DeepTech: Many Roads May Lead There, But There’s Only One Rome
Today: A guest post by Bill Janeway, veteran venture capitalist, author and faculty member at Cambridge University.
Back to deeptech! Last year I wrote a piece to complain that we didn’t have enough controversies in European tech. That’s a problem because I think intellectual battles greatly accelerate the advancement of ideas.
And then in December we did get a controversy, about the opportunity that deeptech represents for European entrepreneurs and investors. It started with a column by me in Sifted (inspired by Jerry Neumann’s work on Productive Uncertainty being the prime lever of success for tech startups). Here’s the gist of it:
Too often, European founders and investors express resignation in the face of the disappointing performance of local tech companies when compared to their counterparts in the US or Asia. And they come to the conclusion that because European startups have a harder time scaling up (because of the continent’s characteristic market fragmentation), local founders should instead focus on ‘deeptech’ challenges.
A few days later, Zoë Ch…