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A collection of 35 issues

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The Assumption Nobody Thought to Test.

The Valley of Death has a well-documented address: the gap between R&D funding and commercial revenue. The last three autopsies examined the conditions that create it. This edition moves inside it — specifically, the assumption risk that accumulates quietly while the technical curve advances and the commercial curve

India Didn't Fund Deep Tech. It Redefined It. There's a Difference.

India rewrote a definition. Europe launched another fund. One of these will matter in 2035. Two weeks ago we examined why capital conditions have structurally shifted and will not reverse. Last week we examined why Germany’s capital went into the wrong category. This week: what happens when the instrument

The Wrong Bet

Germany didn't miss a PayPal moment. It funded the one startup category where its structural advantages are worthless. Last week I wrote about structural shifts in innovation funding — why the 2021 capital environment isn't coming back and what that means for how founders should think about

Innovation Funding Is Not Broken. It Just Works Differently Now — And That's the Problem

AI mega-deals are pulling venture numbers upward. The deal count — the one that actually tells you whether founders like you are getting funded — quietly fell 20.6% in 2025. Innovation funding is a tale of two worlds right now. Most business plans were written for a third one that

Lost In Translation

The Prototype Feedback Problem The Assumption The prototype works. The technical validation is done. Structured feedback sessions have taken place, notes are filed, the team has reviewed them. You are, by any reasonable measure, doing everything right. The assumption driving the next phase: usability feedback is an input to the

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The MVP Trap

Why "build the minimum thing and learn fast" is the sentence that sends deep tech founders into the wrong valley entirely. The Assumption Somewhere between 2011 and 2015, the startup world reached a consensus. Eric Ries had published The Lean Startup. Y Combinator was producing a generation of

The West Got Expensive. The IMF Blamed China.

Why simple answers feel true — and what the complex reality is actually costing us. The Assumption A widely circulated narrative — recently amplified by IMF data — goes roughly like this: China's state subsidies, undervalued currency, and export-led growth model flooded Western markets with artificially cheap goods. That price

The Defense Tech Bonanza for Startups

Why the Doctrine That Opened the Door to New Entrants Cannot Tell You What Is on the Other Side The Assumption The signal has rarely been clearer in three decades. Governments across NATO are spending on defense at a pace not seen since the Cold War. The EU has committed

The 'Deep Tech' Prototyp Trap

Why 'you've proven the technology' is the sentence that kills more deep tech founders than any other. The Assumption You built something that works. In the lab, on the bench, in the demo room — it actually works. The investors in the front row have just seen

De-Risking in Theory, Dependency in Practice: The Merz Beijing Delegation

You've been told Germany is de-risking from China. The delegation that flew to Beijing tells a different story — and the gap between the two is not hypocrisy. It is structural. 1. The Assumption The official position, repeated across Brussels, Berlin, and a dozen policy documents since 2023,

When Rules Become Deals: How the EU’s Cupra Exemption Erodes Trust in the Single Market

You've been told the single market runs on rules. The Cupra* exemption shows how fast it can shift back to deals. *High performance brand from SEAT (VW Group) 1. The Assumption The comforting story goes like this: trade law in the EU is neutral, rules-based, and predictable.

Quo Vadis Carbon Pricing in Europe?

The Pivot We’re Not Making By Manfred Lueth — February 2026 The Reckoning Disguised as a Trade Fair Opening in Essen this week, E‑world 2026 marks its 25th anniversary as Europe’s leading energy trade fair. The mood feels less celebratory than diagnostic. What began in 2001 as an

When Sanctions drive Strategy - Nvidia and the Cost of Policy

Where This Story Actually Begins In the past decade, government intervention has quietly re-entered domains that were long treated as market-led: energy, semiconductors, telecoms, AI. The assumption behind this return was simple and widely shared: strategic industries can be steered through targeted constraints without destabilising the underlying business

$600 Billion Later: A 1-year autopsy of the day DeepSeek "broke" Nvidia.

A Wider Zoom: How the AI Story Was Supposed to Go For much of the 2020s, the emerging AI sector was shaped — technologically, economically, and narratively — by a small group of predominantly North American companies. They trained the largest models. They controlled the largest compute clusters. They attracted the largest

Innovation Doesn’t Survive Politics. The System Breaks Them Both.

The Claim Under the Knife Politicians are too risk-averse to innovate. Innovators, by contrast, can simply import their problem-solving mindset into politics and do it better. The Reality Both claims confuse individual capability with role constraints. What looks like a failure of imagination is usually the result of