Technology's long arc: lessons for founders navigating deep tech

Executive overview

Technology feels new, but most of what we call breakthrough has been decades or centuries in the making. The convergence happening now — AI, robotics, biotech, new materials — is unprecedented in pace but not in kind.

A triple crisis of food, climate, and energy is accelerating. Technology is both the cause and the only credible solution.

The tools exist; what's missing is the urgency and institutional will to deploy them.

Technology is a process, not a snapshot

• The first autonomous car was tested at Carnegie Mellon in the late 1980s.
• A third of US cars were electric in the late 19th century.
• The first streaming music service ran over electrical wires in the early 1920s — 100 years before Spotify.
• Deep tech fields (robotics, machine learning, nanotechnology) spent decades as academic disciplines before reaching commercial viability.
• We overestimate what technology can do in one year and dramatically underestimate what it can do in a decade.

The convergence of deep tech

• Building blocks — compute, materials, sensors — are now cheaper, smaller, and more combinable than ever.
• Fields that were siloed are now stacking: AI + robotics, biotech + data, nanotechnology + manufacturing.
• This compounding effect means the next 30–40 years will outpace the last 50 by a significant margin.
• Timing matters: many technologies existed long before they reached commercial scale; the enabling conditions finally arrived.

The triple crisis

• By 2050 the global population reaches 10 billion; arable land is not expanding to match.
• CO2 concentration in the atmosphere tracks directly to the first industrial revolution — an 18th-century inflection point still compounding today.
• Methane from livestock is a parallel crisis that cannot be solved by carbon reduction alone.
• Unlike COVID, the climate crisis has no single exit ramp. Irreversibility is a real threshold.
• Technology is the only toolkit capable of addressing all three crises simultaneously.

Where the best deep tech investment happens

• The US and Israel are the two dominant hubs for deep tech investment; both offer mature research infrastructure, entrepreneur-friendly regulation, and government as an early adopter.
• The internet, GPS, drones, and space exploration all began with government or military funding, then overflowed into society.
• Proximity to Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York matters — pre-COVID, Guy was on a plane every 40–45 days to stay close to the deal flow.
• 90%+ of Grids Capital's investments are US-based, a deliberate design choice to maximise deployment efficiency.

The social media problem

• Social media has made opinion more powerful than fact in the public square.
• A person with a million followers now shapes reality more effectively than a scientist with proof.
• Governments are using 18th-century institutions to run a 21st-century planet — and it shows.
• The same technology that connects distant people pushes physically present people apart.

Three takeaways for founders and CEOs

1. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Building a better mousetrap and then hunting for mice is a losing strategy. Start from the largest unsolved problem you're willing to dedicate a decade to.
2. Think in decades, execute in quarters. People consistently overestimate one-year output and underestimate ten-year impact. Compound small consistent actions toward a long-horizon goal.
3. Protect silence. Attention spans are shrinking under constant screen bombardment. The best ideas come in unstructured, input-free moments — shower, early morning, a run. Schedule silence deliberately; treat it as a productivity input, not a luxury.