5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Fourth Power’s Deep Tech Journey

5 Critical Go-to-Market Lessons from Fourth Power’s Deep Tech Journey

Regulated markets aren’t known for rapid innovation. Yet in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Fourth Power CEO Arvin Ganesan revealed how his company is bringing revolutionary energy storage technology to market by embracing, rather than fighting, the system’s constraints.

1. Understand Your Customer’s Regulatory Reality The foundation of Fourth Power’s GTM strategy isn’t their groundbreaking technology – it’s their deep understanding of utility operations. “If you’re a utility in Thailand or a utility in Kansas, you’re really driven by the same exact thing, which is you got to keep the lights on and you got to keep costs as low as possible,” Arvin explains. This insight shapes everything from product development to sales conversations.
2. Lead with Economics, Not Innovation While many deep tech companies lead with their technological breakthroughs, Fourth Power takes a different approach. “When we talk with our customers, we’re not talking about leading with carbon,” Arvin reveals. Instead, they focus on concrete utility benefits: “The cost of our battery is one tenth the cost of existing battery technology… It makes the future look much cleaner and more affordable to everyday rate payers in the United States.”
3. Build Credibility Through Transparency In deep tech, credibility is everything. Arvin’s approach is refreshingly straightforward: “Credibility is gained in drops and lost in buckets.” This manifests in their fundraising strategy, where they embrace uncertainty: “Being able to say what you know is great, but being also able to say what you don’t know, I think is really important in the fundraising process.”
4. Adapt Your Timeline to Market Realities Rather than pushing for rapid deployment, Fourth Power aligns their commercialization timeline with utility buying cycles. “Most of these expenditures need to get approved by regulators. So it’s not a one side negotiation,” Arvin notes. Their staged approach – demonstration in 2025, utility pilot in 2026, and first gigawatt-hour battery in 2028-2029 – reflects this reality.
5. Don’t Try to Break the System Perhaps the most counterintuitive lesson is the value of working within existing frameworks. “Don’t try to break it. Don’t have the first thing you try to do for the approach you try to take to say, ‘hey, this doesn’t make sense,'” Arvin advises. Instead, he recommends “deeply understand why it is the regulators are involved, understand the legal and regulatory dynamics of the markets you’re trying to get into.”

For Fourth Power, this approach is already yielding results. Their focus on utility needs – reliability and cost – has helped them advance from university research to utility partnerships. Their technology addresses a critical market need: “There’s already places in the United States, like California, Nebraska, Kansas, that are experiencing significant amounts of curtailment. This makes the electricity grid cheaper and cleaner.”

This market-aligned approach extends to their product strategy. Rather than pushing a one-size-fits-all solution, they recognize that “every grid is going to be unique, every utility is unique. So we build products that are very bespoke to what any individual utility or customer wants.”

The lesson for deep tech founders is clear: success in regulated markets isn’t about disruption – it’s about alignment. Understanding and working within regulatory constraints can actually accelerate market adoption. As Arvin puts it, “I’m not saying don’t ever try to change the existing paradigm, but if you’re going to do it, be very informed on what you’re breaking and what you’re changing.”