It's About the People: Why Deep Tech Needs More Than Money
How early stage deep tech startup accelerators must reimagine founder support
Celine Halioua's breakthrough could revolutionize aging itself. At 25, she founded Loyal to develop the first FDA-approved drug to extend lifespan—starting with dogs, but with implications for humans. After raising over $125 million and assembling a team of neuroscientists, veterinarians, and regulatory experts, she discovered something no accelerator had prepared her for: "As there was no established regulatory path for a lifespan extension drug, we had to design from scratch a scientifically strong and logistically feasible way to demonstrate efficacy."
The FDA surprised them with an unexpected six-month study requirement. Her Series B fundraising "failed miserably" in Q4 2022 because, as she admits, "my pitch was wrong because I hadn't been forced to understand the business as well as I do now." The challenges spanned from canine biology and federal regulations to drug manufacturing and consumer marketing—"If you understand the consumer dog market, you almost certainly don't understand biotech. If you understand biotech, you don't get the veterinary market."
Halioua's story illustrates a fundamental truth: venture capital partners constantly emphasize the importance of selecting the right founders. "It's all about the people," they say, leaning back in their conference room chairs about the critical importance of founder-market fit. Yet for most VCs, this profound insight translates into remarkably shallow action: writing a check, offering workshops on pitch deck creation and presentation skills, arranging introductions to a handful of celebrity investors, hosting presentations from service providers, and culminating in the obligatory demo day spectacle.
For many accelerators — especially international programs — this amounts to little more than "startup tourism": flying founders to the Bay Area for whirlwind tours of Stanford, UC Berkeley, visits to companies like Nvidia, stops at Berkeley SkyDeck, Draper University, photo ops at the Golden Gate Bridge, and maybe a Giants game. Most programs follow a predictable formula: 3-6 months of workshops and seminars, mentor speed-dating sessions, pitch practice, and a demo day finale where dozens of startups present to investors — often taking 20-25 companies at once to maximize their own portfolio diversification rather than founder success.
The VC Paradox: Saying It's About People While Treating Founders Like Portfolio Line Items
Walk into any Sand Hill Road conference room, and you'll hear the same refrain: "We invest in people." Partners will wax poetic about founder qualities — are they coachable, innovative, resilient? Do they have the technical chops and business acumen? Can they handle adversity and pivot when necessary? Are they all-in, with the persistence to push through the inevitable setbacks?
For deep tech founders specifically, the bar is even higher. VCs look for founders who can navigate complex IP landscapes, understand intricate technical risks, articulate massive market opportunities, and possess that elusive combination of scientific rigor and entrepreneurial vision. They want founders who can recruit world-class talent, communicate with diverse stakeholders from lab researchers to Fortune 500 executives, navigate regulatory hurdles and complex compliance requirements, understand the challenges of scaling manufacturing from prototypes to mass production, and maintain unwavering focus despite long development timelines.
Yet despite all this talk about founders being everything, most VCs offer surprisingly little actual support. The typical model? Write a check, offer a few workshops on pitch decks, customer acquisition, and product-market fit, make a few intros, and hope for the best. Many accelerators compound this by taking 20-25 companies at once — optimizing for their own portfolio diversification rather than founder success.
This approach fundamentally misunderstands what deep tech founders actually need.
The Isolation Problem: When Brilliance Meets Bureaucracy
Deep tech founders face a unique challenge. They're often world-class scientists or engineers who've made breakthrough discoveries, but now they must navigate an entirely different world — one filled with regulatory mazes, manufacturing complexities, distribution challenges, and capital requirements that dwarf typical software startups.
Consider what a quantum computing founder faces: They need to understand not just the physics of their innovation, but also semiconductor manufacturing processes, government export controls, enterprise sales cycles, and how to communicate quantum advantage to customers who barely understand classical computing. They need connections to national lab researchers, relationships with semiconductor fabs, introductions to enterprise CTOs, and guidance from founders who've scaled hardware companies before.
The traditional VC model expects founders to figure this out themselves. Make your own introductions. Build your own advisory networks. Navigate regulatory requirements alone. It's sink or swim, and many brilliant innovations sink not because the technology failed, but because the founders couldn't access the right people at the right time.
What Deep Tech Accelerators Actually Need to Succeed
For deep tech to reach its transformative potential, accelerators must fundamentally reimagine their approach. Success requires moving beyond the standard playbook to embrace five core principles:
Targeted, Intensive, Human-Centered Support
Instead of spreading resources across dozens of companies, deep tech accelerators must focus deeply on smaller cohorts, ensuring each founder gets sustained attention. This isn't occasional mentorship — it's embedded partnership where experienced professionals work alongside founders daily, helping them navigate both technical and business challenges.
Comprehensive, Value-Chain Networks
Deep tech accelerators need deliberately constructed ecosystems that span the entire development and commercialization journey. This means building networks that include:
Process engineers from major corporations
Regulatory experts and policy specialists
Government officials and lobbyists
Military and national security experts from DOD, DIU, and defense agencies
Medical professionals and clinical researchers
Banking professionals from major financing institutions
Merchant bankers and private equity partners
Manufacturing and supply chain veterans
Environmental and sustainability experts
Long-term Relationship Building
Deep tech companies require extended journeys. Accelerators must embed founders in networks of experienced professionals who will support them from early discovery through scaled manufacturing — not just to Series A, but through the complex scaling challenges that define deep tech success.
Diversity as Competitive Advantage
The most transformative technologies require the most comprehensive support systems. Accelerators should actively seek founders from varied backgrounds — not because diversity is politically correct, but because overcoming difficult technical challenges requires diverse perspectives. The "right pedigree" is overrated; the right mindset and complementary skills matter far more.
