Deep Tech Gold Rush: Smart Boom or Future Bust?
episode
Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers
53 min
4 speakers
3 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
How do the hosts introduce the deep tech roundtable and its goals?
Welcome back to another episode of Venture Lock, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the business of venture capital. In today's episode, I'm joined by three deep tech investors and friends of the show, Nate Williams from Union Labs, Sunil Nagaraj from Ubiquity VC, and Geet Parameter from Grids Capital for a roundtable on the state of deep tech and the changing venture landscape. This podcast was inspired by a conversation that four of us had at the Allocate Beyond Summit. And during that, we wanted to go deeper into what does deep tech mean today? Why is it suddenly attracting so much capital? And how economics, government tailwinds, and AI have pulled these once niche technologies into the mainstream.
We also explored the growing concentration of capital in a handful of hyperscale winners, the tension between consensus and non-consensus investing, and what all this means today for emerging managers, LPs, and founders. We really hope you enjoy our episode.
Sameer Khaji is the CEO and co-founder of Allocate. Allocate and Venture Unlocked are independent of each other. Any statements or references made by Sameer or his guests regarding third-party investments or securities are solely their views and opinions and are not intended as investment advice or an endorsement of such parties or securities by Sameer, his guests, or Allocate. Allocate or its clients may maintain relationships with or investment positions and guests, third parties or securities mentioned in this podcast. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
guys it's great seeing you all and this episode actually was a follow-on to a conversation the four of us had back at the beyond summit and we were talking about post the summit all the things we were thinking about all the conversations and a lot of threads got pulled from there the deep tech where's deep tech today which all of you are deep tech investors The second was around the concept of how concentrated capital is becoming, both at the fund level and then also with companies. And we were just all thinking through, is this like a moment in time? Is this a good proxy for what's going to happen in the future? And I think a good place to start because we're going to pull on each one of those threads independently.
But the first thing is deep tech is something that we've all talked about and thought about for a very long time. And it seems like it's having a bit of a renaissance moment with a lot of capital. I think I mentioned this, but a third of the capital over the last year has gone into what I would consider deep tech. Now, for all the people listening, how do you guys even define deep tech today? Because I think it's expanded in meaning.
Great to be here. Great to see you guys as always. I would say that the key definition of deep tech has to do with technical prowess. deep engineering skills, and a very unique set of capabilities that will create some edge into a specific field. So the way I like to exemplify what is deep tech versus what is not deep tech, if you are having a dinner conversation, right, and you overhear a pitch for a startup, And you figure, yeah, I could build that. Probably not deep tech. But if you overhear a pitch and you say, wow, that's very cool. And I don't have the technical chops to build that. I think I would need a doctorate or a post-doctorate. That's probably deep tech. So that's my empirical way of defining deep tech.
I'll take a shot. Effectively, my career post-grad school last 20 years has been deep tech. It used to be called Internet of Things. Before it was called connected hardware, it was called semiconductors. I think the classical definition that we use for hard tech, deep tech is similar to what Guy mentioned. First, it has to contain hardcore technology. So white leather sneakers, that's not hardcore technology. A dating app, not necessarily hardcore technology. So hardcore technology. Second is it's hard to build.
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