I had just graduated from college and taken a job with Xerox. (I truly had no idea what I was doing in terms of my career, which is a longer, different story). I was beginning to learn that I loved technology. I can still vividly remember sitting in a conference room playing with the Xerox Star workstation. The mouse, the icons, the graphical interface. I felt a visceral excitement. I thought the technology was magical. Xerox PARC had created what I saw as a masterpiece. I sold some of those early Star workstations to a Washington DC publishing firm.

Most people know what happened next. The ability to fully commercialize that extraordinary technology at scale was lost on Xerox. Apple and Microsoft built billion-dollar empires on what Xerox invented.

That commercialization challenge continues today, charged by hyperbolic innovation cycles. For deep tech companies it is not just difficult; it is a categorically different challenge.

The 2023 European Deep Tech Report found that deep tech ventures typically need 35% more time and 50% more capital than traditional startups to reach $5M in recurring revenue. The average time to Series A is approximately 18 months longer than for a software startup. And while a software product might reach market readiness in 18 months, deep tech products typically require five to ten years. Researchers call this gap the Valley of Death.

CB Insights analyzed hundreds of startup post-mortem reports and found one cause above all others: 42% built something with no existing market need. They failed not because the technology didn’t provide value, but because the market was not built to recognize it.

True innovation rarely originates from a focus group. Technology that is new, different, and ahead of its time does not arrive with a ready, educated market. The paradigm shift that creates extraordinary value is the same thing that makes it difficult to build the market. Creating use cases that never existed, reshaping how problems can be solved, in many cases involve significantly changing human behavior.

That is when go-to-market strategy, from the outset, is existential.

In 1994 mathematician Peter Shor developed an algorithm that changed everything we thought we knew about computational barriers.

Classical computers take what computer scientists call a brute force approach, factoring large numbers by testing possibilities sequentially, one by one. For large enough numbers the problem becomes effectively unsolvable. No shortcut and a lot of grinding. Time is the key variable that supports success.

Shor’s Algorithm doesn’t brute-force the problem. It finds the hidden periodicity in the number, an underlying pattern invisible to classical approaches, and collapses what was laborious and time-driven into something more immediately solvable. Shor’s Algorithm is the reason quantum computing threatens RSA encryption. It doesn’t work harder. It reframes the problem entirely and in doing so, collapses the time to resolution.

Most deep tech founders take a similar brute force approach, exhaustively working through every relationship, every demo, every warm introduction, one by one, with no map of the underlying pattern. It works eventually, but only if you have the time.

Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2026 is plain about the consequence: “The S-curves are compressing. The distance between emerging and mainstream is collapsing. The traditional playbook assumed you had time to get it right. That assumption no longer holds.”

Deep tech companies already operating under 35% longer timelines and 50% higher capital requirements cannot afford to brute-force their go-to-market. There is little runway for trial and error. Finding the pattern early drives outsized results.

Ecosystem intelligence is your Shor’s Algorithm.

It finds the underlying pattern — the precise buyer, the genuine white space in the ecosystem, the right channel motion, the acquirer already visible but perhaps not yet apparent — and collapses complexity into something addressable and executable.

The four gaps I see most consistently in deep tech companies aren’t four separate problems. They are the hidden periodicity waiting to be found:

· Who is the precise buyer — and what specific, urgent problem does this solve for them that nothing else does?

· Where does this sit in the ecosystem stack — genuine white space or entrenched player?

· What is the right channel motion — embedded technology, joint sales, licensing, or a combination?

· And who, in three to five years, will want to acquire this — and are you building toward them today?

Find the periodicity across those four dimensions and the market complexity begins to resolve. Target customers become easier to prioritize. The channel becomes clearer. The exit becomes visible.

Miss it and you’re running a classical algorithm in a quantum market — brute-forcing a problem that Shor’s Algorithm could solve, if you let it.

If you are enjoying the physics and want to learn more about Shor’s Algorithm from Peter Shor himself - check out this YouTube video:

Quantum physics turns out to be a surprisingly illuminating lens for a foundational pillar of company success: ecosystem strategy. A little physics. A lot of business reality. And a bit of fun.

This series is called Ecosystem Entanglement™ — A practitioner’s view on the physics of ecosystems and the commercialization of deep tech in hyperbolic markets.

It is written for founders, investors, private equity and enterprise leaders, as well as for anyone who has ever said “we’re not ready for ecosystem yet.” Feel free to bring your questions. Look forward to the dialogue.

A note on the quantum physics: we borrow from it lightheartedly throughout this series. Not to oversimplify a beautiful science, but because entanglement, superposition, decoherence, and Einstein’s famous skepticism turn out to be surprisingly illuminating lenses for the strategic challenges of building and scaling technology companies today.

The physics is real. The business challenges are real. The connection between them is — we’d argue — a little bit spooky.

Electrons don’t “know” they’re being watched. To measure them you use light (photons) which physically disturbs their wave-like nature. The disturbance isn’t intentional. It’s caused by the nature of the instrument being used to measure. The closer and more entangled the observer, the more contaminated the result.

The result is never purely the state of the particle. It is the state of the particle as changed by the act of looking at it. It’s not about consciousness or intent. It’s just physics.

Founders and innovators have exactly this problem.

You are running the newest version of your product or your latest idea past your network. Your Rolodex is your “instrument of measure.” You want feedback from your network about the value of what you have created.

Think about who your Rolodex represents. The colleague who backed you in your last role. The investor who believes in you as a person. The customer who bought from you before and wants to see you win again. The friend who has watched you build something from nothing and is genuinely rooting for you.

