Guide · Layer 1
Written for: seed / Series A scientist-founder
Put your future process flow next to the incumbent’s. It should look mostly the same; the only real difference is where your technology comes in, usually one or two boxes.
The TEA is really measuring that delta & showing your work: how much does it move the needle against the conventional process?
Leaning on the incumbent’s flow for everything you didn’t change keeps your final number more realistic & conservative: you can borrow the thinking and learnings that engineers before you have already put into designing an efficient process, instead of building the whole TEA from scratch.
This future state flow necessarily carries the deployment risk from your novel technology, so you’ll want to de-risk the risk associated with everything else around it. Even if proven options make your modeled economics look slightly worse, you gain credibility by choosing more realistic assumptions (and otherwise quickly lose credibility when opting for highly performant but highly risky novel approaches for other parts of the process flow)
A boxes & arrows diagram is an easy, high-leverage way to get feedback: there are no numbers to argue about yet, so it’s somewhere others can engage without wading through your model. Walk your advisors, team, and partners through it and ask what’s missing.
It’s also a useful prop on customer calls and in discovery: it shows how your technology changes the status quo without dragging the conversation into the weeds, and it gives others something concrete to react to.
It’s sometimes uncomfortable putting guesses down on paper, but it’s a fast / expedient way to get feedback and reactions; and it’s much easier for others to react to something they can see.
With the structure in place, the next layer puts numbers on the flows: Layer 2 — Mass & Energy Layer, where each unit operation gets parameterized and the balances close.