, nobody wants to be the first. Everybody wants to be fifth, the sixth, the seventh. And, uh, it is extremely difficult to get uh, even pilots off the ground. There's a lot of actionable advice in this series uh, from founders that have successfully gotten over that hurdle, and it takes

  23. uh, years and years of de-risking and relationship building and data collecting uh, and uh, sales momentum to eventually get that get over that hurdle where a utility or another uh, critical industry player will be comfortable paying you for a pilot. Uh, and then as we'll get into um, those pilots need to be structured in a way that launches you

  24. into an actual commercial agreement. So, nobody wants to be the first buyer. Sell the economics and not the climate. This is a big thing for me. Um, we're still playing with the different uh, language. We're still playing with the different words that we that we use to describe the space uh for our company. A year ago, all this

  25. was easily climate tech to me. Clean tech, green tech, nature tech. I mean, there's all these different um terms that we actually do talk about throughout the season. Um but when it comes to raising money and when it comes to especially in this political environment and regulatory environment, when it comes to getting

  26. customers, it comes down to the economics of your technology and your business and not necessarily the fact that you are helping the climate. For better or worse, if you have solid economics behind your business, the climate aspect of of your story can be an accelerant. But what we saw out of the post-COVID

  27. uh influx of money into the climate space, a lot of these companies were raising money uh and trying to scale on top of the fact that they were climate first and economic second and they're no longer around. So, so the economics, not the climate. When you are building a business and your ultimate goal is to successfully deploy

  28. a novel technology into a critical industry, you have to de-risk your technology to such an extent that this critical industry player can look at you and say, "Okay, it costs so much money or lives potentially uh or at least quality of life for a lot of people.

  29. If this does not go right, we need to be absolutely sure that this is not going to be perfect, but this is going to be at at least X level of success rate. They need confidence in the fact that this is not your first deployment. And a lot of times what you can do is you can

  30. find a beachhead market. It is a subsection of that greater world critical industry that you're looking to scale into and you pick that beachhead market and you win there and you fund your business through there. You can raise money on the fact that you're going after that market. You can, you know, fund your

  31. business just based on the revenue that you get in that market, but effectively it needs to be a place where the bar for how well your your needs to work is lower um and and you can fund it and you can build your team and you can de-risk your technology and then move on to a tangential market, a

  32. bigger market after that. A great example comes from my episode with Steve Clouse talking about a portfolio company of Brighter Living Ventures, Aqua Sense. The founder, Oliver, uh I believe now all of this is going to be from memory, so I believe they've been around for 10 plus years.

  33. Uh I got to meet Oliver in person and so I talked to him a little bit about this journey, but again, what I believe their technology is is uh they are purification, uh filtration for water. I believe they use a particular type of laser technology to purify the water.

  34. And instead right now they're doing great in water utilities, they're getting uh a ton of uh traction in that space, but what they started out in is vending machines. They started in ice machines. So they used their technology to purify the water for ice machines, they de-risked it enough, they got commercial contracts, they got revenue into the

  35. business, they grew the team, de-risked technology, and then used that beachhead market to get to the next market, and eventually now they're in water utilities. Great example. Boom. Hardware takes longer and it costs more than planned. Just like this episode, it's taking longer than planned.

  36. And uh I think that's a simple one, doesn't need to be elaborated on, but just in general when you're building anything in this space, you can plan for it to take a long time, you can plan for it to cost a lot, and often times it will exceed both of those type timelines.

  37. Hardware takes longer. Costs more than planned. Something else that's very impactful to me about this season is hearing the personal stories of the founders, like I mentioned, some of them are coming just out of college, some of them are coming off of a third exit or maybe a 20 plus year uh corporate career.

  38. Uh some of them are transi- A lot of times, um which is an exciting uh place to be, is when you're transitioning from an academic, sometimes coming off of a PhD, and you're transitioning into an entrepreneur. It can be very jarring, uh but there are increasingly a lot of resources, just like The Grove, for

  39. extremely technical people transitioning into this space. And so, um learning those personal stories was very encouraging. Another thing that was very surprising to me is how much the team matters. And it may sound obvious to a lot of you, but to me a year ago I was really fascinated with technology. I was really fascinated with

  40. market dynamics. I thought if you had the right tech, if you had the right product and you had the right market, then your business would scale. It's just that's what would happen because the environment is there. And as we got as we collected more and more of these stories of how these companies came to

  41. be, it's really about hiring the right talent. And it come And a lot of times it comes to picking the right co-founder or founding team. Uh but then as you scale, uh picking the right talent, ensuring that people are there um for the right reasons, that you're supporting them in the right way. Uh

  42. there's all There's this whole you know, there's this whole space that we'll have more people uh in in the next season talk about about building the right culture, especially at the early stages. Uh so that was very fascinating to me.

  43. And sometimes it could be even more important than the technology or the market. I saw a post recently that said uh some VC investors said that they would take uh a good founder over uh a really exciting market opportunity because uh the good founder or founding team would eventually find a way. Um

  44. even if their first try wasn't correct. So, personal stories, team over tech. Utilities. Now, we talk a lot about utilities uh cuz it's been a a focus of our event series and um will be uh the focus of a lot of the content in season two. Uh some A positive thing about utilities,

  45. as hard as it is to manage them, as crazy as it is that they're structured in the regula in the regulation, and it's very complex. Once you get past a stage where they are confident in your technology they are one of the most stable and long-term customers that you can find in any market building any type of

  46. business. It excites a lot of the people building in these spaces that that they made sure to to mention that. So, uh it came up enough where uh it was one of the the the more common themes. So, a lot of the that utilities get for being extremely complex and maybe not doing things in the best interest of,

  47. you know, whoever at whatever time, um they are good at least from that perspective. When you do get over that line, they're a great customer and they're long-term buyers. It's great to build a a company inside of. Uh something that's very, very important is the fact that pilots do not guarantee commercial engagements.

