Need a Founding CTO?

This is a premium post for paid subscribers only. Thank you for supporting deep tech venture building at MIT Proto Ventures!

Every deep tech venture studio hits this roadblock sooner or later:

“We need a founding CTO who knows this technology inside and out — but none of the researchers want to leave the lab.”

It’s one of the most common challenges in R&D translation. Without the right technical leadership on the founding team, you can’t really translate the technology into a working product. The IP alone simply isn’t enough.

But here’s the good news: R&D venture studios are uniquely equipped to solve this problem.

The first instinct is often: we can’t launch unless the principal investigator or postdoc is on the founding team. That’s not always true.

Sometimes the venture just needs someone with the right technical background and private-sector experience — think an electrochemist, materials engineer, or systems architect — rather than the specific person who ran the experiments in the university lab.

In fact, these external hires can sometimes be stronger fits: they bring applied industry experience (as opposed to academic lab experience), they may be more familiar with the fast-paced and chaotic rhythm of startup life, and they be better suited to growing into a leadership role.