Notes from Deep Science Forum, BLR
Oct 2024
I swung by the Deep Tech event hosted by Ankur Capital last week. Some thoughts -
Panels are extremely inefficient and we should mostly stop doing them. The most value from having 100 odd people w similar interests and complementary offerings comes from creating new edges between nodes, panels are a terrible way to do this. Most events could take a page from Effective Altruism events where there is an intense almost overbearing focus on structured 1:1s. Would love to see more events doing that. I was still able to have some great conversations with other founders geeking out on deep tech but feel like I missed out by not having more of them. A tragic-comic event was being corralled into yet another panel when having the most interesting conversation of the day post lunch. All conference organizers should probably read this post titled “Everything you did to make your conference better actually made it worse”.
Deep Science/Tech in India has a remarkably different aesthetic from its counterpart in SF. There was a surprising number of suits and I was one of the few wearing just a t-shirt and jeans. Palmer Luckey would have stuck out like a sore thumb.
Related - the age demographic skewed noticeably older. There were several mentions along the lines of “for all the younger entrepreneurs just starting out” and a sense that you needed at least some grey hair before you could talk in the big leagues.
For a event branded Deep Science, there was little technical talk, and a lot of panelists focused on business development, IP protection, and especially fundraising.
Ah fundraising. There was a liberal amount of advice given about what founders should do and should not, and perhaps not enough on what VCs can do and do not. Overall I’d say it remains the case that most Indian deeptech founders are better over setting up a Delaware C-corp and raising from the States. Space and semicon are likely the only exceptions.
Related - everyone probably wants to say they invest in deeptech bc it’s sexy + feels impactful but few appear willing to do so early enough to really matter. What especially seems missing is a willingness to bet on unconventional founders with ambitious visions on truly frontier (and not just hardware or infra) deeptech. This is unfortunate because this is where a lot of the game-changing value really is.
Also related - there was a fair amount of “we need to really understand the tech first before we invest and many times we’re not equipped to do so and hence have to pass.” This means there’s incredible alpha in being able to “vibe-check” founders and build enough conviction in their capabilities such that you don’t really have to fully understand the tech to make a good investment thesis. You can do all the spreadsheet math and paper reading you want but future capabilities are, by definition, not priced-in the current market nor spelt out in the literature.
It’s become noticeable by now that the investor - founder dynamic in India is often not one of being equals, like it generally is in the States, but rather the investor is being gracious enough to gift you their valuable time to the lowly founder who is desperately seeking their money. I exaggerate but it truly is my biggest peeve when I sense this vibe, which is not infrequent, esp from VCs who’ve never been founders themselves. I guess it’s prevalence in India is a phenomena from the nature of supply-demand + the lack of homegrown myths about the massive FOMO-inducing founder like Zuck.
Ultimately, its founders who will build the paradigm-shifting company that makes obvious sense in hindsight but appears “preposterous” in the present. I’m as bullish as ever on the Indian deeptech founder but a tad bearish (at least in the short-term) on the Indian deeptech ecosystem.