  48. Um huge learning for me. I really didn't have any experience with pilots uh a year ago anyway. And listening to all these people's stories about pilots that deployed effectively and ineffectively, uh it is extremely important that you are as specific as you can be about what the scope of the pilot deployment is,

  49. about how much things are going to cost, about who owns what, about what the communication type is like. Uh Ben Silton, uh uh a friend and prior guest, he provided uh a very good worksheet about this that that I'm pulling a lot from. And it's very important as a founder to have a

  50. clear channel of communication and upfront approach to landing a pilot that says, first of all, it needs to be paid. I think in very, very rare cases, uh you take unpaid pilots to continue to de-risk your technology, but in general, it's important to get paid pilots because that shows that somebody's willing to pay for your technology. And

  51. then you need to work after that pilot is done uh to secure a longer-term, more official uh commercial engagement. So, pilots are not contracts. And finally, number 10, I think along that same line is that a lot of times, it's not just in pilots, but a lot of times in these industries uh with harder technology, a bottleneck

  52. is actually deployment. There's a lot of work that you need to do to get to the sale. Uh you know, marketing, go-to-market, like all of all of those all of those top-of-funnel things. But after the sale has happened, a very difficult thing to do is deploy seamlessly and successfully and create customer success and engagement and all

  53. of those and all of those fundamentals about client engagement. Uh because the technology, the deployment of the technology can be so complex. So, it's important to also be as prepared as possible to understand what it will look like. It will not be perfect. It will continue to evolve every time, but be as

  54. intentional as possible about the deployment of your technology with everybody that signs a contract and gives you money. Now, those are the 10. Financing, VC is not everything. Policy makes or breaks markets. Nobody wants to be the first buyer. Sell the economics, not the climate.

  55. Attack the beachhead first. Hardware takes longer and more money than planned. Personal stories uh are very impactful and also teams are sometimes more important than your technology. Utilities are hard, but they are very very very very good customers uh from a business model standpoint. Pilots are not a contract and a big bottleneck is

  56. actual deployment of the technology. 10 biggest themes from season 1. Excited to see what season 2 brings. Now to close, I just want to talk about for a minute the different places that this podcast took me this year. So, I wrote them down. I'll just read them off. The first episode ever, shout out to Quantum and

  57. his team at Harmony Descanting, the very first episode ever of The Grove. I believe sometime in the fall of last year, it was a little chilly. Uh but I'd reached out to Quantum after 6 years of first getting in touch uh when I first found out about their technology.

  58. And I said, "Hey, I'm starting a podcast. Would you like to be the first guest? And he said yes. And so, I went out to Boston where my sister is living. And uh my sister and I went to uh a storage container on Boston Shipyard where Quantum and his team are preparing for

  59. their next deployment of one of their pilots. And we just show up with my laptop and uh two mics, one of which did not work. >> [laughter] >> And uh this phone. And it was amazing. I mean, I left so inspired. And that is exactly what my vision was for this podcast. Was to go and talk to

  60. extremely inspiring impressive people and their teams and go on-site and document what they're doing because it's important. And it's special that they're dedicating their life to it. And it was so impactful to be in that space next to that technology around just you know, they were just so cool about it, you know? And there

  61. was like this forklift that kept like driving back so we had to keep pausing. Um anyway, uh so I really appreciated that experience and uh I'll remember it for the rest of my life, but it launched uh the inspiration for this podcast um for me to continue pursuing it. Uh also ended up at

  62. Greentown Labs uh as you'll see in the next season as well, new lab in Brooklyn, uh Temple University uh in their mechanical engineering department. Um Burr Island Ventures uh after our uh after our episode invited me to their founder forum this year. And I again, I I just I wish I brought a

  63. camera. I mean, every single person in that room um was working on a technology in the water tech space that uh really had the potential to genuinely impact the world in a positive way. And I just want to interview all of them. Uh so it was uh an amazing room to be a part of.

  64. Uh hope to be back. Uh some people won't name who, but they let me into their backyard >> [laughter] >> to do an episode. So, I hope to do more of those. Uh New York Climate Week, a lot of the events I ended up going to were because of um past podcast guests. So, I appreciate

  65. all of you, and I'm excited to continue being in touch. Uh and then also the team that's working on this is based in New York. So, I was able to go to uh Greece Macedonia Serbia all incredibly beautiful places with extremely friendly, welcoming people, beautiful language, uh Portugal and England. And the team all helping make

  66. this happen. Uh have all been a huge support for getting this off the ground. I mean, I've had probably a hundred just as all of these founders have probably had a hundred different ideas about what this show is going to be and what this show should be.

  67. Um and it's still evolving. It's more concrete than it ever has been, but I wouldn't be here uh if it weren't for Crazin' Friends, and if it weren't for Cleantech Group Lab. So, uh I'm excited to continue uh working with them. If you have any If you're going to market, as I say every episode,

  68. >> [laughter] >> if you're going to market uh in cleantech, Cleantech Group Lab are the people to do it with. And for anything else that has to do with uh marketing in any other industry about anything, Crazin' Friends is an incredible team to work with. Um and I'm excited uh for them to be a part of the

  69. second season. So, that's it. Those are all the things I had to say. Originally supposed to be 10 minutes. We'll see how I did uh after the editor. Uh we'll see you on the other side.

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