A new generation of researcher founders think like engineers: Devika Thapar & Ale Maiano, Co-founders at Wilbe

0:00Devika Thapar:Hello and welcome to the Scaling Europe show presented by Deal. This episode is sponsored by SurrealDB, the multimodal database for AI agents. Omni, the AI analytics platform trusted by growing companies like Perplexity and Symbesia and VentureComet, the platform that gives startups and scale-ups real-time equity tracking, daily business insights and automated management information. Thank you for joining me. Please like, comment and subscribe.

0:33Devika Thapar:Hello and welcome back to Scaling Europe show. I'm Sid Johnson. Today we have two great guests, the co-founders of Wilbur. We've got Devika and Ali. Wilbur is the VC firm for turning, I guess, like scientists with academic breakthroughs or amazing research into founders of amazing and enduring companies. You've been around for five or six years already. You've seen a lot of success in some great portfolio companies that we can get into. But the thing I really want to talk about is Build Weeks. Can one of you give the high level introduction to what it is and why you've done it?

1:01Ale Maiano:Sure. I'll tell you what it is and Ali can dig into the why. It's certainly our most wildest ambition yet. Blue Weeks are essentially very intense online weekly cohorts for scientists and engineers to go anywhere from an idea to to an investment decision and or investment readiness within seven days. That's what it is. Moving away from a batch model, which we had historically, to basically allowing us to work with many, many, many more researchers, over a thousand, at least this year, versus what we used to do, which was probably 80 to 100 in a year. Wow.

1:47Devika Thapar:I mean, that's 10x. That's crazy. can you kind of give a bit of like flavor to what does a build week actually look like the experience for those who are invited to join a weekly cohort starts on on the friday with a kickoff session and then probably the most intense period of the week is actually during the weekend where we are pushing them to go through a lot of the material and a lot of the tutorials that we have been building over the last five, six years. And the end product of that is that by Monday, they submit their first version of the material that we want them to complete. This is not the final submission, but it's in effect their first attempt at putting together for some their first version of a deck or their first financial model.

2:35Devika Thapar:And then we do have two office hours on Monday evening and Tuesday evening, typically, where we're able to answer any immediate urgent questions that they may have about the material they're putting together and really push them to come up with the best version of the company possible. And then by Wednesday, we ask them to submit what is in effect their final version of all of the documents. So they're able to, in effect, improve their material over time and have co-founders to meet. And that final submission really is the material that then we can look at during Wednesday evening and Thursday and decide which of the founders that have taken part of the cohort we would wish to meet on a one-on-one basis and further the conversation for investment.

3:25Devika Thapar:By Friday, Friday morning that is, they receive an email that recaps the great work that they have done. So in effect, they can take the material, which now looks almost like a data room or like the first attempt at a data room. and we offer some early insight around the pieces that we liked or the places for improvement. For some, we say, this is great stuff. We are ready to talk investment. For others, we say, we would like to dig deeper. And for others, we say, this is not for us, but here are a few suggestions that may help you as you take on the founder challenge. And by the time that we have done that, then we start looking at the next cohort, which kicks off on the same day on the Friday evening with a new set of founders.

4:15Devika Thapar:That must be very intense. Can we talk about the why then? Why did you move to this model to try and see 10x as many people? And why is definitely the way that we frame all of our thinking and all of our product development. It started off with four or five years of experience, a beautiful experience, very, very insightful at trying to change the paradigm over how science was commercialized. And we started off with the premise that there was a fundamental asset that was undervalued and undersupported within academia, which was the inventor itself, the scientist. And so we started thinking, hold on, what if we start teaching these guys what it means to be a founder?

5:02Devika Thapar:in a class style, so in cohorts. And then from there, we can then pick those scientists that had the potential of becoming founders, and then we invest in those. And traditionally, the class was three cohorts a year, 20 people, each about 500 applications per year. And it was very, very intense nonetheless, and it required a lot of logistics. And the classes were successful. That's how we identified. We got to meet. We had the privilege of supporting some of the founders that have become anchor performers for our first fund, like Carta Expression Edits, Francesco da Proxima, Shamet at Arapoha.

5:48Devika Thapar:So that model really was very, very good at demonstrating that scientists can become founders. But what we realized is that it had become almost inefficient. So as operators, we were spending more time marketing the program and then going through the selection process and then offering the places and then eventually kicking the program off, which may have been three months to six months down the line. and then we still had to deliver the program and carry out the selection. Well, we realized that the best founders from our experience in working with Francesco and Shamit and the rest is that the best founders, they want to move very, very quickly and they want to have answers in effect today and particularly at a time in society where you can answer not perfect answers, but you can't find good enough answers through Charged GPT, for example, through the network.

