From Poetry to Deep Tech: How Europe Builds the Next Tesla I Will Wells, Speedinvest

0:00Will Wells:The biggest mistake Europe has historically got wrong has always started with an innovation. Let's start with 100 million, then hire a team, then solve the problem. At 9 o 'clock, I'm talking to semiconductor companies. 10 o 'clock, it's chemical synthesis. 11 o 'clock might be, you know, a launch company in Switzerland trying to build the next SpaceX. I was diagnosed with cancer. I almost died. I turned 30. The only thing I wanted to do was have a crack. I don't want to die a coward. I don't want to die having not given it a go.

0:33Luis:So Will, you majored in poetry, became a hedge fund manager, a deep tech founder, and now a deep tech investor. I find that incredibly fascinating. And what would you say is the common thread, the underlying principle that combines all those different paths? There isn't one.

0:51Will Wells:I've always aspired to be as much of a Renaissance thinker as possible. and do a bit of arts and humanities and science. I think for too long, people are pushed into a binary bucket. But I think that the common thread is kind of frontier thinking, some adventure, learning new technology and sort of some degree of measured risk. I'm proud of having done poetry. I have to say I don't use it very much now.

1:25Luis:And what is it about Renaissance Man that you like? Because I'm also a big fan personally, and I see it as the convergence of arts, humanities, and science.

1:34Will Wells:I mean, look, my passion is deep tech. That means that at 9 o 'clock, I'm talking to semiconductor companies, and 10 o 'clock, it's chemical synthesis, and 11 o 'clock might be kind of a launch company in Switzerland trying to build the next SpaceX, which is a huge amount of sort of science content switching. So it's kind of a necessity of the job. To some degree, my startup was like that. We were using robots and drones to try and spot disease in plants. But it took me down so many rabbit holes. I had to learn about soil science, about agronomy, about space remote sensing, hyperspectral cameras.

2:16Will Wells:And then really the beginning of AI, right? This is 10 years ago.

2:19Luis:So what I see in there as well is also this relentless curiosity and just a love for learning. Is that something that's driving you as well?

2:27Will Wells:I think so. I think so. It's I mean, it's a privilege. The cynic in me says that I'm very comfortable knowing a little bit about a lot of things.

2:36Luis:Probably most of the most VCs are good at that. And how did this express itself in your earliest context? So like how did you grow up? Like what were kind of the fascinations that you had back then? Also like determined by your social context.

2:49Will Wells:Hummingbird, my startup, was a kind of marriage of many different passions and life events. I come from a family of shipbuilders and naturalists and war heroes.

3:03Luis:In a Victorian paternalistic way, school and home drilled into me like, have a crack, do something that helps people, but have a go.

3:16Will Wells:That was like the startup. You know, we always talked about how screwed up the food system was. And, you know, we talk about plants at the dinner table. And I think it was a confluence of my entire 32 years previously.

3:32Luis:You must think differently about food than the majority of people because you dedicated, like, many years of your lives towards that. Like, what is it about it?

3:40Will Wells:It was this awakening of how screwed up it was. I have a sort of catholic savior complex, you know, with technology problems, whether it's kind of solving cancer or getting to the moon or, you know, energy bottlenecks. I'm drawn to these big problems. And food felt like an injustice on humanity, the way that the system works. we're beginning to see some of the impact of you know like chemical warfare and processed food if you look at chronic disease and cancer incidents now it's out of control like it was the first big problem I really threw myself at I also felt like felt like something that only a technology unlock could solve even though paradoxically food is you know like the most like organic and sort of hopefully hopefully when you walk in nature you do not see drones and

4:38Luis:AI you can just turn it off at all something when I speak to founder that I hear a lot is when I ask them what they're most afraid of they usually say it's a fear of failure but I don't really agree with this because most startups are default dead right so I think there needs to be something else like if it would be fear of failure you wouldn't necessarily take on such a big challenge like What was it for you that drove you towards that? So ironically, it was a fear of not having a go.

