STEP 24:
Scale Up

The last step of our process is to prove that the venture has a bankable model for scaling. It often takes solutions years to reach this stage, but once they do, they can escape beyond the startup phase to can reach a whole new level of scale, in terms of both profitability and climate impact. That's why we call this stage escape velocity, borrowing a term from rocket science. For infrastructure-scale solutions, reaching escape velocity means project finance-ability. In other words, entrepreneurs must sufficiently de-risk the commercial, technological, and operational elements of the solution such that they can finance expansion with a heavy dose of debt.