Pontus Stråhlman, Partner at Voima Ventures about NLSDays’ Deep Tech super session interviewed by Chelsea Ranger, Senior advisor, SwedenBIO Do you believe impactful investments are challenging for the deep tech field? Impactful investments are indeed challenging, but for the deep tech field they will quite often – when successful – have a greater-than-average impact. Voima Ventures believes that our investments into deep tech will have a great impact. However, startups have a specific role in commercializing innovations with significant business potential. Too often, entrepreneurs want impact before profits, and this is not a road for success in startups. The impact startups have come from ideas that are highly profitable, where a startup can sell a service with an impact and make profits, then reinvest those profits to grow impact and grow profits. After this reinvestment cycle, you have huge impact with huge profits and that is how startups make a difference. If you try and build a startup out of an idea with too small of a business potential, you will not grow it into significant scale and, hence, your impact will not be significant either. Even worse, if you try to build a startup out of an idea you don't even want (huge) profits from, you are on the wrong track and will not have an impact. Small deep techs are often trapped by developments created for domestic markets and face challenges with approvals when trying to engage foreign markets. What can start-ups do to pre-empt this challenge from the beginning? This is a good goal, with a simple and elegant solution, that, however, is quite difficult to achieve in practice. Telling startups to be "borne global" or "have a global mindset" is easy, yet it easily becomes the startup version of mansplaining, where investors tell entrepreneurs simplistic anecdotes that bear little resemblance in the entrepreneurs’ daily lives. There's been talk about creating a deep tech ecosystem, but could the solution be to not box deep tech into its own category and rather try to integrate the deep tech ecosystem with the broader startup ecosystem? Also, as innovations often derive from academia, is one solution to this problem that you do not spin innovations out of the university until they have grown into a global business potential. For scale-up and larger companies, innovating while managing the demand of technology improvements and putting data to good use is also a challenge. How can the industry work together through partnering and converging to created marked improvements without draining resources? And can greater engagement between small and large companies help to service this demand? For scale-up and larger companies, innovating while managing the demand of technology improvements and putting data to good use is a challenge. Can greater engagement between small and large companies help to service this demand? Deep tech companies sometimes partner too early with large companies, thereby limiting their commercial opportunities in the future. While we do see (and encourage) co-operation between our portfolio companies and large corporations, we always urge for caution, and remind that no deal with a large corporation is far better than a bad deal with a large corporation. What is vital in deep tech is that startups understand the whole value chain in the industry in which they are working. Quite often a startup with a deep tech innovation will need to co-operate with other industry players in order to get the innovation to market. Thank you so much Pontus and see you in Malmö! Super Session 1 28 September 2022 Diving into deep tech – from buzzword to benefit in life sciences