This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Your board re-forms at every round. Learn to read it fast
Last week, we ended on a warning: the board you are managing today is not the board you will face in eighteen months. It changes shape beneath you, round by round, as each new investor-director arrives with an agenda of their own.
The shifts are marked. After a Seed round, the board might be the two co-founders and a single investor. After Series A, the founders, two investor-directors and an independent non-executive may form the new quorum. Each major round brings a new lead, and the new lead takes a seat.
That changing structure does changing work. At each stage the board is, or should be, optimised for a different job: early boards, through Seed and Series A, exist mainly to help find and exploit the early market; later boards turn to growth and company-building of a more classical kind, the shift in emphasis we traced in May. Neither is the better board.
The harder truth sits beneath the structure. Each director at the table has their own agenda. They may all carry the same legal duty to the company, but underneath is a private set of priorities that is theirs alone. Reading those priorities, director by director, is the real work of operating a board well...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Founders, your board doesn't want what it says it wants
Ask most founders what their board wants from a meeting and they will point at the board pack: the metrics, the financials, the update against plan. They are not wrong, exactly. But they are answering the stated question, not the real one. Behind every set of numbers, your directors are running a quieter assessment, and it has almost nothing to do with the slides.
The real question in the room is simpler and far more consequential: does this founder have a grip? Are they ahead of the business or behind it? When something breaks, will they see it first, or will the board? That assessment is being made whether you manage it or not, because the board holds the one power that matters most. It can judge and replace the chief executive. Shikhar Ghosh, the Harvard Business School professor and serial founder, is blunt about what this means: your board meetings are a continuous evaluation of you, dressed up as a review of the company.
So the founders who operate their boards well are not the ones with the most polished decks. They are the ones who understand what is actually being assessed, and who lead the room accordingly.
This is the first of three briefings on making your board work for you rather than against you. We start where it matters most: not with structure or composition, but with the unglamorous business of being seen to be in control...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Why DeepTech companies fail even when the science works
Every DeepTech founder works for years to reach the same moment. The science finally works. The prototype runs to spec. The team has crossed a threshold the wider market has not yet seen. And the founder, having poured years and most of their identity into reaching this point, makes a quiet assumption that turns out to be wrong. They assume the technology will now speak for itself.
It rarely does. The breakthrough is one thing. The commercial opportunity it unlocks is another. Investors, customers, even the team that helped build it can usually grasp the science. What they cannot see, without the founder doing the work to show them, is the business that could be built on top of it. The founder, surprised, blames the market for being slow when the cause is closer to home.
Hailey Eustace, founder of Commplicated, puts it sharply. More than half of DeepTech companies fail within five years, not because the technology let them down but because the founder did. They could not communicate the company well enough, to enough people, to keep it alive.
This is the discipline many DeepTech founders learn too late. And the audience they most often forget is already inside the building...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- The ten-year founder in a five-year VC ecosystem
Most published advice on building startups is written for software founders. Much of it is practically useless in DeepTech. The dominant vocabulary, built on the seminal works of Eric Ries's Lean Startup theory and Steve Blank's Customer Development methodology, was created for software businesses that can build, ship, learn and iterate at speed.
When founders are told to "trust the process", it is this loop of rapid iteration they are being told to trust. The frameworks are excellent in their native context, and they have become foundational to how an entire generation of founders thinks about building a company.
So deeply ingrained have these frameworks become in the startup psyche that they have almost become invisible - their heritage forgotten. Founders absorb the assumptions without noticing they are assumptions, and the venture ecosystem has organised itself around them: the advice columns, the accelerator curricula, the questions investors ask in diligence.
For a DeepTech founder, this creates a problem that is hard to name precisely because it is everywhere. The SaaS rapid iteration loop is the wrong shape for the work. What follows is an exploration of two failure modes it produces, one internal, one external, and what the strongest DeepTech founders do about each...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Term sheet paradox: why DeepTech founders aren't getting AI's leverage
DeepTech is now 45% of UK venture capital investment value, up from 14% in 2021. The 2026 HSBC Innovation Banking Term Sheet Guide reports 71% of UK VCs optimistic about the year ahead, with the same proportion expressing strong conviction in DeepTech specifically, a thirty point year-on-year jump. The headlines say it clearly enough: DeepTech is in favour.
So why are term sheets getting tougher?
That is the question buried inside HSBC's 2026 analysis, drawn from 711 UK term sheets and £11.2bn of investment value, and the question almost no public commentary on the report has surfaced.
The data describes a market that is simultaneously more optimistic in sentiment and tougher in the terms attached to that sentiment. Investor optimism is real. So is the cost of accepting it, paid in the small print of the term sheet.
For UK DeepTech founders raising in 2026, the most useful thing to understand is not the headline mood music but the three axes along which the market has quietly bifurcated underneath it. Stage. Sector. Geography. On each axis, most early-stage founders are sitting on the wrong side of the line...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- What investors already know about your exit prospects - and you probably don't
Most founders, after closing their second institutional round, allow themselves a quiet moment of relief. Two rounds of validation. Two rounds of investor due diligence. Two rounds of someone with significant money on the line saying yes, this company is going somewhere. The instinct that follows is natural: we're on the path now. The hard part is behind us - the exit will come.
The latest data says otherwise. PitchBook's Q1 2026 European Venture Report reveals something most founders would find genuinely uncomfortable to read. A drill down on all European AI companies that have already raised at least two rounds of institutional finance, says 42% are predicted to have no exit at all.
Not failure in the dramatic sense. Just companies that drift sideways, become self-sustaining, get stuck, or quietly run out of momentum without ever reaching a clean ending. After two rounds. After all that effort.
And it’s not just in AI. Similar numbers repeat across other sectors. They should change how every founder thinks from Series A onwards.
This data reveals something else, too: that genuinely useful predictive analytics now exist for venture-backed businesses, but founders rarely see the predictions being made about their own companies...
