Cleantech is not "Cleantech"

Heard Around The Grove

By Blake Newcomer • January 26, 2026

This week we're throwing it back to two episodes from my last podcast. While the focus was general business growth, Dan White from Gentian and Eben Meyer from Cleantech Growthlab still came to share their climate-oriented wisdom with me.

First order of business is regulation dependency. A particularly hot topic given this administration's regulatory demolition, Dan articulates the shift from cleantech being "Green" to cleantech just being good business.

Now that we have our story straight (we are definitely not climatetech or greentech or whatever; we're just a good business) how do we best communicate our highly technical solution in a way other humans can understand? Eben communicates this in a way us humans can understand. Meta, right?

This week's issue

• The Regulation Dependency Trap
• The Technical Translation Challenge
• This Week's Playbook

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When Regulations Become Your Business Model

"I think it's a trap to fall into regulation dependency. You have to create value. And that's fundamental to any company." Dan says

The Growth Compass Podcast - Daniel White, Founder & CEO @ Gentian Hear Dan explain how his satellite biodiversity mapping succeeds globally by solving fundamental land stewardship problems rather than just compliance shifting environmental regulations.

The carbon credit market illustrates this well. The global carbon credit market reached $656 billion in 2024, projected to hit $16,390 billion by 2034 by some accounts, yet carbon credit issuances dropped by 40 percent from the 2021 peak as regulatory frameworks shifted and integrity concerns mounted.

This isn't to say carbon credit markets are bad. It's simply:

1. There is a carbon trading market.
2. You have a carbon trading business that relies heavily on the policies that define what can be traded and for what price.
3. You build a company, raise funds, hire people, engage with customers all on the foundation of those policies.
4. A particular Monday arrives someone somewhere decided to f&*$ things up, expose market vulnerabilities, so now policies are changing based on a tightening of quality standards for carbon credits.
5. Now you have to adjust your entire business model to adhere to new trading standards. Oh, and this could happen again and again without notice.

Big picture, it's a good thing to trend in this direction. According to this report, the share of "low-rated" project retirements dropped "from 88% in 2020 to 47% in 2024". Good luck, though, if your portfolio is full of credits that were high-rated yesterday and are low-rated today.

Somewhere there needs to be value outside of the policy definition of it.

Dan's Reality Check

By mapping biodiversity across different countries, Dan sees regulatory environments vary dramatically: "There are regions of the world now that are really understanding the value of nature. From a global perspective, it's really interesting how different cultures and governments and businesses around the world are having different interactions with nature."

Japan embraces nature-focused corporate initiatives. Other markets deprioritize environmental concerns.

Companies building for specific regulatory environments struggle to scale internationally, while those solving fundamental problems adapt to any political climate.

His satellite technology helps property developers, forestry companies, and indigenous groups understand ecological risks and stewardship responsibilities. This value exists whether environmental regulations strengthen or weaken. The fundamental need for land management insights persists across political cycles.

Dan's framework creates the foundation: "Regulations are like an accelerator pedal, but they're not the engine."

It also requires systematic thinking: "Understanding the true value of what your product does is really the key question, in my opinion, for any organization. The next question is, OK, so how do I communicate that to the market or customers?"

Enter Eben

Eben Meyer knows why technically brilliant cleantech founders can't close deals with customers who desperately need their solutions: "Technical founders are incredibly knowledgeable in that area that they're in." But that area is rarely go to market strategy.

The Growth Compass Podcast - Eben Meyer CEO @ Cleantech Growthlab Hear Eben reveal how technically brilliant founders can close deal by translating their innovations into language that resonates with the complex web of stakeholders.

The Multi-Stakeholder Maze

Eben has a client that created a telecommunications solution solving "a massive problem in grid interconnections" for renewable energy integration. The technology is outstanding. The sales process was a nightmare.

"The organization that has to buy a product involves a financial gatekeeper, involves a decision maker, involves a user, a supporting user, an analyst. It's this whole team, and to get this team to gather around your product and say, yeah, we're ready to buy that is like herding cats."

The Translation Framework

Eben's approach requires understanding each stakeholder's daily reality: "You need to run that exercise for each department and ask like, what are they measured on? How can they get promoted? How can they get fired? And then how does this product intersect with the things that they're forced to care about on a daily basis?"

For the grid interconnection solution, this meant:

• Cybersecurity leads: Care about protocols and regulatory compliance risks
• Financial gatekeepers: Need ROI calculations and budget impact analysis
• Operations teams: Want workflow improvements and efficiency gains
• Decision makers: Focus on strategic priorities and competitive advantages

Do you see any policy-dependent value propositions in there?

The Emotional Component

Technical features must translate into emotional relevance: "You need to bring it home to them in a way that actually makes them take notes and pay attention to how the product can solve it."

Eben's framework works across cleantech verticals because it addresses human decision-making psychology rather than technical specifications. The principle remains constant: "Have empathy for the person that's buying your product and really run the exercise of thinking what is it that they do for a living? How does their day to day job interact with the benefit that you're bringing to them?"

This Week's Playbook

3 Exercises to Test Your Message

Building a resilient cleantech business requires mastering both regulation independence and stakeholder translation. Here's how to apply Daniel and Eben's insights:

Exercise 1: Value Independence (Daniel's Framework)

1. Map fundamental problems your technology solves that exist regardless of political environment
2. Test your value proposition: "Would customers pay for this if no regulations existed?"
3. Document business impacts that transcend compliance: cost savings, efficiency gains, risk mitigation
4. Now, where in the world does regulation accelerate these impacts?

Exercise 2: Stakeholder Translation (Eben's Framework)

1. Map all decision-makers involved in your sales process:
   1. Financial gatekeepers: ROI and budget impact concerns
   2. Technical users: Workflow integration and performance metrics
   3. Decision makers: Strategic alignment and competitive advantages
   4. Compliance teams: Risk mitigation and regulatory benefits
2. Create role-specific messaging for each stakeholder type
3. Test emotional relevance: "Does this make them take notes and pay attention?"

Exercise 3: Message Integration

1. Combine value independence with stakeholder-specific benefits
2. Develop messaging that works across regulatory environments and organizational roles
3. Create sales materials addressing both fundamental value and compliance acceleration

Implementation Check: Apply both frameworks simultaneously:

• Daniel's test: "Would your business model work if favorable regulations disappeared tomorrow?"
• Eben's test: "Can each stakeholder type immediately understand how this helps their daily job?"

If either answer is no - exciting! There's opportunity to improve.

The Inosculation

Dan & Eben's episodes are more relevant now than they were last year. In the current US regulatory environment, there is not an environmentally positive policy that is safe. Most of the wider-reaching bills have been repealed and even the bodies enforcing the regulations dismembered.

The vision to build something in cleantech doesn't have to be global, but in deeptech it often is. Problems like energy and water don't adhere to socio-political state or country boundaries. If a technology churns drinking water from the sea, it's going to be rolled out in any place that needs it.

I think back to my conversation with Nili and her revolutions with toxin monitoring in water. There are plenty of regulations around what these farms can and can't do with the water that contains certain chemicals. For Nili, though, Dottir Labs isn't about that. It's about the "mass mortality events where literally an entire farm dies in a single day because there's no toxicity alarm". They provide accessibility to that alarm.

Checks all the boxes for me.

Resources

A bit of fun in the mix of stress that came from the massive US snowstorm this weekend

Interesting read on trends in Voluntary Carbon Markets

Global Cleantech 100 Annual Report if you've read it already, read it again!

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With love, Blake

See you next week!