Deep tech founders have a communication problem… They know too much.

That was the starting point when we flew Matt Abrahams out from the US to spend a day with a room full of our portfolio companies. 

Matt teaches strategic communication at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, hosts the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast, and has coached everyone from world leaders to Fortune 500 execs on exactly the problem our founders live with daily. He calls it the “curse of knowledge” – you’re so deep in the science, the IP, the ten years of R&D, that you forget your audience hasn’t been on that journey with you. Add the “curse of passion” (you care so much about this) and you get founders who go too deep, too fast, and lose the room.

For a Fund built on backing scientists and engineers turning breakthrough research into companies, we feel this more than most. Our founders aren’t short on substance, they’re literally building the future of our critical systems – quantum sensors, deception-based cyber defence, ammonia from air and water. 

The substance isn’t the problem, it’s the delivery that sometimes is.

Start with the audience, not the message

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The single biggest mistake in communication, Matt argued, is starting with “here’s what I want to say” instead of “here’s what my audience needs.” Before you write a word, you need to know their knowledge level, their attitudes, what’s making them hesitant, and what actually motivates them. Skip that step and you’re writing a love letter addressed “to whom it may concern.”

For deep tech in particular, this matters because your audiences are wildly different from one meeting to the next – an LP who wants risk-adjusted returns, a journalist who’s never heard of your category, a technical hire who wants to know if the science is real. One message doesn’t always serve all three.

Have an actual goal

Matt’s simplest, most useful idea: every communication needs a goal with three parts – what you want your audience to know, how you want them to feel, and what you want them to do. Most of us obsess over the first and forget the other two, but people don’t act on information alone. They act on information plus emotion.

Matt had a line for us that brought this to life: “Tell the time, don’t build the clock.” Founders love showing their work – the years of R&D, the ten failed prototypes before the breakthrough. But your audience usually doesn’t need the mechanism, they need the outcome. 

If someone wants to know how the clock was built, they’ll ask. Save the detail for the follow-up question, not the opening pitch.

Structure isn’t bureaucracy, it’s kindness

Founders often resist structure because it feels like it’s slowing them down. 

Matt’s counter was simple: unstructured information is forgettable, and a good structure is what stops you losing your audience… like a tour guide who never leaves anyone behind. 

Structure helps give people’s brains something to hold onto so your idea survives contact with a distracted, time-poor listener.

The takeaway?

None of this is about dumbing down deep tech. It’s about respecting the fact that brilliant science still needs a translator, and that translator is usually the founder. 

In deep tech, the science is the hard part but it’s rarely the reason a raise stalls, a story doesn’t land, or a brilliant hire says no. Communication is what turns a breakthrough into capital, customers, and belief. It’s the multiplier on everything else you’ve built. 

As Matt put it to the room: “the most precious commodity in the world today is attention.” 

Win it, and everything else gets easier.

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