Execution Portfolio
Concentrated PV · Europe · Technology Commercialisation · 2008–2012
Took a technology no bank would finance and no customer would adopt — and built both frameworks from zero. Appointed interim Managing Director EMEA overnight during the 2008 financial crash, with one mandate: commercialise Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) technology across Europe before the company ran out of runway.
The Situation
I joined SolFocus — a Concentrated Photovoltaic startup based in Mountain View, California that would go on to raise $215M across nine funding rounds, backed by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and other top-tier US and European investors — in June 2008. The company had raised significant venture capital on the premise that CPV technology could outperform conventional PV in high-irradiance markets, with an IPO strategy as the planned exit.
By November, the financial crisis had collapsed credit markets globally. The outgoing Managing Director departed. The IPO strategy, dependent on favourable capital markets, was no longer viable. I was appointed interim Managing Director EMEA overnight.
The mandate was simple to state and extraordinarily difficult to execute: commercialise a technology that no European bank had ever financed, that no European customer had ever adopted at scale, in the middle of the worst credit crisis in a generation.
The Challenge
CPV was not an incremental technology. It required direct normal irradiance, precision tracking, and a different risk profile than conventional PV — which meant every institutional gatekeeper had to be convinced from scratch.
Project finance in solar depends on lenders having a reference framework to assess technology risk, yield predictability, and long-term performance. For CPV in Europe, that framework did not exist. Without it, no project could be financed, and without financed projects, no customer would commit.
Banks finance technologies they understand and trust. CPV had no European track record for institutions to draw on. In a frozen post-2008 credit market, asking a bank to finance an unproven technology was, in practice, asking them to take on career risk — not just project risk.
Without bankability and lender comfort, developers and utilities had no reason to choose CPV over established alternatives. The technology's superior performance in high-irradiance conditions was irrelevant if nobody could finance a project built on it.
And all of this had to be solved while simultaneously reducing the cost base to survive the crisis.
What I Did
Worked with ATA Renovables to develop independent technical certification specifically for CPV — the documentation, yield modelling, and performance validation that lenders require before committing capital to an unfamiliar technology.
Structured an 80% debt / 20% equity, grid revenue-backed non-recourse financing arrangement with Intesa Sanpaolo — the first of its kind for CPV technology in Europe. This was not adapting an existing template. This was building the template that did not exist, in a market where credit committees were rejecting far less novel proposals.
With bankability and lender acceptance established, developed the commercial framework that gave developers and utilities the confidence to commit to CPV projects — technical support, performance guarantees, and a track record built one project at a time.
Reduced the European team from 48 to 14 people across three ERE-compliant phases — a 50%+ cost base reduction executed in full legal compliance while preserving the capability required to execute the commercialisation strategy.
Raised EUR 15M in European institutional capital through Demeter Partners and other European institutional investors — at a moment when most capital markets activity for clean-tech startups had stopped entirely.
Coordinated product, engineering, finance, legal, and commercial teams between the European operation and Mountain View headquarters — monthly presence in San Jose, board participation, and continuous alignment to ensure European market realities shaped global strategy rather than the reverse.
Results
Why It Matters
Most commercialisation challenges involve persuading a customer to choose your solution over a competitor's. This was different. There was no established category for CPV in Europe to compete within. The challenge was building the category itself — the financing instruments, the institutional trust, and the customer confidence that make a new technology adoptable at scale.
This is the most demanding form of go-to-market execution: introducing a technology that has no precedent, no comparable, and no existing adoption path — and building all three simultaneously, under financial pressure, with no margin for a slow start.
Key Takeaways
What this case study demonstrates
Executive Capability Demonstrated
Commercialising unproven technology under financial crisis conditions — building bankability, lender acceptance, and customer adoption frameworks from zero while simultaneously restructuring for survival.