Gregory Constantine had a wild idea: What if he could suck carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into sustainable fuel for airplanes?

With an MBA at Harvard, he’d met Stafford Sheehan, who got his Ph.D. at Yale working on the technology to do it. So when they cofounded Airco in 2017, Constantine asked a very different question: While we work on our big idea, what can we make and sell now?

This is a critical tactic, often employed by the most visionary thinkers. It’s the stepping stone to making their bold ideas a reality — by first taking something simpler to market, and using the earnings to fund more ambitious work. Examples abound. Tesla CEO Elon Musk always wanted to create an affordable electric vehicle, but he knew the economics would be too difficult at first — so Tesla began with premium sports cars. Amazon wanted to be an “everything store,” but started with a much smaller market: books. Google used its advertising revenue to finance its robotaxi ambitions. And so on. 

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So how do you find the right product to start with? 

For Constantine, the process went like this: He considered what would have obvious consumer appeal, could be sold at a high price point, and would also showcase the technology he was developing.

Sheehan figured out how to make ethanol from carbon dioxide — and that provided their answer: They could use it in a drinkable alcohol. So they distilled the first-ever vodka made from water and “air.” Called Air Vodka, it got a lot of attention and sold well. Then they created a perfume and, during the pandemic, a hand sanitizer, also out of CO2. “These products were never the endgame for us,” Constantine says. “They were proof points to build trust and awareness and to fund the scale.” 

The strategy worked. Three years later, Airco was able to attract seed investors for its real mission, and went on to raise over $100 million. Now, the company is doing exactly what the founders originally wanted—producing industrial aviation fuel made with CO2. Not only has their fuel powered a military test flight; the company has won government contracts, including one for $65 million from the Department of Defense, and has commitments from a few airlines for when the fuel goes commercial. 

“As entrepreneurs, you often get stuck on your path,” says Constantine, “and more often than not, you have to really re-look at that path and say, Is this going to get me to where we need to go?” (He and Sheehan split recently, and have filed lawsuits against each other.) 

Lonnie Johnson asked that question too. He’s another example of a big thinker who put this strategy to work — and in his case, it led to one of the most iconic toys of all time.

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Trained as a nuclear engineer, Johnson worked for NASA and served in the Air Force but longed to pursue his own inventions in sustainable energy. One evening after work, he was tinkering with a heat pump that would use water instead of freon. “I hooked a tube up to the sink that shot a stream of water across the bathroom,” he says, “and it was so gratifying that I thought, A high-performance water gun, something a small kid could drench people with, would be a lot of fun!” 

Johnson saw opportunity: He could license his concept to a toy company, which would then fund the research he actually wanted to do. That toy became known as the Super Soaker, and it’s done more than $1 billion in sales. That helped Johnson build his own lab and attract investors. Now he’s working on bringing his eco-friendly energy inventions to market, like batteries that can charge an electric car for up to 800 miles (instead of the typical 300) and a new version of that heat pump. “I couldn’t do what I’m doing now,” Johnson says, “if it were not for the freedom that the toys gave me to address the environmental challenges that we face and focus on my passion.”

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