Collaborative Community Over Competition
Traditional accelerators often treat portfolio companies as competitors for attention and resources. Deep tech accelerators must view their founder community as collaborative ecosystems where diversity of experience, background, and perspective drives innovation. When a materials scientist collaborates with a former manufacturing executive and a regulatory attorney, solutions emerge that none could have conceived alone.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
The challenges facing our world — climate change, health crises, geopolitical instability, the uncertainties of AI — demand technological solutions that can only come from deep tech innovation. But these solutions won't emerge from isolated genius working in labs. They require orchestrated collaboration across disciplines, industries, and institutions.
With only 7 years remaining to meet 2030 climate targets, we can't afford 10-year development cycles for carbon reduction technologies. China's recent semiconductor advances highlight how quickly competitors can move when they have comprehensive state-industry coordination. The COVID-19 pandemic showed how regulatory bottlenecks can delay life-saving innovations by years when we needed them in months.
The rise of AI has transformed how we approach complex problems, offering unprecedented ability to analyze data, generate hypotheses, and broaden expertise across domains. AI can accelerate literature reviews, suggest experimental designs, optimize manufacturing parameters, and even predict regulatory pathways. But deep tech's fundamental challenge remains unchanged: experimental ideas must be verified through rigorous testing, performance data must be compared against real-world benchmarks, techno-economic analyses must be validated with actual market conditions, regulatory approvals require human judgment and relationship-building, and manufacturing scale-up demands hands-on problem-solving that no algorithm can replicate.
AI can be a powerful accelerant, but it cannot yet replace the experienced regulatory expert who knows how to navigate an unexpected FDA study requirement, the manufacturing veteran who can troubleshoot pilot plant failures, or the industry executive who can open doors to enterprise customers. The human expertise gap in deep tech has only become more pronounced as AI democratizes information while the need for specialized, experiential knowledge intensifies.
The earlier that experienced professionals get involved and start building trust with founders, the faster these critical technologies can reach market impact.
When a robotics pick-and-place startup connects early with manufacturing experts, regulatory specialists, and automation industry leaders, they don't just get advice — they get a roadmap for navigating the complex path from lab to large-scale deployment. When a biotech founder builds relationships with clinical researchers, FDA experts, and healthcare system leaders, they gain insights that can shave years off their development timeline.
This isn't about hand-holding or reducing founder agency. It's about recognizing that the most transformative technologies require the most comprehensive support systems.
The Bottom Line: Investment in Human Infrastructure
Yes, VCs are right that it's all about the people. But supporting people requires more than capital — it requires comprehensive human infrastructure.
Deep tech accelerators must build dense networks of relationships, expertise, and support that help founders navigate not just the technical challenges of innovation, but the human challenges of building organizations that can scale breakthrough technologies.
In a world facing unprecedented challenges, our only hope lies in collaboration — bringing together the brightest minds with the most experienced hands to build solutions at the speed and scale our problems demand.
Because ultimately, people are our only hope. And people need people to change the world with deep tech innovations.
Why We're Building the Berkeley Gateway Accelerator
These insights — about the inadequacy of traditional VC support, the isolation of brilliant founders, and the desperate need for comprehensive human infrastructure — are precisely why we're building the Berkeley Gateway Accelerator.
We're not building another accelerator that follows the tired playbook of workshops, pitch practice, and demo days. We're building the deep tech support system that founders actually need:
Embedded Support: We hire entrepreneurial fellows from UC Berkeley graduates who work alongside founders daily, helping them acclimate to the Bay Area ecosystem and build crucial early connections. Consider that 40-60% of deep tech startup capital goes to R&D, compared to minimal R&D spending in software. Our entrepreneurial fellows understand these capital-intensive journeys and help founders optimize R&D investments while building the industry relationships that determine commercial success. This isn't occasional mentorship — it's embedded partnership.
Comprehensive Networks: We're deliberately building an ecosystem that spans the entire deep tech value chain. Our LP and advisor base, along with partners, collaborators, and network, includes process engineers from major corporations, regulatory experts, government officials, military and national security professionals, medical experts, financial institution leaders, manufacturing veterans, and sustainability specialists.
This ecosystem approach is informed by our direct access to UC Berkeley's world-class talent pipeline. As co-founder of the UC Berkeley Deep Tech Innovation Lab, I've seen firsthand how the university combines education and research to help bring cutting-edge technology to market, partnering with Berkeley Haas, Berkeley Engineering, and Berkeley Law. This gives BGA unparalleled access to emerging talent—from PhD researchers developing breakthrough technologies to MBA students understanding commercialization strategies to law students navigating IP complexities.
Our entrepreneurial fellows from UC Berkeley graduates aren't just smart generalists; they're individuals who've been immersed in the intersection of advanced research and commercialization through programs that span the entire university ecosystem.
Long-term Commitment: We recognize that deep tech requires extended journeys. Our goal isn't just getting founders to Series A — it's embedding them in networks that will support them through scaled manufacturing and global impact.
Community-Driven Innovation: We're building a collaborative ecosystem where diversity drives breakthrough solutions, bringing together founders, experienced professionals, and domain experts across ages, disciplines, and backgrounds.
The Berkeley Gateway Accelerator represents our commitment to building the human infrastructure that deep tech innovation demands. Because the world's biggest challenges require more than brilliant technology — they require the comprehensive support systems that help brilliant people build world-changing companies.
No matter what, don't forget to Ignore the Confusion!
The Berkeley Gateway Accelerator is reimagining early-stage deep tech support through intensive, collaborative, human-centered programming. Learn more about our approach and apply here.
This post was created with help from Claude and Midjourney