Hightech Ventures

Dejan Hušman is CEO & Co-Founder of denovomatrix – a life science spin-off out of TU Dresden founded in 2018. Denovomatrix is a key enabling technology to manufacturing stem cells at high quality and quantity with application fields in cell therapy, cell-based meat or vaccine production. They are innovating in an area that hasn’t seen much change for the past 30 years but has huge potential for our future.

From a young age, having grown up with entrepreneurs as parents, Dejan felt that being an entrepreneur himself was the only path to follow. He talks about his love for science, building a personal competitive advantage and the role of the other people along his path: in particular, his mentor and his professor and how they helped focus his curiosity, provided the breeding ground for innovation and startups during his PhD and brought together the initial founding team and supporters for denovomatrix. We speak about the most important lessons he learned in these first three years of building the company. And although the journey is far from over Dejan is incredibly clear not only about the vision but also the limitations of the company and the ultimate end goal, the exit scenario for denovomatrix. 

Dejan has benefited greatly from mentors in his last couple of years but also sees the flaws and limitations in the German or European research ecosystem in producing high quality startups. Thus, we hear about his biggest wish for the ecosystem that is to include more experienced former entrepreneurs and other people that direct “these engines of curiosity, i.e. PhD students just researching something” to get to the core question around the value of someone’s research more quickly.

Jan Schnorr co-founded C2Sense as a spin-off from MIT and served both as CTO and CEO before leaving his company in 2019. He now spends his time as “management consultant for startups”, helping scientists build their companies and initial teams – both in the US and Germany, amongst others as a Startup Scouting Consultant at the Max Planck Foundation. 

We learn about the first steps of building C2Sense, the support of the MIT ecosystem and differences and similarities between the Boston ecosystem and Germany, Jan’s home turf.

Jan shares his learnings and reflections on his time in various roles building up his company, jumping from researcher to CTO to CEO. He talks about the importance of knowing yourself to be at home in every role and designing it to fit your own personality and skillset. We talk in-depth about his understanding of leadership, the valuable lessons he learned as a cub scout leader in his home state around motivating people to join a cause and the role of empathy and unfiltered feedback. Jan has a deep motivation for building teams, and he shares his learnings on choosing the right people, the importance of clearly defining roles in advance, and talks about how investing enough time and energy into good hiring pays off for a startup.

This episode is with the former Partner & Managing Director and Co-Leader of the Deep Tech unit at BCG, Chairman at Hello Tomorrow, author, deep tech investor & advisor Massimo Portincaso. Massimo has studied the deep tech landscape internationally like no other. As a co-leader of BCG’s „Deep Tech Mission“ he has gained an extraordinary rich perspective on emerging technologies, those startups building businesses out of them as well as investors helping to grow deep tech ventures. In partnership with Hello Tomorrow, Massimo has published several reports on deep tech related topics, such as: Nature Co-Design, Deep Tech - The Great Wave of Innovation as well as The Deep Tech Investment Paradox. All of them are true thought leadership and based upon outstanding analyses of the international ecosystem.

In our conversation, Massimo shares his view on what constitutes deep tech and why now is the time for the big wave of deep tech ventures. In particular, we discuss the most relevant findings from the Deep Tech Investment Paradox report: why venture capital needs to get back to its roots, how the investment game needs to change in order to help deep tech ventures being built and grow as well as why the limited partners are key for making this change happen. Massimo also tells us what technologies excite him the most and why it is up to all of us to discuss how we want to implement them in our everyday lives.

In case you want to read the report yourself, here is the link: https://hello- tomorrow.org/bcg-the-deep-tech-investment-paradox/

You should also follow his thought leadership & work via The Antidisciplinarian:

https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/the- antidisciplinarian-6635292802584457216/

Ask Ravikumar is an Entrepreneurship Development Officer at CERN - the world-famous research organization where the World Wide Web originated from and the Higgs Boson was discovered - and manages the Business Incubation Center there. He is also one of the rare individuals possessing twenty years of experience in technology transfer from three different continents. He gained his expertise in the US, Australia and now in Europe. Ash is definitely a forward thinker with clear values and a true gentleman. His rich collection of deep tech stories makes him the ideal guest for our podcast.

We touch upon the skillset needed for becoming a good tech transfer officer and what motivated him to get on this path. Ash outlines his understanding of how new inventions make it to market and can change the world, if we put them into the right hands. For him, tech push is not dead. This also brings us to CERN’s strategy for building and collaborating with startups and how to put the right incentive system in place - on both the micro level (e.g. cap table of a single spin-off) and the macro level (KPIs for research organizations). Finally, we get Ash’s perspective on how to measure the impact of a startup.

Luuk Eliens is Partner and Chief Commercial Officer of XNode, the leading Chinese platform for global innovation with offices in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Singapore. XNode is on a mission to build a global platform for innovation connecting China to the rest of the world by empowering innovators and entrepreneurs to build businesses with global impact. To realize it’s mission, XNode consists of five business units: (1) XNode Community – a physical space where innovators can connect, (2) XNode Innovation service – where XNode works together with its corporate partners to realize innovation through consultancy, accelerators and training services, (3) XNode Launch China – where XNode supports startups and scaleups to grow, (4) XNode Venture Building – where XNode takes equity stakes in selected companies and (5) XNode Labs – where moonshot projects are explored.

