Selecting the Right Deep Tech Startup: A Job Seeker’s Guide | Chris Reichhelm

Job Seekers! Are you looking to get into the Deep Tech industry? Deep tech recruitment expert Chris Reichhelm talks about what you can do to give yourself the best chance of finding the right role. He delves into the critical steps for aligning your career ambitions with the appropriate phase of startup growth. 

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Sector Specifics: Understand the unique market challenges and opportunities that define deep tech startups.
• Startup Phases: Insights into each stage from concept to commercialisation.
• Fit Assessment: Identify which startup phase best matches your skills and experience.

Tune in for an enlightening discussion that equips you with the knowledge to navigate the complexities of the deep tech sector. Whether you're just starting out or looking to pivot into a more advanced role, this episode is a must-listen for anyone serious about making a mark in deep tech.

Learn more about Lab to Market Leadership: https://www.deeptechleaders.com

Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deeptechleaders

Podcast Production: Beauxhaus

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Deep Tech Startups
• 1:00 Why Deep Tech?
• 2:00 Understanding Deep Tech and Hard Tech
• 4:00 Choosing the Right Startup Phase
• 5:00 Defining the Solution
• 10:00 Scaling the Solution
• 14:00 Commercialising the Solution
• 18:00 Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to the Lab to Market Leadership podcast. Too many advanced science and engineering companies fail to deliver their innovations from the lab to the market. We're on a mission to change that. My name is Chris Reichhelm, and I'm the founder and CEO of Deep Tech Leaders. Each week we speak with some of the world's leading entrepreneurs, investors, corporates, and policy makers about what it takes to succeed on the lab to market journey. Join us. Those of you looking for jobs, And those of you trying to get into deep tech or hard tech startups, you need to listen to this. This is a discussion that I have with executives from big corporates, executives from other startups, and executives even from venture funds. Lots of people want to get involved in, in startups right now. I think that's been the case for frankly, 25 years. I think it's much more recent that we've seen this big rush to deep tech. And I think in part, that's because of the nature of the problems that deep tech solves. They're trying to address, or they're addressing the biggest problems known to mankind. Who doesn't want to be involved in participating in deep tech? And that kind of problem solving, frankly, everyone does. So, but where should you play? Where should you focus your energy if you're looking for a job? And, uh, and so I want to give you some advice. I want to give you the advice that I give to every person with whom I have this discussion. And the advice is very simple. There's one thing you need to bear in mind. Now, before I tell you, I'm going to make some assumptions here. I'm going to assume that you know what Deep Tech is. You know the difference between Deep Tech and Hard Tech. You understand that Deep Tech and Hard Tech are not like enterprise software. They're not like, uh, I mean, SaaS is a business model, but, you know, the distribution costs and the time to market are wildly different. The lab to market journey that we talk so much about here is, doesn't exist as much for software. It, it, it can, it can in certain areas, but generally the multidisciplinary nature of deep technologies, of hard technologies makes their lab to market journey very, very different. Those are the majority of companies that we deal with and the majority of the companies that people that speak to us want to get involved with. So I'm assuming you know the difference with that being said. Here's the number one question that I tend to ask people. What kind of startup do you want to engage with? That sounds super obvious, but let me tell you, it's not. I'm not talking about domain. I'm not talking about the domain. Whether you want to go after a medical device company, uh, an industrial AI company, whether you want to go after a battery technology company, that's entirely up to you. It'll be based largely on your background. That's a different story. Um, what the kind of, what is behind that question? What kind of startup do you want to engage with? Is it? Well, it's a question about phase. There are, you know, startups are broad term that cover lots of different types of companies. Generally, they refer to venture backed businesses. And, you know, at one point when Uber was producing billions of revenue, but still unprofitable, we referred to Uber as a startup. And it was, but it was a startup on a completely different scale. So I want to help you break this down so that you can understand and be clear with yourself and be clear with other recruiters like me and be clear with investors that you talk to. or other parts of the market. So you're really clear on the type of startup you want to engage with. There are three types of startup. There's a startup that is going through the solution definition phase. All right. These are TRLs one to five, one to the end of five, beginning of six. Okay. Where the focus is on defining the solution. I'll come back to this. There are startups that are focused on scaling the solution, all right? These are startups focused on TRL 6, and they're probably to the middle of their commercial scale up, uh, first of a kind, all right, TRL 8, the middle of TRL 8. Those are, uh, startups focused on scaling their solution. The final one, number three, is those startups focused on commercializing their solution. Alright. So we have defining the solution, which is the very earliest stage too early for most people. We have the scaling the solution, which is where we have an approach. We think it's interesting. We're starting to scale that and we're building other examples of that scaling process, other pilots, and eventual first of a kinds, uh, in order to complete that process. And then finally. The piece that actually most people want to join, and that is when it comes to commercializing the solution. So this is when we have an approach, we have a commercial scale platform, uh, that is ready for the market. There are a few other things we need to do. It needs to integrate with its environment. We need to tweak the value proposition more. We need to do some work on supply chain and a lot of other areas, but it's the closest it's been yet. And we're starting to think about deploying this on a global basis. So those are the three areas that we're going to talk about. Those are the three types of startups. So when