5:08Will Wells:And when I was 29, I was working for a hedge fund. I was properly in the safe corporate financial bubble. I mean, it was hardcore. It was exciting. But ultimately, I was in finance. And I was diagnosed with cancer. I almost died. I turned 30 in hospital, having savage treatment. And when I got better, the only thing I wanted to do was have a crack. Like we call it to swing the bat. And it was the sort of existential fear of not having done that and just feeling incomplete. I don't want to die a coward. I don't want to die having not given it a go. I'm so much better than I don't know like being an analyst or being you know and that might seem lame but I well potentially it's lame that it took something life-threatening to to force me

6:05Luis:out of my comfort zone but I'm glad that it did I think of those moments I call them moments of truth it's when you could go into one direction which is most of the time like the easier path but then you very deliberately decide to go actually the other route and take take this turn and and how did you know what to do in this moment because it's the first i think the first realization is okay i need to like swing big you know do something and then how does it form to the idea of the startup we made a lot of mistakes the beginning bit we didn't make mistakes where

6:36Will Wells:i started you know y combinator first print i mean why i don't think my combinator existed then but i spoke to hundreds of farmers realized how big a problem it was how much money was spent on chemicals, prophylactic warfare where half your P &L is like pesticide. What the... I mean, it's crazy. And there was no technology-driven diagnosis. I mean, it was maddening. And it was a problem that was getting bigger and bigger. So step one, tick. So I was also doing my MBA at INSEAD at the time. So I kind of ditched the MBA midway through. I still passed, but began working on it. And then I went to Imperial College when I finished and said, can I have some lab space?

7:23Will Wells:Like back in 2015, you had DeepMind, Benevolent AI, Babylon. Like there was no one in London doing like actual AI. So you sort of had to go to Imperial, UCL, Oxford, Cambridge. So started in Imperial in the lab. It was a great place to hire people, began building the data science team. And then we sort of got going. And the mistake that we made was we sort of almost fell in love with the technology solution. Wouldn't it be cool if drones did X, Y, and Z? And then tried to ram it down farmers' throats, which didn't work. They didn't want to pay for it.

7:56Luis:But that was, I mean, that was basically how we started. I think you need to have that audacity to be able to solve something like that and throw yourself at it. And then, so when you got into venture, you worked with teams like Lightspeed, First Middle Capital, and you invested in companies, I mean, with the teams like Wave, Mistral, SpaceX. What did you learn about how great investors make decisions?

8:19Will Wells:So, I mean, so number one, I didn't lead all those deals, but I was very lucky in that I worked for two funds, First Minute and Lightspeed, very different, top three European seed fund and top three Silicon Valley multi-stage fund. I got to see what good looks like on a sort of transatlantic basis. and I was very, very lucky to have worked with some incredible generational founders from NAN, Wave, Base Power, Cusp, etc. I would say though that if I go way back, the hedge fund that I worked for, High Clear, Long Only Fund, my boss was a legend. The rumours were that he would get followed in his taxi from Tokyo Airport as we went to go and see Japanese companies because he was such a guru on like what was going to be big so brokers and journalists would follow him you know i learned mathematically how to value companies and like how to spot think differently to the pack then it's quite contrarian a lot of the hedge fund world back then and then and then way back i used to do a lot of m a deals for private equity so i had an idea but i was on the different side of the table and then and then when i was in venture i was kind of learning it a lot from fresh but with the perspective of having been a founder and I'd done series A and B and I sort of knew what investing was like, even though it was big public equity stuff.

9:48Will Wells:So I put it all together quite like probably quite quickly. What are my biggest lessons learned? So first minute taught me how, how network can be a superpower. I mean, Brent Hoberman and Spencer Corlea, the maestros of networking, and how you always put the founder first. So my VCs were terrible in comparison. Never the founder first, old school, 1960s, UK investor mindset. But at first minute, we're very founder friendly and so are Speed Invest. And then at Lightspeed, I learned how to have courage. I mean, what they did with Anthropic is kind of insane. Insanely brave. That decision to invest was made as a sum of months and years of very diligent work.

10:42Will Wells:But ultimately, when you put a billion dollars into a business like that at that stage, I

10:47Luis:mean, you are like, essentially all in.

10:51Will Wells:Lastly, Paul Murphy, Alex Schmitt, I learned focus. You know, only a few deals matter each year. Only a few decisions matter. Don't listen to the noise, which is hard.

11:01Luis:You mentioned the quote from the Colors of Others with, follow up, be the most valuable thing you can do in your 20s or early 30s is to know what good actually looks like. I think you did that incredibly well. But I think it's also something that rationally, like, everyone would agree with. But then it's not that easy to actually translate it because you also need to offer something. So how would you say, do you actually translate this into action?

11:24Will Wells:It's becoming the default template in venture to back people that know what good looks like, which is potentially a bad thing. It concentrates talent into these like impossibly small pools, right? It's just not true that the best people live within 10 miles from Menlo Park. The caveat to that is that 11 labs get 100 ,000 applicants for every couple of jobs. Palantir is probably the best hiring program in the world. and they hire from a very diverse pool. So someone who's been at Palantir, who may be, you know, first generation Syrian immigrant family in France, first person at uni, who then knows what good looks like is quite a potent combo.

