The Founder With a Great Chip and No Market
A few years ago, I met a founder who had engineered a beautiful new chip design for 5G base stations. Brilliant architecture. Excellent benchmarks. One problem: He had no clue how to get it manufactured at scale, let alone how to sell it to telecom operators who had six-year budgeting cycles and weren’t interested in swapping out existing infrastructure without regulatory prodding.
That meeting stuck with me. Because it wasn’t the first time I’d seen a technically elegant solution hit a wall. In deep tech, elegance isn’t enough. Timing, capital strategy, supply chain insight, and domain fluency matter just as much. If you want to build something hardcore, you need more than a deck and a dream. You need a durable playbook.
Why Deep Tech Is Not SaaS
Most startup advice is optimized for software: move fast, ship MVPs, iterate weekly, raise every 18 months. None of this cleanly applies when you’re working with semiconductors, RF systems, or telecom infrastructure.
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Hardcore tech comes with brutal constraints: Long R&D cycles
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Capex-heavy manufacturing
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Fragile, geopolitically entangled supply chains
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Skeptical customers with ten-year roadmaps
You’re not selling to early adopters on Product Hunt. You’re selling to hardware engineers at Bosch, network architects at Reliance Jio, or the CTO of an energy grid operator in Texas. The pitch isn’t “cool tech.” It’s risk mitigation, compliance, and ROI over a decade.
Which is why deep tech founders who try to raise like SaaS companies often get burned. Investors expect ARR. The founders have BOMs. That mismatch kills good ideas.
Lessons from 40+ Deep-Tech Bets
After working with dozens of startups in hardcore domains—from advanced materials to chipsets to spectrum intelligence—I’ve built a rough playbook. Here are the patterns that keep surfacing.
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Founders must speak both engineering and economics.
The best founders I’ve backed can toggle between transistor physics and go-to-market math in a single conversation. They obsess over yield rates and unit economics. They know how to talk to a fab and a Fortune 100 buyer.
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Stealth isn’t always smart.
Deep tech founders often default to stealth mode. I get it—you don’t want to tip your hand before you’ve secured IP. But staying invisible too long delays customer feedback loops. Worse, it slows down partner development in adjacent industries. Smart visibility beats premature secrecy.
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Academic links help. Commercial muscle helps more.
Yes, publishing papers and winning DARPA grants is great. But hardcore tech companies that win long-term almost always bring in senior ops talent early. The bridge between the lab and the line is long. Hire someone who’s walked it before.
One founder I worked with refused to hire a head of operations, insisting he’d manage supplier relationships and compliance himself. Nine months later, he lost a major aerospace contract due to delays in testing and certifications. That startup never recovered. Deep tech is unforgiving of operational gaps.
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Chasing valuation kills discipline.
Too much hype capital can cripple a company. I’ve seen deep tech founders get seduced by frothy valuations after a single prototype demo. Then they can’t raise again when scaling hits real-world friction. Better to build quietly with aligned capital than loudly with tourists.
The Silicon Valley Capital Problem
We’re living in a weird moment: There’s more money chasing deep tech than ever, but most of it doesn’t understand what it’s buying.
Capital raised on short-term IRR targets doesn’t mesh well with startups that require five years to reach pilot production. VC partners who cut their teeth on B2B SaaS metrics struggle to diligence a company whose customers are defense contractors or Tier 1 OEMs.
Too many VCs treat deep tech like SaaS with a longer sales cycle. It’s not. You can’t A/B test photonics. You can’t “fail fast” in chip manufacturing. And no, your KPI dashboard won’t fix a supply chain blocked by export restrictions. If your fund doesn’t know what a mask set costs, maybe sit this one out.
That’s why I believe the next wave of successful deep tech companies will be backed by smarter capital.
Investors who:
- Understand supply chain fragility
- Get the capital intensity of hardware
- Can think globally (especially in Asia)
- And stay in the trenches with founders post-Series A
Advice to Founders Entering Hardcore Tech
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Think in decades, not quarters.
Deep tech timelines are long. If your plan is to flip your company in 24 months, you’re in the wrong game. These are decade-long arcs. Build with that in mind, and so should your team and investors.
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Recruit operational depth early.
Brilliant PhDs are essential, but someone needs to manage vendor contracts, navigate certifications, and keep production on track. A seasoned operator at the table can prevent existential delays.
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Pre-sell the bottlenecks.
Know what’s going to break first—whether that’s manufacturing capacity, regulatory clearance, or interoperability. Then proactively build relationships, pilots, and fallback plans. The startups that survive aren’t always the most innovative but the most prepared.
Let’s just say: You don’t want to realize too late that the one fab capable of producing your component at spec is fully booked for the next three years. Quiet due diligence today can prevent existential panic tomorrow.
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Don’t pitch like SaaS.
Educate your investors. Teach them how your world works—cycle times, capex profiles, margins, and risk curves. If they’re not willing to learn, they’re not the right capital for you.
The Road Ahead
There’s never been a better time to build in deep tech—or a noisier one. Between geopolitical reshuffling, a renewed interest in domestic manufacturing, and cracks in cloud-native overgrowth, hardcore infrastructure is back in focus.
But building real technology for real industries still takes more than hype. It takes founders who can think like engineers, operators, and diplomats. And capital that understands how atoms scale differently than bits.
The ecosystem doesn’t need more hype. It needs grit. Builders who don’t flinch at a five-year R&D roadmap. Backers who show up after the grant money runs out. If you’re in this game, build like it matters. Because it does.
If that’s you, let’s talk.
