Heard Around The Grove

Blake Newcomer • May 25, 2026

I attended a beautiful wedding of an old family friend this weekend. Leaving very grateful for all relationships in my life including those created on The Grove.

For that reason, along with our highlight of the most recent episode, we're shouting out some founders interviewed earlier in the year. woo!

A main theme from my conversation with Alon Mashkovich (enSights) is trust.

Surprise, surprise that Alon sells a software into the solar industry that improves on the traditional way of doing things. enSights' biggest competition is the status quo. Customers have to deeply trust that his solution is worth the (perceived) cost of switching away from what is familiar.

Vik Chaudhry (Buzz Solutions), Nili Persits (Dottir Labs), and Celine King (GreenIRR) all describe the same friction in very different industries. What to do about it?

Let's dive in.

In this week's issue

🌳 A scar tissue problem

🌳 Building before selling

🌳 Earning the room

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A scar tissue problem

Alon described selling into an industry where previous vendors had over-promised and disappeared. enSights has been operating for five years, serves global customers, and the product works. The trust gap persists anyway.

What closes the gap

The product.

Alon spent the early years listening deeply to early adopters to understand what stood behind their feature requests. This is instead of just building everything they asked for. In time, the product derisked and became flexible enough to serve use cases he never anticipated.

Vik describes the same. In his case, he didn't hire sales resources until founder-led sales had proven the model worked. Buzz won its first major utility contract, New York Power Authority (NYPA), through a blind AI assessment where they returned results in seven minutes with 85% accuracy. The closest competitor hit 32%. They developed the tech over ~7 years in order to gain that trust from the NYPA pilot.

Nili, for her ramen spectrometry sensors, takes a different but parallel approach. She deliberately invests in more expensive + durable components for Dottir's sensors, even though it's painful for an early-stage hardware company. Her logic is simple: if it breaks, people will never use it. The trust is gone forever. So she under-promises and over-builds.

Footage from Dottir Labs' first pilot deployment

I don't think any of these founders would describe themselves as having a trust strategy, but they all arrived at the same place: earn it with the product.

Climate Tech Reading List

Earning the Room

Celine spoke about what it takes to establish credibility when the industry you're entering doesn't know you.

Celine didn't know trucking. She did the work. for months of making ecosystem diagrams by hand, reading everything she could about trucking logistics, cold-calling people who had no reason to talk to her. She found champions willing to teach her. A UPS operations president then sat with her weekly for six weeks because she showed up curious and kept showing up.

Trust.

Celine King at a recent event speaking on GreenIRR's positioning

That learning changed how she built GreenIRR. She pivoted the whole company away from PE ESG tooling and into fleet sustainability software, because that's where the actual pain was.

Celine learned to lead with efficiency and profitability, and let the sustainability story emerge from the data. She's reading the room because she spent months in it before she ever tried to sell anything.

When you show up having done the work, people can tell!

The Inosculation

Trust in climate tech is operational. The founders breaking through in energy, utilities, trucking, and aquaculture are doing it by building products that work before they build sales teams, listening longer than feels comfortable, and respecting the fact that these industries have been burned before.

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With love, Blake

See you next week!