you're, so when I ask, what kind of startup do you want to join or what kind of startup are you thinking about? It's going to be one of those three. For most people, it tends to be the last one. But for those, uh, you know, for those who enjoy engaging at the point of first principles, Or for those with a much bigger risk profile, the earlier stages can be very attractive too. So let's dive into these a little bit. In the early phase, solution definition, when we're, you know, TRLs one till about the end of five, what are we doing? We're actually, we're physically defining the solution. We don't know yet. Okay. We may have a platform technology we've developed. It'll still be early stage. We're thinking about where we can apply it. Or if we've done things in a more commercial way, Maybe we've got some early problems identified, we think we've got them identified, and now we're trying to build solutions that might be right for them. So it's this constant dance back and forth between figuring out what the real problem of the market is, Trying to draw a connection between literature, between academic papers and so on, and between the technology work that we're doing. And at the same time, whatever approach we ultimately adopt, we need to make sure it's scalable. This is all in the solution definition phase. So when you're thinking about the skills and talents and experience that are going to be required to succeed in that phase, we need people who are, in my view, comfortable with first principles. So they're comfortable operating at, at, at the very beginning of the journey where we are pushing the boundaries of technology. We're stretching it in new ways. So if you are, let's say, an engineering leader, you're looking to get involved in a deep tech startup. You want to get involved at the very early stage where a lot of the, let's call it grunt work. And technology alignment work, where you're having to face off with R& D people every single day. You're having to create engineering designs. You're having to do a lot of that pre feed and feed work. That's the zone of the very early stage. Alright. That stage is not comfortable for most people, especially those people who've already gone into management. So, and who are going to have more junior people typically doing a lot of that early work for them. On the engineering side, we've just described it. On the commercial side, what does it look like? On the commercial side, that very early stage is generally about analyzing markets. Listening to the market, listening to partners in the market, understanding what their problems are, doing a lot of ancillary research to support some of your thesis, developing a number of different hypotheses to, to support the development of a solution. And again, coordinating deeply with tech and engineering, all three commercial tech and engineering are involved in this dance. And so for those individuals attracted to that, it's really helpful for these people to be generalists, to have, it's helpful for the commercial people to be a bit technical, to have an engineering background. It's helpful for the engineers to have a commercial background. It's, it's helpful for the technology people to be super market driven and focused. All three need to be actually doing a lot of the same stuff, I think. And the more that's true, then the more likely it is that a market and a solution will be developed, uh, in a successful way. Most people don't fit those categories. So let's move on to the next stage. And the next stage is all about scaling the solution. In the next stage, we start to, you know, on the commercial side. We're about strategic business development. So we've moved from market analysis, defining the problem, maybe identifying an early potential industrial partner. We're not selling anything yet. Even in this solution scaling phase, there's nothing to sell. What we're trying to do is partner. We're trying to see if anyone who has a problem could be interested in our approach to solving that problem, and who'd be willing to help us. Obviously, we're something in return, and if we can create a commercial opportunity out of that, fabulous, but we're really trying to validate our approach and work with a partner who can help us scale. Our approach ultimately. So commercial people, again, I think the need to be technical, to have that blended experience and background and their activity. Now we're ramping up. It's less market analysis, still a bit, but we're really much more out in the market. Now we're talking to partners, potential customers, or understanding their needs. We're trying to line up. More trials, more sampling, uh, we have, we're probably implementing a CRM. It's going to start to feel like a more traditional commercial role, but again, the focus is on strategic business development, not sales. From a scale up and engineering perspective, we're looking at graduating from very small gram scale to kilogram scale. We're building pilot plants. We're maybe considering working with third party manufacturers. Yeah. If we're going to build it in house, then obviously we're building pilots of, of, of increasing size and the consideration of all of the things that go into that transportation, materials, handling, regulatory, quality, supply chain, uh, all of the different elements. That product and engineering and operations professionals are going to be familiar with. They start to get factored in to that thinking. Now, in reality, they should be factored in at an earlier stage because that will help govern approach too. But in practice, we start to see more of that happen in and around that TRL 6 and 7. So again, that first principles thinking is kind of helpful. But if we've got an approach that we're, that we've got a high degree of confidence on and now it's time to scale pilots and build towards commercial scale facilities, this could be a good home for people. It's still very much hands on. It's still picking up the phone to suppliers and to service providers yourself and doing a lot of that. You're probably going to over time build a small engineering and operations team, but it's going to be small. You've still got to be able to get your hands dirty. And on the technology development side, we're also looking at individuals who are going to be comfortable with industrially professional solution building or developing. Uh, this is managing R& D teams in a professional way. This is creating processes where we're able to evaluate technology approaches. approaches in, uh, in super quick time so that we're not investing too much in any one approach unless we're really sure it's going to work. That is such a tricky thing to get right. And so, and not all founding CTOs, most founders have a CTO bent to