Luuk is definitely a pioneer with regard to bringing professional startup activities to China - he is heading the venturing activities of HightechXL there since 2017 - and meanwhile extended his activities to Singapore by co-initiating the Singapore Deep Tech Alliance. As an entrepreneur and investor himself, he does understand what it takes to build a startup and at the same time is a thought leader in the field of deep tech venturing, its specific challenges and approaches to enable it.

In this episode, we take a closer look at the Chinese startup landscape and what makes venture building so hard in this ecosystem. Luuk also explains the idea behind the Singapore Deep Tech Alliance and how exactly venture building is being done there. We also discuss the main challenges of deep tech venturing, why methods such as the Lean Startup possess a limited value for this type of innovation and Luuk proposes a radical approach for changing thew rules of tech transfer in order to pave the way for more startups in collaboration with research organizations.

Dr. Andreas Olmes is THE expert at HTGF - the most active early-stage VC in Europe - for industrial tech ventures. Since 2008, Andreas has been financing companies in hardware-related industries. Seven successful exits have covered over half of the investment outlay for his portfolio. He also enjoys programming Excel and CapTable tools to make the lives of his HTGF colleagues easier. Not too long ago, he co-initiated an expert circle at HTGF focusing on product-market-fit. Andreas Olmes holds a PhD in physics and has always enjoyed working on the strategic development of companies. In the first ten years of his professional career, he handled the transformation of an eye-surgery practice into a clinic, set up his own VC-financed technology firm and helped the owner of a sales company to establish his firm in the laser market, in a move that proved highly successful. 

With Andreas, we not only discuss why there are so many physicists among successful VCs and tech transfer officers, but also what triggered him to become a VC. Also, he has a very clear picture of how a successful startup team looks like: he advocates for more „product teams“ instead of the dominant model of rather management-driven teams. This is also due to the fact that for him product-market-fit is the key enabler for successful venturing. We also touch upon the role of research organizations in forming new ventures and his perspective on the right deal structure. Since Andreas is a passionate supporter of the sustainability movement, he also outlined why deep tech is the solution for addressing many of the relevant issues. 

Paulo Marques is CTO & Co-Founder of Feedzai - a company using machine learning to make banking and commerce safe by combining fraud prevention and anti-money laundering under one platform to manage financial crime. Feedzai is Portugal's newest unicorn raising a $200m Series D round in April and now looking to further grow internationally.

Paulo has always been fascinated by computers and the possibilities to create and simulate new things with them and at the same time he loves trying out every new thing he comes across and "living different lives within his life". So the jump from his research career to becoming an entrepreneur was probably inevitable. We talk about the difference between technology and product, running initial experiments as a company until the pivotal moment of finding product-market-fit and the first type of clients you need to discover after that. We learn how they keep the company at the top of its game by constantly asking what could put themselves out of business. After twelve years of building and growing Feedzai, Paulo's role today is as much about technical roadmaps as it is about the operating system of people - and it remains all about teaching, what he loved doing as a professor and what he does now with his employees. Talking about his alma mater we also learn how you can set up an extremely valuable win-win-relationship with your university even without any kind of contracts and negotiations. Join us on a rich conversation on everything from technology to business execution to the human factor - everything it takes to build an internationally successful product company.

Ben Soffer is a distinguished expert in technology transfer, hightech venture building and investing. Among others, he headed the technology transfer department of the renowned Technion university for 13 years, has co-founded and led the Technion DRIVE accelerator and was the Chairman of the Israel Technology Transfer Organization for many years. Through helping various spin-offs to get off the ground as well as through his roles in investment management, Ben understands how to build, scale and exit hightech startups. Beyond that, life sciences and healthcare are at the core of his expertise. Until recently, he was the Head of Strategic Industry Partnerships at King’s College London. Having worked not only on Israel, but also in the US and the UK, he gained a rich understanding of the international startup ecosystems.

Ben will share with us his perspective on why small nations, such as Israel, or Singapore excel at innovation, explain why the startup itself is the best vehicle for innovation as well as why a certain amount of paranoia is beneficial for entrepreneurship. We also discuss the difference of deal structures between life sciences and engineering-based ventures and how alignment of interest is done right. Ben also outlines his view on the future of healthcare, the new role of hospitals and what makes him stick to the hightech ventures ecosystem.

Max Gulde is CEO & Co-Founder of ConstellR - a space data and services company leading the way in delivering daily, global land surface temperature maps for the agritech industry - to help provide 50% more food in the next 30 years. 

Max has only recently made the jump from researcher to entrepreneur and is now running a company with 15+ people, they'll send their first payload to the ISS in 2022 and have just closed their first financing round. We talk about his journey from deep technological research to running a company and his motivation to do the work he’s doing on a daily basis. Additionally, we hear about his journey from institute to company and discuss the mindset it needs for a successful negotiation between a spin-off and their research institute.

Jörg Sperling, a passionate mountaineer, has been a hightech investor for more than two decades. His investment expertise ranges from the very early stage as an angel investor, institutional & corporate venture capital, to private equity. He was directly involved in almost 50 transactions as an investor, buyer or seller. 

As an electrical engineer by training, we talk about Jörg‘s transition into the investment space and his insights from three of the world‘s leading ecosystems for hightech ventures: the Silicon Valley, Israel and Munich. We also elaborate on the difficulty of creating spin-offs from a research organization and how the founding team needs to be composed in order to be investment-ready. Jörg also gives very helpful advice on how a healthy relationship between founders and their investors should look like.