“Too far in the future.”
That was the feedback John Diklev received, learning that his Master’s thesis had been rejected. Not one to be easily demoralized, it provoked something within him. To everyone else, it might seem far-fetched; to John, it felt inevitable.
On the surface, his idea was simple: why couldn’t clean energy have the same flexibility as fossil fuels? But underneath this, John found complexity, rigidity, and a system that was ultimately rigged against the renewable transition. The market didn’t just need to produce or sell more renewable energy: the infrastructure was missing an entire layer that could create this same flexible supply and demand.
Unlike a Master’s thesis, the stakes were too high to fail. And so that initial rejection became a catalyst. John didn’t wait for that future to arrive; he set about building it. In Flower, he started building what others couldn’t see or believe possible, and in doing so, he has potentially changed the course of society in the face of one of its biggest challenges.
From entrepreneurial beginnings
Risk appetite, problem-solving, and disruptive thinking ran in John’s blood—his parents and grandparents were all entrepreneurs—and so it always felt natural that, one day, John would start his own business.
He’d first been drawn in when his grandfather entered his whole family into a stock picking competition. As a kid, his money seemed to sink into candy companies; as he matured, so did his investment preferences.
But whether it was candy or technology companies, these investments were always a chance to start formulating his own theses, confronting weak reasoning, and distinguishing intuition from hard evidence. It helped him understand the investor side of the equation—and it also offered him a fundamental understanding of how humans think.
“I realized that I lied to myself all the time. It’s so easy in hindsight to say, ‘I knew that would happen.’”
He started keeping an investment diary: a list of the decisions he was making, and why he was making them. He calls it his “anti-hindsight” archive, and has proved critical to shaping John’s bias towards evidence and truth over narrative.
As much as theoretical hypothesizing and problem solving have always appealed, John has always found himself drawn towards the ‘doing’. “If someone put a pile of Lego in front of me,” he says, “I would start building.”
His entrepreneurial beginnings led him towards engineering, a chance to build real-world solutions to pressing problems. Energy, the mother of all problems, stood out. To John, it sits at a complex intersection of physics, economics, politics, and even aspects of philosophy, especially where it concerns concepts like fairness and sovereignty. And just like any good philosophical subject, it often provokes more questions than it offers answers.
One question became increasingly prominent; a question that would become the basis of John’s career and the company he was now on a path to building. A question of flexibility.
The missing layer
John’s research, the basis of his Master’s thesis, explored the fundamental issue of flexibility in renewable energy and how it constrained market expansion.
He explains that traditional energy, like coal and oil, offers you true flexibility concerning supply and demand. Dispatchable generation means that you can essentially adjust supply (e.g. drill more or less) to meet demand.
Renewables offer the opposite. “All of a sudden, you have an inflexible demand side and an inflexible, volatile generation side.” Demand remains consistent regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, meaning that unless there is something able to fill that gap, supply is considered not just unreliable but risky. This has a huge impact on investment decisions, where the asset feels less like an energy investment and more like an insurance company or financial risk portfolio. For incumbents in the energy market, it requires not only new software and trading capability, but also a fundamental reconsideration of risk.
John recognized this wasn’t just a dysfunction of the market; it was a critical omission. “There’s a piece missing—pure flexibility.”
Finding hypergrowth
This became the basis of Flower: a way, as John sees it, “to control everything that consumes, stores, or produces energy.” The name itself is a portmanteau of ‘flexible power’. Flower optimizes and manages renewable energy assets using AI-driven software. Imagine a virtual clean power plant, which allows you the flexibility to adjust and control renewable energy, making intermittent energy sources more reliable.
The size of the problem demanded focus, so John’s early days at Flower had to be pragmatic. They couldn’t solve every problem at once, so they started by aggregating EV chargepoints to understand how they could control flexible demand in a real world scenario. EV chargepoints were a narrow wedge, but they proved instrumental in kickstarting Flower’s genuine market access as well as building out real-world data that could prove or disprove John’s original hypothesis.
John quickly realized that it was, in fact, their trading algorithms where their value really lay. This drove their expansion in battery energy storage systems (BESS), which helped them to structure new types of long-term financial contracts for wind and other renewables, and now accounts for the largest proportion of their trading activity. In 2024, in the same year Flower closed its €45M Series A, the company acquired Sweden’s largest battery park.
Flower’s ambition was scaling, as were John’s responsibilities as a founder and CEO. The company was moving from this scrappy product discovery phase into a phase of hypergrowth, and the team was growing accordingly. He quickly became comfortable with delegating work, embracing distributed execution over centralized control. “Leadership is to empower other people,” John says. “Even if I could do everything 50% better, 114 people still outperform one person.”
He learned to be more comfortable stepping out of the weeds, and this meant growing more comfortable with his team’s mistakes. The key, he found, isn’t trying to avoid the mistakes, but rather avoiding delays in correcting those mistakes.
Today, quality over quantity is very much the name of the game. Rapid headcount expansion has been replaced with “expertise densification”, where John is far more focused on precision and experience.
Short-term problems, long-term solutions
At the heart of the climate crisis, John sees a paradox. Climate change is an increasingly urgent problem, and yet it will take years, even decades, to solve.
This is why the politicization of climate and energy has become a real problem for founders like John. Democracies run on short electoral cycles, meaning that decisions are short-term. Infrastructural change, meanwhile, requires decades-long commitments.
For John, it’s a source of motivation and frustration in equal measure. “We end up arguing over the details, whereas we really need to get going on lots of different fronts all at the same time.”
To stay optimistic, he puts aside politics and comes back to economics, returning to a central truth that has remained constant since he first launched the business. “Even without pricing externalities [e.g. the costs of pollution and other side effects], renewables are the cheapest way to secure energy.”
Flexible power no longer seems as far off as it once did. Within the next decade, John is confident that wind and solar will become the dominant source of energy, meaning significant overbuild capacity to ensure consistent supply. Increasing global trade for hydrogen derivatives (such as methanol and ammonia) will further drive access and supply in more remote locations.
And so while Flower began as a rejected hypothesis, it’s looking increasingly crucial to our infrastructure. And at its center, John remains motivated—making theses, testing them against reality, and building a future that he believes in.
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