them, but very few founder CTOs really understand what it is to create industrially worthy solutions. So, this is often an inflection point for companies on that lab to market journey to swap out CTOs or to hire a new CTO and to take the founder and move him or her into another position. So, if you're, again, comfortable working with raw technology and you've got the skills to start scaling up technology teams. Not too much too early. The focus is still on speed, customer centricity, making sure we're delivering platforms that our market, our target market is going to want. That could be a very helpful home for you too. And finally, we get into the commercialization phase, where we're commercializing the solution and we've got units which are commercial scale. Uh, we're producing in the right quantities. Or we're getting close to producing in the right quantities. We've got integration. We've thought through a lot of the big issues. And the whole focus now is on how do we move to become a, a true participant in this marketplace, not a leader. That's a while down the line. How do we become just a good participant in the marketplace? How do we become accepted by the value chain? Commercially, we start to integrate a lot of marketing We're starting to move more towards something that could look and feel a bit more like sales. Most of our engagements are still strategic business development and focused, but we're keeping a clear CRM. We're going to conferences. We're targeting lots of different types of companies and partners within our target market. We're lining up more demonstrations of our exemplary units. We're creating lots of trials. We're engaged in lots of sampling. We are preparing ourselves to become a big player in the space. It's a whole, it's the same type of energy, just differently focused, but much more appropriate, especially for individuals who are coming from larger corporate environments. So if you're out there and you're thinking I'm a commercial exec, I've done some marketing, I've done some sales, I've operated in much larger environments before, and I'm looking involved in getting a startup. This is typically the place. Where you might jump into a company where it would feel the most comfortable for you and where you would be able to benefit the company the most too. On the scale up and engineering side, actually, we're starting to break into silos now. So we've got engineering leaders now, we have production, we have people who are building plants, we have people in charge of supply chain, probably quality, environmental health and safety. We've got all of these different units established, all folding under probably operations. And, uh, and we are, we're, we're, you know, we're site locating. We're, we're now starting to think about how we're going to support customers in different markets. We're building plants probably in different geographies. We may be in the middle of that. Um, uh, we're making sure that wherever those plants are located, they're going to be close to supply chain partners. That's going to be a very important piece of it too. All of this work is going to, of course, factor unit economics and our ultimate pricing that comes back to commercial as well. So again, we still need individuals that can play across these different fields. But if you are a, if you're a production leader, uh, if you are an operations leader that is, uh, that has historically worked in large organizations. And again, you're looking to get into one of these types of opportunities that could be a place that could be a good place for you to jump off into this, you know, the, you know, the, the commercialization of, uh, of the solution is, is often a comfortable place for people, for, for these kinds of leaders to get involved with. And then finally, on the technology side, we're continuing to scale up technology, we're building out our IP position, making sure we've got defensibility in terms of technology modes, but we're balancing out that with that activity, the new innovation and IP filing activity, we're balancing that out with making sure that we are prepared to support it. The customers that we're anticipating, can we deliver on our first gen platform? Can we make sure all of the different areas we're going to be measured on in quality, performance, price, all of those things are going to stand their test. So individuals who understand how to build that level of stability and repeatability and professionalism in their technology development process are critical at this stage. And if we haven't changed out of Founder CTO by this stage. then it generally happens around now. So it is a, it is a popular place for us to replace CTOs at around this time. And so if you're, if you're of a technology, if you're of a product development or a technology persuasion, uh, an experience, if you want to get involved, that could be a popular place to do so. So at the beginning of this whole lab to market journey, at the very beginning of the startup phase, we need generalists, probably a small number of them. And they need to be comfortable playing in one another's field. The three main ones, the three main ones, commercial, technology, scale up, and engineering. As you can probably tell, alright? That's not to diminish the importance and value of the others. CFOs, product leads, application engineering, super important too. in the early phase. But those are, I think, second order priority. Um, when you are actually trying to develop the solution, the fundamental solution, there are three parts to the solution. Is it novel? Does it address someone's problem? Can we scale it? And can we build a value proposition around it? Those three elements, which is why I tend to focus in those three areas. And if you're an individual with backgrounds or experience in those areas, Then there's probably a place for you within, uh, deep tech or hard tech startups, but it's really important for you to understand where that place is. So that you maximize your chance of being useful to those kinds of companies. And you also max your, you maximize your chance of being successful and of enjoying yourself. So look, I hope that's been helpful. Uh, it is the, it's the, it's the number one piece of advice I give. And so ask yourself the question, where can I be most useful for startup companies on the lab to market journey? One of those three areas, defining that solution, scaling that solution, or commercializing that solution. I hope that's been helpful. See you again soon. You've been listening to the Lab to Market Leadership podcast, brought to you by Deep Tech Leaders. This podcast has been produced by Beauxhaus. You can find out more about us on LinkedIn, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.