12:10Will Wells:I think you need both approaches, but that would be how I translate some of that into who I look for in founders.

12:19Luis:From a, like, young person perspective, Like how do you surround, like how do you get to those places? Like for instance, you mentioned like Palantir, 11 Labs. Like what do you think makes you actually stand out?

12:30Will Wells:Very few people in Europe have been operators. And I think that I did not have a billion dollar exit. I largely failed. But the technology stack that I operated on and the journey that we went on gives you a right to a conversation sometimes. Or at least it gives you a right to chat as operators. Maybe. they've probably been dwindling now as the years go on and candidly i'd rather have a 30 minute coffee with an engineer at wave or a 45 minute coffee with um uh back-end data warehousing analysts at lovable or like you know someone in product at lagora than i would like talking to another vt i mean like otherwise you're just comfortably in your echo chamber and i think

13:20Luis:You said in an interview that the most interesting opportunities today exist between the buckets. So in between the deep tech verticals like energy, space. You said that this is actually necessary to build a generational titan. I think it goes back to the beginning when we talked about the idea of the polymath.

13:37Will Wells:Why do you think such a horizontal approach to deep tech is necessary? I think it's about TAM and how do we back someone who's building an enormous market. Look at Tesla, right? So every year that's gone by in the last 10, it's metamorphosized into something else, right? And it's still going. I'm sure two years time, Elon will be talking about something we've never heard of. You've got a car company, a grid storage company, a home battery business. You've got Optimus. You've got humanoids. You've got decentralized data centers. What is that, right? They're building exceptional technology at the core that can be applied to multiple markets.

14:20Will Wells:And having created this wedge, which was electric vehicles, are now moving sideways. And I think that Europe lacks that horizontal ambition sometimes. I think that companies like Helsing and Wave and to some extent people like Norfolk try to do it. But I think we need more of that. I mean, look at Revolue. Great example. I think we haven't even seen half of the Revolut products that are going to come out. It's so exciting.

14:49Luis:Do you think this is in contrast to the very early beginnings when you need to have a very concentrated approach when you're building a startup? Because especially in deep tech, you need to try probably to solve one problem better than anyone else. Or how do you go about this in the temporal succession?

15:04Will Wells:So there's a few questions in that question. Generally speaking, which is what I did not do as a founder, focus is good. I think with software, it's very important. There's a very strong argument in deep tech that if you're building the first rocket company or the first battery storage business or the first driverless car company, you actually need to go all in and own your entire supply chain. You need to verticalize like very, very fast. And the moat is then totally impenetrable. To sort of answer the question slightly differently, that requires like an insane capital moat and it requires a type of founder that's like probably not a sort of oxford university spin-out professor look at alex karp palantir it's not not a technical guy palmer lucky like it's not obviously having done oculus but he's not a sort of um you know

16:02Luis:photonics professor right and does this tie into the like specialist versus generalist discussion do you think for founders i think so i like it i like a combo of both and someone actually i was

16:15Will Wells:thinking about cambridge aerospace i mean this is a plug i did didn't angel ticket but look at the breadth of that bench you have former defense minister you have you know aerospace professor you have ex-andreal headed europe these are not one person founding teams these are highly dynamic kind of three four five person all-star bench from day one the caveat is that no i didn't i think it's that crazy stat that almost all trillion dollar companies or companies that can get to a trillion have been founded by sort of like one person as a first-time founder like you know or very few people so jobs gates elon etc but um yeah i think broad bench in 2026 going after huge market with some lessons learned from a previous venture and some hungry first-time DNA is a good combo.

17:14Luis:And I think this goes into a similar direction. You also said that companies need to build platforms and not just products. What do you mean by that?

17:23Will Wells:I think to reinforce the Tesla argument, you create some technology, you have unfair advantage in terms of data set size. that becomes your platform and you can use that platform to solve multiple problems in multiple industries the platform unlocks that horizontal approach if you think about like what is andrew what is helsing these are neo primes they are solving a new technology problem in warfare for a department of defense type actor in the same way that lockheed martin and ryan mattel I've been doing for years. There will only be one or two extra primes in each continental geo. But they offer everything.

18:07Will Wells:It's like ISR, UAVs, it's ballistics, it's ground robots, it's night vision AI.