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New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack
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🌊 Building Deep Tech at Software Speed
What separates the best hardware founders, and why conviction matters more than consensus.
We’re joined by Clara Ricard, investor at Transition, focused on hardware and industrial deep tech, to explore what it really takes to build and back the next generation of climate and frontier technologies.
Hardware startups don’t follow the neat trajectories investors became accustomed to during the SaaS era. Their paths are messier, more capital-intensive, and often require a fundamentally different way of thinking about risk, talent, and execution.
In this conversation, we unpack why the best venture investments often begin with disagreement, how elite engineering cultures create outsized companies, and what founders can learn from organizations like SpaceX, Tesla, and ASML.
In this episode, we covered:
→ Why hardware investing requires a different mindset than SaaS
→ Why great VC partnerships shouldn’t always agree
→ How SpaceX, Tesla, and ASML created cultures that move hardware at extraordinary speed
→ Why operator networks outperform impressive résumés
→ The role of luck—and how investors try to recognize it
→ Why accepting more failures may actually produce better venture returns
→ Whether Europe can compete with China’s manufacturing advantage
✨ Leave a review and share the episode if this conversation challenged the way you think about growth, innovation, and sustainability.
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