6:50Devika Thapar:So things change wildly over the last four or five years where we said, hold on a second, if we digitize all of the repeatable work that we do, so all of the same classes about the basics, for example, and if we upload and open source the materials like the DAX and the financial models, then we can short circuit the amount of knowledge transfer that that that we need to do with every cohort and just focus on providing ourselves in person to answer real question real practical question where we can share our operational know-how and how's it going so far i mean i had a look on the website you've been running these since it looks at the beginning of january you're in what week eight or nine it looks like how's it been in the first couple of months pretty good

7:38Ale Maiano:we're on week uh we're in week seven we're actually running a fusion build week now with uh with proxima which is pretty exciting so i think the cool thing is that now that we've sped up the engine so fast we can kind of direct it the way you know the way we think is best so we could run on a thematic build week with fusion or fertility. We did one in fertility a few weeks ago. Robotics is coming up two weeks later or at a talent ecosystem like Cambridge, Imperial, EPFL, for example. So I think now, actually it's pretty cool. Since we started in Jan, we've had approximately 80 folks go to complete build weeks, go through build weeks.

8:22Ale Maiano:And that's what we used to do in a year. Wow. Yeah, so we've got one investment deployed and then two more in the making that we hope to execute this week.

8:33Devika Thapar:Amazing. That's phenomenal. So one already, two more in the works. What about that one investment kind of stood out to you? You know, what was it about that founder or that team that made you think, OK, this is who we want to back?

8:46Ale Maiano:Yeah, I mean, I'll let Ali kind of continue. I will just say the first thing is so much for us. I mean, everyone applying already has a solid pedigree just by virtue of these are researchers coming from the top institutions in Europe, sometimes in the US. So everyone's published in the top journals. So I think the science is incredibly strong majority of the time. I think the thing which is what the week allows us to do is really see the speed of execution and understand how founders think. and both of those are probably the two key things that we're looking for in order to inform hey, is this something we want to work on together between the founders and us?

9:37Devika Thapar:Amazing. So go ahead. I think from an investment perspective a particular full-time researcher that did the program and then we were aligned we invested but on the premise that she, in that case, would basically put out of office for a few weeks and just move to the Bay Area. And he left, in effect, one week after the completion of the investment and spent time in the Bay Area and came back after that with a whole different mindset and idea about what the next proper round would look like and with partnerships, which is really a way of venturing almost like in the old days of Wagoneers, making their way across the continent, just gunning for it, which is a great signal for us.

10:33Devika Thapar:Yeah, I mean, I've heard that people who go, they do come back with a sort of reframed level of ambition and that just being in that ecosystem around other builders can just be transformative. I want to ask, how are you both finding it? I mean, this must have been such a step up in intensity and such a different job. You even was undertaken from doing a few cohorts a year to now doing this week after week, dozens of people. What's the transition been like?

10:58Ale Maiano:I won't lie. When Ali first said, we're going to do 52 build weeks, I think with my semi-operational hat, I was like, what?

11:11Ale Maiano:but you know in reality it's actually been pretty seamless and and none of this would have been possible had we not been building will be for the past few years i think because we've done all of that the engine has been built of course we keep improving upon it but because the engine exists we can make it repeatable because we have developed an archetype of what looks like a great founder to us we can make those decisions a lot more a lot more quickly and of course we have a incredible team uh very small but incredible team that's allowed us to execute with with also this kind of speed and and these deep partnerships and collaborations that we've had with universities right from when we started uh which is a whole different story that allows us to kind of get embedded into research ecosystems a lot quicker.

12:04Devika Thapar:I want to ask about the general ecosystem. And I guess the problem that you're trying to solve with will be that the gap that we have in the sense that Europe has got some of the best technical universities of anywhere in the world, some of the best founders, some of the best academics, some of the best researchers, but we haven't been able to always translate that to the the best commercial successes. I want to ask that firstly, why do you think that that has been a problem historically? And then I also want to ask about the relationship that you have with universities. You know, one of the things that Europe has been criticized for academic institutions in Europe is their own venture type programs.

12:39Devika Thapar:So number one, I want to talk about why Europe has failed to capitalize on the academic excellence that we have. And then number two, your relationship with universities and their own venture programs. I don't think there are many places in the world that have managed to capitalize on researchers in eventual scale. In fact, Stanford perhaps is the greatest example I can think of. Historically speaking, the East Coast is as behind as Europe in many places. So it's not specifically a European problem. It's an academic issue. As we discovered, as non-scientists ourselves and non-VCs, we didn't kind of inherit the issues.

