Crossing the chasm in DeepTech – the critical role of Business Development in early scaling
 
Most scaleups don’t struggle to find their growth path because the technology doesn't work. They stall because they never reach the commercial tipping point.
 
As we highlighted in our post on crossing the chasm, Geoffrey Moore's foundational insight is that between the early adopters and the early majority lies a major discontinuity - the chasm.
 
Reaching the 15-18% market penetration needed to trigger mainstream adoption and cross the chasm requires winning over visionaries in the early market: buyers who share your belief in why the product matters, even before it's fully proven.
 
Most startups never get there. They stall in the early adoption phase, unable to generate the commercial momentum needed to break through.
 
For Europe's DeepTech founders - building complex solutions that often combine hardware, software, and services - this challenge is magnified. And the critical capability that could accelerate them towards that tipping point has a name that too few founders recognise: Business Development.
 
 
Why DeepTech magnifies the gap
 
DeepTech now accounts for roughly a third of all European venture capital, and the Royal Academy of Engineering's State of UK Deep Tech 2025 confirms a world-class sector powered by research excellence. Yet translating that momentum into commercial traction is where things go wrong.
 
McKinsey's research on European DeepTech highlights the structural challenge. Even the VCs backing these companies need ever more specialist growth teams to assist with go-to-market strategy and operational scaling in ways that simply aren't necessary for pure software.
 
The reason is that DeepTech solutions often involve complex solution architectures - hardware plus software plus services plus integration plus ongoing support. Sales cycles are longer, buyer conversations are multi-level, and the product itself is typically still maturing when the first enterprise customers need to be won.
 
Compounding this is the profile of the founding teams. DeepTech ventures are overwhelmingly led by individuals with technical backgrounds. Many have limited commercial experience. This isn't a weakness - it's the nature of the sector. You don't build a quantum computer or a novel robotics platform without deep scientific expertise.
 
But it does mean that the transition from founder-led selling to a scalable commercial operation is particularly fraught. The founder may be brilliant at explaining the technology to a fellow scientist, but architecting a multi-million-dollar enterprise deal that wraps hardware, software, and services into a compelling commercial proposition? That requires a different kind of expertise. And hiring a conventional salesperson to fill this gap is precisely the wrong move.
 
 
The premature scaling trap
 
Everyone talks about the funding ‘valley of death’. Far fewer talk about its commercial equivalent. Between the phase where the founder personally closes a handful of early deals and the point where a conventional sales team can take over, there is a dangerous gap - a commercial valley of death.
 
As we highlighted in a previous blog post on premature scaling, 74% of startup failures are attributable to premature scaling - and a major dimension of that is hiring a sales team before the product and sales methodology have stabilised.
 
In the early customer engagements, many things will still be shifting: the proposition, the pricing, the delivery model, the buyer persona. That instability is normal as the startup tries to align product/market fit, the go to market strategy, and the business model. It can be lethal if you drop a conventional sales hire into the middle of this.
 
The seeds of destruction are often sown early. Startups that scale properly grow around 20 times faster than those that scale prematurely. Yet the pressure to "hire a sales team" after raising an early round remains one of the most powerful - and dangerous - instincts in the ecosystem.
 
 
The VP of Sales graveyard
 
So what happens when founders make the leap too early? Brendon Cassidy, a serial VP of Sales who built early sales teams at LinkedIn, EchoSign and Talkdesk, estimates that roughly eight out of ten first VP of Sales hires in startups fail. As Cassidy bluntly puts it, get this hire wrong and you lose a year of your startup's life - and for most startups, that's the difference between life and death.
 
The root cause isn't talent. It's context. A VP of Sales is a scaling function - designed to take a proven, repeatable process and expand it. Without that foundation, there is nothing to scale.
 
The data bears this out: startups with a documented sales process before making this hire saw an 83% success rate versus just 34% without one. Someone needs to build that foundation first - and in DeepTech markets, building it means something far more ambitious than just documenting a tidy sales process.
 
