Navigating Uncertainty as a Climate Tech Founder

I spoke with two founders recently whose financings have stalled. Their weeks are filled with an exhausting drizzle of lukewarm interest. In these situations, it sometimes seems the company’s story is working against it. Often these are teams starting to deliver on their promise and strategic narrative, so you’d expect emerging conviction about the business. But instead, as the company develops it inadvertently reduces beneficial uncertainty about its possibilities. By growing and stabilizing their business, founders make its future easier to characterize, and increase the specificity about what it is not. Paradoxically, steady positive progress can bind with investor expectations and gum up their aspirations. You get drag instead of alacrity. And the more you reduce error in your trajectory the easier investors can plot the slope of your business and set the whole thing to the side. One move I’ve seen work in these circumstances is for founders to add chaos to the system. That means introducing information and behavior that violates the storyline and conventions of the company narrative. What do these countermeasures look like? Generally, fluid and fast-moving tactics that disrupt the thinking of potential investors. It can be as complex as a partnership deal that stakes out new positioning, or as simple as a provocative executive hire or clever new pricing. Sometimes, you’re better off with guerrilla wizardry. Either way, time kills all deals. If things have stalled, consider what options you have to deploy uncertainty through assertive and unexpected maneuvers. These force people outside to discount their prior assessments and reevaluate your company, its position, and potential trajectory, and can help you recover your momentum and recapture the advantage. 🌟 Link to the full newsletter in comment below 👇

Despite preparedness, anyone else in a state of emotional shock? Here are some ideas on how to navigate that side with rationality: You're not alone in feeling a little tighter in the chest right now - that's what risk aversion feels like. I can assure you that it drives decisions—slower yeses, smaller checks, safer bets. For founders, especially in the early days, that emotional climate matters. It’s harder to raise. It’s harder to sell. And it's harder to gauge when the fog lifts. Have confidence in what you've built, and in what you're building: 💡 If you're pre–product market fit, stretch out cash to survive another NINE months. Yep. Be ruthless with cash. Default to survival. 💡 If you're post–product market fit, your customers will hesitate. Don’t mistake that for disinterest—it's just uncertainty. Adjust accordingly. (Oh, and if you're not already profitable, then follow the guidance above.) 💡 If you're 'this close' to raising a round, keep going; demonstrate your resiliency and fortitude through confident transparency. And close as soon as possible. This isn't about panic. It's about posture. The founders who make it through these periods are clear-eyed, patient, and a little paranoid. But—and this is the hard part—they don’t stop experimenting. They just do it with sharper constraints. You can cut burn without cutting ambition. You can slow spend without slowing down the work that truly matters. To our founders at Bee Partners—this is what we signed up for. We're in it with you, irrespective of cycle. #VC

One of the hardest lessons I learned while building NbliK AI was this: ->You can be doing everything right… and still not know if it’ll work. - No guaranteed path. - No perfect answers. - Just decision after decision — with limited information, high stakes, and endless pressure. In the early days of NbliK, I kept searching for clarity — a formula, a framework, someone to say “you’re on the right track.” But that voice never came. What I did find was this: The more I waited for certainty, the more stuck I felt. The more I acted from conviction, the more I grew. The more I trusted the process, the more things started to move. Uncertainty hasn’t gone away. It still shows up every week. But I’ve made peace with it. It’s part of the founder’s job — and the journey. If you’re building something right now and it feels foggy — you’re not broken. You’re just growing. How do you deal with uncertainty in your own founder journey? #Building #AI #founderlife