These are not neutral observers. They come to every conversation already entangled with you — with your history, your credibility, your shared relationship. Their bias isn’t dishonesty or flattery. It’s something more fundamental: the relationship itself changes what they measure and how they report it.

That’s the Observer Effect at work. The result is contaminated by proximity, loyalty, and genuine goodwill. Your friendlies respond not just to the technology — but to you. They cannot separate those two things and neither can you.

So you walk away thinking you have validated your product. But what you actually need is to validate your market.

The question shouldn’t be “is the technology interesting?” You need to answer a harder question — one that demos, Rolodexes, and networking events can’t answer:

How does this technology create value within the ecosystem around it?

Who are the natural buyers — and what specific, urgent problem does this solve for them that nothing else does? Where does this sit in the stack — and is there genuine white space, or does an entrenched player already own that position? What are the right channel motions — embedded technology, joint sales, licensing, or a combination? Which investors will find the thesis compelling? Who will help embed, propel and drive your vision forward? And who, in three to five years, will want to acquire this — and are you building toward them today?

Those questions span product, investors, channel, and exit. They are ecosystem questions — not technology questions. And they require an undisturbed measurement that is not proximate to you. They require you to reach into the space where you don’t know what you don’t know; built not from who you know, but from what the market actually tells you when proximity isn’t distorting the result.

That’s what a well-researched go-to-market strategy does. It removes the Observer Effect. It maps the white spaces, the product integration points, the channel dynamics, the buyer personas, the acquisition signals — and builds a clear picture of where the technology creates genuine, differentiated value in the world around it.

And once you have that strategy then take it to your network based on their alignment to your go-to-market plan. Identify exactly who you need to reach — the right level, the right function, the right company — and then use your relationships to open those specific doors. Don’t waste your time on meetings that simply seek product validation. Be deliberate and understand what each outreach could bring you in the context of your longer-term business goals, and drive the desired outcome.

Your Rolodex is not a market strategy, and it can’t truly validate your product. No matter how brilliant an offering, if there is no market for it, no ecosystem to propel it, it is not valuable. But in the hands of someone who has done the ecosystem work first — who knows precisely where the technology creates value and who benefits from that value — the Rolodex becomes a remarkably powerful tool.

Build the ecosystem GTM strategy at formation and then activate your network against that plan.

If you are enjoying the physics and want to learn more about the Observer Effect and Wave-Particle Duality - check out this YouTube video:

Quantum physics turns out to be a surprisingly illuminating lens for a foundational pillar of company success: ecosystem strategy. A little physics. A lot of business reality. And a bit of fun.

This series is called Ecosystem Entanglement™ — A practitioner’s view on commercializing deep tech in hyperbolic markets.

It is written for founders, investors, private equity and enterprise leaders, as well as for anyone who has ever said “we’re not ready for ecosystem yet.” Feel free to bring your questions. Look forward to the dialogue.

A note on the quantum physics: we borrow from it lightheartedly throughout this series. Not to oversimplify a beautiful science, but because entanglement, superposition, decoherence, and Einstein’s famous skepticism turn out to be surprisingly illuminating lenses for the strategic challenges of building and scaling technology companies today.

The physics is real. The business challenges are real. The connection between them is — we’d argue — a little bit spooky.

#ecosystems #quantum #commercialization #startup #valuecreation

Entanglement creates capabilities neither particle could achieve alone. It is the basis of quantum computing power, quantum cryptography, and quantum networking.

Entanglement can also drive errors to propagate instantly. Decoherence (interference from the environment) can corrupt the entangled state. And once entangled, you cannot cleanly separate without consequences.

Albert Einstein hated this idea. He called it “spooky action at a distance,” and he meant it as a criticism. Surely, he argued, the universe couldn’t actually work this way. There had to be a rational, local explanation. Objects affect what’s immediately around them. Nothing reaches instantly across distance.

He was wrong. In 2022, physicists Aspect, Clauser, and Zeilinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics for proving that quantum entanglement is real. Particles genuinely share a unified state regardless of distance. Some theorists believe entanglement is the fundamental glue that holds space-time itself together. That without it, the fabric of reality doesn’t cohere.

Ecosystem is the same kind of glue for a company — the non-separable connective tissue between product, partnerships, competition, revenue, retention and exit. When it’s built in from the beginning everything compounds. When it’s ignored, decoherence can set in. The connection between what you’re building and where the market is going breaks down.

Ecosystem is not simply a channel engagement model that is bolted onto a sales strategy for a Series B raise. It is not just joint pipeline calls or market placements. Ecosystem informs the strategic architecture of your company and its ultimate value. It’s a foundational component everything else should be built on from the very beginning.

When you embed ecosystem into your company from formation, your product decisions, your partnerships, your positioning, your exit thesis become entangled in that same quantum sense. Non-separable. The state of one changes all the others.

Quantum physics turns out to be a surprisingly illuminating lens for a foundational pillar of company success: ecosystem strategy. A little physics. A lot of business reality. And a bit of fun.

Starting next Tuesday I’m launching a series called Ecosystem Entanglement™ — a practitioner’s view on commercializing deep tech in hyperbolic markets.

It is written for founders, investors, private equity and enterprise leaders, as well as for anyone who has ever said “we’re not ready for ecosystem yet.” Feel free to bring your questions. Look forward to the dialogue.

A note on the quantum physics: we borrow from it lightheartedly throughout this series. Not to oversimplify a beautiful science, but because entanglement, superposition, decoherence, and Einstein’s famous skepticism turn out to be surprisingly illuminating lenses for the strategic challenges of building and scaling technology companies today.

The physics is real. The business challenges are real. The connection between them is — we’d argue — a little bit spooky.

#ecosystems #quantum #commercialization #startup #valuecreation