Just Give Our Deep Tech Founders Ambition

This is a cry from the heart.

If there’s one thing we must give to our Deep Tech founders, our scientists, our researchers, it is ambition. Nothing else matters as much.

And here’s the paradox: they are ambitious, but not always in the right way.

They are ambitious holistically, pushing science, chasing hard problems, contributing to humanity. But they are not yet ambitious systemically, understanding the venture game, the mechanics of scaling, the logic of billion-dollar outcomes.

Once they see that, everything changes.

…

And I’ve seen it, first-hand. Working with hundreds of Deep Tech founders, I’ve witnessed that moment when the mindset shifts. When a scientist starts to think like a venture builder. When the light turns on. It’s transformative, almost electric. You can feel it.
That’s why I’m writing this, because it’s not theory. It’s happening, right now. And it’s one of the most inspiring things I’ve ever seen.

The VC game is complex. Layers of rules, hidden dynamics, structural constraints, it takes years to fully understand. But here’s what I’ve learned: the best people to grasp it are not MBAs, not consultants, not storytellers. It’s the scientists. The people trained to wrestle with complexity.

When they are exposed to the VC game, without simplifications, the hard truths, they digest it quickly. They recalibrate their ambition. And suddenly, their vision of the technology they master, the company they dream of, the scale they could achieve, shifts completely.

Some embrace it immediately: they want to build a venture-scale company, and they see the path clearly.

Others respond differently:

“I get it. I see it. But not now. First, let me build something solid with my technology. Let me enjoy that. I’ll come back to bigger ambition later.”

And that is just as powerful. Because it means they won’t crash by aiming too high too soon. They can build strong businesses, grow their entrepreneurial muscles, and be ready for the next technological wave.

Either way, they’ve been “infected” by ambition. And that’s the point.

If you step back, you can see three clear waves in the history of venture-backed companies:

1. The Scientist Wave (the pioneers)

Intel, Qualcomm, Genentech, Google, NVIDIA, these were companies built on deep technical insight. Their ambition came from science itself.

2. The Hacker/Operator Wave (the hustlers)

Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, WeWork, companies that hacked markets, regulations, and consumer behavior. Their ambition was systemic, but often opportunistic.

3. The Deep Tech Renaissance (what’s next)

We are now entering a third wave, one where ambition fuses scientific depth with systemic scale.

Companies like OpenAI, SpaceX, DeepMind, and Anduril are not just building products; they are reconfiguring entire industries, rewriting how nations think about defense, intelligence, or computation itself.

When scientists and engineers start to understand the venture game, their ambition becomes exponential. They don’t just build technologies, they reshape the frontier of what’s possible.

I don’t want to be unfair. Business school founders also deal with complexity, just of a different kind. They excel at reading markets, navigating social dynamics, and managing regulatory or administrative hurdles.

In fact, if the second generation of entrepreneurs was dominated by “business guys,” it’s because they were the first to feel the tectonic shift of the Internet and software era. They saw the ground move beneath incumbents. They sensed the cracks forming in markets once thought inaccessible, cracks opened by the web, by cloud technology, by software eating the world. And they rushed in.

Their strength was not scientific depth, but social and systemic agility, the ability to read those movements and occupy the space created by technological disruption. That has produced its own set of iconic companies.

But today, we stand on the edge of a new tectonic movement, one driven by Deep Tech. A new generation of scientists is ready to pair their intellectual depth with systemic ambition. That combination is rare, and it’s exactly what Europe needs.

Thirty years ago, we were naïve. Even ten years ago, much of the ecosystem lacked maturity. But today?

We have extraordinary playbooks.

We have the stories of venture-scale companies, broken down in podcasts, blogs, essays, and first-hand accounts from founders and investors. We have the math of venture capital, no longer hidden, no longer mysterious.

For the first time, scientific ambition can couple with financial and operational ambition in a truly systematic way. And the result is a system of unprecedented power.

If we inject that knowledge into our scientists, the outcome is explosive.

So let’s not keep reinventing the same playbooks, endless pitch contests, YC-style accelerators, or naïve “matchmaking” programs that promise to pair scientists with business co-founders as if ambition could be outsourced.

What we need instead are places where Deep Tech founders and PhDs are exposed, from day one, to the hard truths of the VC game.

Call it VC Game Inside, the idea that in our ecosystem, we don’t just teach innovation, we teach how capital really works.

Give them the hard truths. They will calibrate their ambition.

They can handle it. They want it. And once they absorb it, the companies they create will be breathtaking.

This is my cry of the heart: if Europe wants to matter in Deep Tech, the only gift we must give our scientists is ambition and expose them to the hard truth of the VC game.

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Mighty Nine