Structural Diagnosis
I diagnose the structural patterns that make climate tech organizations underperform — then redesign the system so the same people produce different outcomes.
What I do
Strategy without fixing the system is expensive wallpaper. Coaching without fixing the system is therapy that doesn't stick. I start with the structure.
Your leadership style was an asset at 10 people. At 50 it's the bottleneck. The system needs to change — not you.
Your DD evaluates the market and the technology. It doesn't evaluate the operating structure that has to deliver on the thesis.
Hardware + software + government + commercial. Climate tech carries organizational complexity that SaaS frameworks can't see.
Atmospheric modeling taught me one thing: most failures come from unexamined assumptions, not bad data. I apply the same diagnostic process to organizations — not because it's a clever metaphor, but because it's structurally the same problem.
Most advisors skip this. They arrive with the answer. I don't form a hypothesis until I've seen what's actually happening — not what you believe is happening. These are rarely the same thing.
I build a structural hypothesis about the root cause — the mechanism generating all the other problems. Not the symptoms you've been treating. The thing underneath them that makes failure structurally inevitable.
We design interventions that produce data. We find out if the hypothesis holds. This is not gut feel, not best practice, not what worked at your last company. It's a structured experiment with a real feedback loop.
If the hypothesis was wrong, we update it. This is where most advisory engagements end — the moment the clean answer gets complicated. It's where mine starts getting accurate.
For investor engagements, the same method operates on a compressed timeline. A pre-investment organizational assessment takes days, not months. The rigor is the same. The clock is different.
Diagnostic Patterns
These are the structural failure patterns I see repeatedly in climate tech organizations. If you recognize your situation, the diagnosis is already underway.
Your strategy exists in a deck. Your team is executing something else entirely. And every advisor you've hired has told you it's a communication problem. It isn't.
Read →The leadership style that built your company is now the thing breaking it.
Read →Your organization is more complex than it needs to be, and the person who made it that way is you. Technical founders model complex systems for a living.
Read →Your processes aren't designed. They're accumulated. Every workaround your organization has ever invented to deal with a dysfunction is now embedded in how you...
Read →You're treating a structural problem as a people problem, and it's costing you talent, time, and money. The underperformer you're about to fire.
Read →What worked at your last stage is structurally incapable of working at this one. This isn't a metaphor.
Read →Your organization is fighting its mission without knowing it. The strategy deck still says "climate impact." The decision-making architecture optimizes for margin.
Read →You're optimizing a model whose assumptions no longer hold, and every improvement is making you more efficiently wrong.
Read →Nobody in your organization knows who can say yes. Decisions get escalated, deferred, or made by whoever cares most and pushes hardest. The org chart says one thing.
Read →The board sees one company. The team is running another. This isn't deception — it's structural.
Read →Climate Tech Sectors
Each climate tech subsector has its own organizational dynamics. I map the specific structural tensions in each space.
Earth observation is a sector in permanent structural transition.
Read →Climate adaptation is a sector where the technology works and the market doesn't. The science is solid. The products are real.
Read →Energy markets are being structurally transformed, and the companies building for this transformation are being whipsawed by the very forces they're trying to serve.
Read →Climate tech companies don't pivot to defense because defense is more attractive. They pivot because the climate market hasn't been built.
Read →Carbon capture is where deep-tech R&D meets industrial-scale project development, and the organizational collision between those two worlds is where most companies stall.
Read →AgTech's bottleneck isn't technology. It's trust.
Read →For Investors
65% of portfolio failures are attributed to people and organizational issues. The due diligence missed it because it wasn't looking.
Your due diligence evaluates the market, the technology, and the team. It almost never evaluates the operating structure that has to deliver on the thesis.
Read →A portfolio company is underperforming. The market is there. The technology works. The team is talented. Something is broken and nobody can name it.
Read →Can this founder scale? Every investor asks it. The usual assessment is personal — leadership style, emotional intelligence, coachability, self-awareness.
Read →Climate tech is not SaaS. The operating model assumptions you've developed investing in software companies don't transfer to companies with hardware, regulatory dependencies, and project-based revenue.
Read →Family offices entering climate tech bring financial evaluation expertise that's often more sophisticated than what venture capital firms apply.
Read →The check is written. The company is struggling. Board advice isn't working. You've told the founder to "fix the org" three times — restructure, hire a COO, improve communication. Nothing sticks.
Read →For Impact Investors
Your DD evaluates the market opportunity and the impact metrics. It doesn't evaluate whether the organization can structurally deliver on either.
Market narrative and physical science disagree on where climate capital is needed. The data points to sectors where small capital has outsized impact — and where billions flow into diminishing returns.
Read →Family office direct investing in climate tech is structurally different from fund investing. Standard financial DD misses the organizational risks that determine whether the company can deliver.
Read →Impact measurement frameworks evaluate outputs — carbon reduced, people served, SDGs aligned. They don't evaluate whether the organization can sustain those outputs. That's the layer where impact actually fails.
Read →87% of millennial UHNW individuals consider social impact when investing. 30% of their parents do. The content industry frames this as a values conversation. It's an organizational design problem.
Read →About
PhD in atmospheric physics. Built €20M ARR in climate adaptation products at ICEYE. Spent years watching brilliant organizations fail for structural reasons that had nothing to do with talent. Now I diagnose what's actually broken.