13:27Devika Thapar:We just realized that there was an opportunity that was not exploited in effect. And so we started off from the premise of we're not going to look at all of the drawbacks of working with scientists or having to juggle through bureaucracy or changing mindsets. We're just going to focus on the upside of the time that is present. And so in a way, we never kind of tried to solve existing infrastructural problems. We just built our own infrastructure. And that naturally has led to those scientists that were comfortable away from the traditional way of doing things to move towards us. and that served as well.

14:11Devika Thapar:We tried for a few years to change things at an institutional level, if you like, by advising governments across Europe and being part of spin-out reviews and all of that. Fundamentally, you can't teach venture and venture is something that it's an innate drive. It's not a profession in our eyes. And so whenever you're seeing institutional bodies setting up programs, they tend to be just copycats of, you know, just another version of a similar model. And we've seen them all. We've seen Let's Match scientists with MBAs. We've seen different versions of retired executives with scientists. We've seen angel investors with scientists.

14:58Devika Thapar:And all of those may have produced companies, but they are all subpar companies because they are, in effect, trying to protect the interest of the institution as opposed to the interest of the founders and hence that of the company. So they prioritize the wrong thing from the beginning. And it's very difficult to build on such weak foundations, at least to build a generational company almost on a biased company. and do you think then that universities have played a role in almost holding back scientists becoming entrepreneurs yeah and very very happy for you to clip this absolutely right i don't think that they've done so in in bad face i think the majority of universities they were presented with a problem initially whereby they had so much um you know ip being being filed and and needed to be licensed that they needed to build their own engines but over time i think that there has been there have been different hubs that thought of the venture world as almost like an arm of the university that could generate revenue particularly where universities are now striving to generate the same amount of income from donations from taxpayers funding or from regular fees and so there has been this mindset of kind of creating corporate venture vehicles in certain universities.

16:29Devika Thapar:I think the smarter universities are accepting that that is not their role and they're just trying to be on the side of founders. So for example, and I'm happy to give a shout out to universities like ETH in Europe and universities like UT Austin in the US, they have taken a very practical founder first approach that is allowing them to in effect attract talent rather than capturing it okay that's interesting i'm also interested to hear your view on how that or i guess the the change in focus areas that you're seeing scientists build in you know over the last five or six years ecosystem has changed technology has changed rapidly we're seeing a lot of more money go towards things like deep tech and of course proxima fusion one of your amazing portfolio companies we're seeing more being built in in energy and resilience defense, robotics.

17:21Devika Thapar:Are you seeing that reflected in the ambitions of the scientists that you're working with? Are they now solving very different problems than they were four or five years ago?

17:31Ale Maiano:Yeah, I think definitely. I think when we started, we had this inkling that there's a new generation of researchers that are emerging and that these will be far more hungry and switched on to be able to solve problems using you know the vehicle of of capitalism and we we knew we also had an inkling that a lot of a lot of them will be computational so you know there's the compute no no one's just a biologist anymore they're a computational biologist computational physicist a computational chemist but if that has only been like amplified enormously into what we're seeing now so much so that because of that combination, you basically have a researcher who thinks like an engineer.

18:17Ale Maiano:And that's what you actually want if you're building a company. And in the nature of someone who can move with speed, but can also move with a certain clarity of thinking, much like a lot of top engineer founders do an exhibit. And that has short-circuited the build time for some very, very deeply scientific companies, whether that's in the life sciences domain, material sciences domain, or like, you know, AI infrastructure and energy. So we're seeing that more and more. And I think an interesting kind of shift, or maybe, I don't know if it's a shift, I think some people have probably seen it for a longer time.

19:03Ale Maiano:I think with that, we're seeing younger founders as well. Not just historically, we have the postdoc founder, which has 10 to 15 years of experience, top of their, you know, top of their game in terms of scientific know-how, research, having worked across different labs in the world. But now you, I think because that there's this potential to realize your ideas through different paths. You see it, sometimes you see it being realized sooner. I think there's a double edged sword there for us as will be, because I think one of the core things we look at is the depth of know-how and insight when you're trying to solve a problem versus just going for the scientific or engineer founder that wants to pursue the career path of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, which is very different.

19:59Devika Thapar:Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, it's definitely a trend that we're seeing across the entirety of the ecosystem. When you look at the ecosystem, you look at the areas that are sort of getting more attention from traditional VCs, you're seeing more generalist VCs trying to move into deep tech. Does that influence the type of people that you're looking for at all now that you're seeing certain sectors attract more funding, more attention? or are you always laser focused on just finding the best founders in whatever field they're in? Within the venture ecosystem, we sit upstream of traditional VCs.