It means architecting complete product-and-service solutions for major enterprise opportunities through deep, multi-level customer engagement. It means landing the big, transformative deals with early adopters - the kind of deals that others might say are impossible to close - and generating the commercial momentum that proves the business model works.
 
The insights that flow from these early wins - the ideal customer profile, the solution architecture that cements product/market fit, the forecasting framework, the opportunity qualification criteria - are all byproducts of doing the hard commercial work first.
 
That hard work has a name: Business Development.
 
 
Selling what you don't yet have
 
Business Development and Sales are fundamentally different disciplines, yet most founders conflate them. A good way to think about it: salespeople sell what you have - existing, proven products into defined markets using repeatable processes. Business development people sell what you don't yet have - emerging or incomplete solutions, wrapped in services and close engineering support, to early adopters willing to pioneer alongside you.
 
This is a subtle but crucial distinction. When we say, "what we don't yet have," we don't mean vapourware. We mean a product that isn't fully ready for the mainstream market but, with a services wrapper and hands-on support, could deliver genuine value to the right early customers. That requires a particular skill set; technical fluency, commercial creativity, the ability to operate at multiple levels within a customer organisation, and - critically - access to engineering and product development resources that regular sales people simply don't get.
 
As a16z's Martin Casado observed, in pre-chasm markets a product released into an emerging market typically "lands with a dull thud" and it's up to the company to figure out how to sell it. That's not a challenge you solve by hiring a quota-carrying salesperson. It's a challenge you solve with a hunter.
 
 
Why the best BD people don't build sales teams
 
One misconception we need to address here. Founders often assume that the first Business Development hire should eventually grow into a Head of Sales, building and managing a team. In practice, many of the most effective BD practitioners in DeepTech are individual contributors, not team builders.
 
They are driven by architecting and closing large, mission-critical deals - not by managing headcount. They are heavy hitters who get excited by the landmark customer engagements that define the early trajectory of the company.

Their genius lies in marrying customer advocacy with the needs and limitations of the startup. They are adept at coordinating cross-functional teams: pulling in engineers, product managers, and subject matter experts to shape solutions for demanding early customers.

The BD person creates the conditions under which a sales organisation can eventually succeed - they prove the proposition, build early reference customers, and codify what they've learned into a repeatable methodology. 

But running the team that executes this methodology requires a different profile. The experienced founder recognises this and hires accordingly: one or two BD people first, then - when the playbook is ready - a few salespeople to build further commercial momentum, only hiring a head of sales when the scale justifies it. The sequencing depends on the circumstances, but the principle holds: BD comes first. 
 
 
The methodology moat
 
There is an additional payoff from this approach: the playbooks and processes developed by early BD hires don't just solve a short-term scaling problem. They become a lasting competitive asset - a methodology moat. And this dynamic doesn't only apply in the early stages of a startup's life. Every time a company launches a major new product or service, it re-enters the early market.
 
Even in established businesses, BD managers function almost like mini-CEOs - pioneering new offerings into the installed base, shaping the solution around what early adopters actually need, and only then handing a proven proposition to the sales team for broader rollout.
 
Because DeepTech companies are continually producing new products and capabilities from R&D, the business development cycle never truly ends. BD pioneers a new solution, lessons are codified, the sales team drives broader adoption - and when the next breakthrough emerges, BD does it again.
 
As a16z noted, the most successful enterprise companies find ways to recreate the "zero-to-one" environment for new products even at scale, hiring people who are hustlers and generalists - the business development archetype. Founders who invest in this capability early don't just cross the commercial chasm once. They build an engine that carries them across it every time.
 
For Europe's DeepTech founders, sitting on world-class technology and facing the most complex enterprise sales environments imaginable, this isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between a brilliant technology that stays in the lab and one that changes the world.

 
Let's talk.