20:33Devika Thapar:So we are, in fact, the first check. And in a sense, it's great that there is an ecosystem being built around us because it allows us to have more optionality on where the company is built. But ultimately, the preferred founders, the preferred VCs are the ones that have experience at commercializing research or commercializing product. And so, in effect, there may be a lot of GPs around in Europe right now that have the ability to deploy cash in deep tech. That's what the H2 says, and that's what H2, you know, European sovereign wealth funds. but the preference always goes for funds that have been started by exited founders and all that or by operators but people within within industry and so that's a very small group of investors in in europe it's a it's a very tight pocket which are in effect become very close friends of ours some of them a good proportion of them are actually lps in our funds and that creates almost like a almost like a family experience for our founders whereby the transition from us which are the first uh the first flavor of business and then they they move on to aligned uh investors that um that can help them with the journey after that um deep tech is a is a wild term right now i don't know how much interest there is for any other form of tech other than that than this today it's just the expectations from from lps and and uh and that's great however it also has to be qualified around uh what's the level of technical risk that you're willing to to take and uh expectation on return and so a lot of our companies you know if you look at nuclear fusion or if you look at uh you know even single access therapeutics which we do less of but also we have worked on and or you know new chemicals they they don't necessarily have a venture profile and so the the risk is that there's so much more money to be deployed in deep tech and the majority of the companies coming through, they have this high capex profile and the majority of investors, they're just putting in the money because they're afraid of losing the deal.

22:53Devika Thapar:But then they're not able to support the founder and really realizing what needs to be done to build such a company. And so what you find potentially is a lot of good technical talent that was able to raise, say, three, four million without having an adult in the room on helping them make good you know good decisions they're certainly very vocal online about the fact that they've been able to raise but they're not necessarily setting themselves up to be successful if you like industrialists because ultimately this is what we're trying to build at will be we're trying to build a generation of industrialists and so yeah it sounds like that definitely is a problem that we don't have enough uh ex-scientist entrepreneur founders leading vcs we we do have a lot of generalist species who are trying to dip their toe in would you like to would you like to i guess would you see will be playing that role further down the line like would you like to raise later stage funds helping them bring bringing on more ex-founders ex-operators trying to not just help at the very very early stage which is very right now but also as they grow mature in scale so we'll take this recording i will send it to a couple of uh a couple of endowments in the US and see what happens.

24:05Devika Thapar:So the time being, the model is designed to focus on, you know, what we're going to do, which is identifying not really just good scientists, but good individuals. So it's, you know, our science is behavioral. It's a social science. And so the model that we have built is so that we can really get under the skin of individuals and support them even before they have an idea about what to build. So that kind of work doesn't really work at a later stage, unless you're talking about continuously investing in the companies that we build, which is an issue because if you have a small fund in science and you have a pre-seed round of 8 million and then the Series A is 100, then how do you maintain your...

25:00Devika Thapar:And you like that company. How do you maintain your... And that's a problem that so far we have dealt with by doing side vehicles with our LPs, which is a bit of sweat, if you like, but has worked so far. But it's a good question. I'm more on the side of building the companies, if you like, and securing the talent. and D is on the side of actually engineering our fund ambitions. So maybe she has some ideas to propose to us right now.

25:32Ale Maiano:Yeah, I mean, I would say we're doing what we're good at and we want to continue to become better at it. I mean, that's the focus for now. I will say to the earlier point of other GPs doing deep tech, I think the one great thing of some of the micro VCs and GPs, the solo GPs that are doing that, there's some great caliber solo GPs out there. And it makes it easier for us to syndicate and close rounds faster, which is a good thing. That was a lot harder when there were only a handful of serious VCs. But it doesn't escape the problem of what happens once these companies reach a size and a need of funding, which is like north of like 20 million.

26:23Ale Maiano:And that's when the capital markets break. So from that point, if we can provide a continuity of capital for our companies, for sure, it would be something we would want to think through.

26:37Devika Thapar:yeah interesting i guess we're not quite at the stage where we can be fussy about where the money is coming from right we just need more money flowing to technical teams completely europe

26:45Ale Maiano:needs we are definitely i mean it has much more than what it was but yeah we need more i mean more across across stages and we need more of uh also like entrepreneurial uh you know investment capital that's not solely relying on like you know state lps uh to to launch launch funds as well, which is a whole different topic.

27:08Devika Thapar:Oh, 100%. I feel so strongly about the need for more LP capital. I think it's crazy. But I'm curious, we're out of time. Thank you so much both for joining me. I love what you're doing. It's so interesting to speak to VCs who are doing things differently and disrupting the traditional model and trying to back underserved founders as opposed to chasing consensus. So thank you so much for joining me and I love chatting. Thank you, Seb. Thanks, Seb.

27:35Thank you.