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When Luck Beats Technology: The Counterintuitive Truth About Commercializing Deep Tech

Most deep tech founders won’t admit what Patrick Heissler said in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. As CEO of Scrona, a high-resolution printing platform that’s raised $15.5 million, Patrick joined the company with one mission: transform academic research into something manufacturers could actually use. But when asked about the key to commercializing breakthrough technology, he didn’t talk about product-market fit or go-to-market execution. He talked about luck.

“I think first you need a lot of luck,” Patrick explained. “You need a lot of luck and you need to be at the right spot at the right time, having the right contacts to make it work. It’s not so much about your technology, maybe then just having the right contacts, being in the right place at the right time.”

This isn’t the Silicon Valley narrative anyone wants to hear. But for founders working on platform technologies that promise to revolutionize manufacturing at the micrometer scale, understanding this reality might matter more than perfecting the technology itself.

The Platform Technology Trap

Patrick joined Scrona in May as a consultant, became CEO in June, and added investor weeks later. The company had developed printing technology with applications across semiconductors, displays, life sciences, consumer electronics, and automotive industries. The promise was extraordinary. The problem was execution.

“I was pretty excited about what they can achieve with the printing technology they developed at that stage,” Patrick said. “But we need to get it into an industrial package. Going from more academic, research driven development, scale, feasibility, type of studies and products into an industrial scale product that can really be used by let’s say operators, non PhD operators in a fabric.”

This gap between research capability and industrial usability kills promising companies. Brilliant PhDs optimize for technical performance. Manufacturing operators need reliability, simplicity, and integration with existing systems. These are fundamentally different problems.

But the deeper challenge emerged from the technology itself. As Patrick put it: “For a startup to push a technology into a market is pretty difficult, especially if it’s a platform technology, because you can do everything and nothing at the same time.”

When your technology can solve problems across six different industries, which one do you choose? Every potential customer looks promising. Every application seems worth pursuing. Your roadmap becomes a wishlist. Your team gets pulled in endless directions. And you run out of money before proving value anywhere.

The Hero Customer Strategy

Patrick’s solution started with an uncomfortable truth about supply chains. “Converting a supply chain with a new technology, you’re seeing a lot of resistance,” he explained. “You will face a lot of, say, mindset problems where people will have some kind of transition costs, they might bear it. They would need to take some risks to get your technology into production lines, into their product.”

Trying to convince every link in the supply chain is expensive and slow. Patrick took a different approach: “You need to have a compelling package that you can put on a table where, let’s say a hero customer, like an end market champion, can directly jump onto it, understands the opportunity he has there, and helps you to pull it through the whole supply chain.”

The logic is simple but powerful. If you convince the company at the end of the supply chain that your technology creates competitive advantage for their products, they’ll use their purchasing power to pull you through every upstream supplier. Their demand creates urgency. Their endorsement reduces risk for everyone else.

“But if you have an end market champion, if you can convince, really one of these big corporates at the very end that they will have a value out of your technology, they will pull you through,” Patrick said.

This strategy requires different thinking about sales. You’re not building a pipeline of hundreds of prospects. You’re identifying the single customer whose success creates a cascade effect through the entire ecosystem.

The First 100 Days: Product Before Everything

Patrick’s first action as CEO revealed his priorities. “The first thing we did is we clearly defined a product roadmap,” he said. Not strategy sessions. Not team restructuring. Not fundraising presentations. Product roadmap.

The timeline was aggressive. Patrick joined full-time in June. By July, Scrona had launched their Gen 3 8-nozzle printhead at Semicon West in San Francisco. More importantly, they launched it with complete specifications: “A data sheet with something that people can take, have a look at, see the facts and can start implementing it.”

For industrial customers evaluating new manufacturing technologies, datasheets matter more than whitepapers. Technical specifications matter more than technology demonstrations. The question isn’t whether your breakthrough works in the lab. It’s whether their engineers can integrate it into existing production lines.

Patrick continued building the roadmap: “Have a roadmap towards higher nozzle counts, have a roadmap towards an integration pack that people can directly take and integrate into a bigger tool to use our printheads. So just defining this kind of product roadmap and timelines that help our customers really making use of the product.”

The roadmap became a sales tool. It showed customers that Scrona understood their scaling requirements, integration challenges, and timeline constraints. It demonstrated that the company thought like manufacturers, not researchers.

Marketing Strategy: The Power of Saying No

Patrick deployed a marketing strategy that most startups would reject outright. “With a very small team like ours, a marketing strategy like a full blown up marketing strategy with multiplatform advertisement of your product doesn’t necessarily make sense,” he explained.

Instead: “I don’t necessarily need a huge project pipeline. Like it’s great if I have a lot of interest, it’s great if I have a lot of people coming in. But I want to be very selective on what we’re working on to have the highest impact on a company.”

This selectivity sounds risky. What startup CEO actively limits their pipeline? But Patrick understood something crucial about deep tech commercialization: every customer engagement consumes significant engineering resources. Customization requirements, qualification support, and integration assistance all drain the team’s capacity.

Building a huge pipeline in this context doesn’t accelerate growth. It fragments focus and prevents the high-impact work that actually moves the company forward.

The solution was ecosystem design. “What is important for me is also to use that and build up an ecosystem,” Patrick said. “We have a strong partner with notion system that enables like smaller scale systems directly for customers that might not require this kind of immense R and D work. So I’m freeing up time at my team to really focus on value creation for our company and at the same time enable an ecosystem partner to also generate growth and value on their side.”

This approach captured market interest without draining resources. Smaller opportunities got routed to partners. Scrona’s team focused exclusively on projects that would fundamentally change how the market perceived the technology.

Market Selection Through Team DNA

Patrick’s market selection process inverted typical startup methodology. Most founders start with TAM analysis, identify the biggest markets, then try to build networks and expertise. Patrick started with the team’s existing advantages.

“For us, it was quite clear that this technology enables a lot of value for customers in the semiconductor space, also in the display space, which are maybe the two markets and industries that we’re closest to, because we are coming out of this kind of semiconductor, like we as a team are coming out of this semiconductor ecosystem,” he explained. “So we know these companies, we know these supply chains, we have a lot of contacts, and this makes it quite easy for us to Attract it.”

This approach dramatically reduces the cost and time of customer acquisition. You’re not cold calling into unfamiliar industries. You’re activating existing relationships with people who already understand the problem you’re solving.

The Real Competition

When asked about competition, Patrick reframed the entire question. While acknowledging direct competitors, he immediately shifted perspective: “I think for a company like us which really wants to change the way that manufacturing is done on a micrometer scale, we are competing more against incumbent technologies like lithography, direct laser writing, screen printing, inkjet technology.”

This reframing changes everything about sales strategy. You’re not competing on features against similar startups. You’re competing against decades of established practice, qualified vendors, and organizational inertia. Your real challenge isn’t proving your technology is better than alternatives. It’s proving the switching costs and qualification risks are worth bearing.

Timeline Realism

Patrick’s three to five year vision included a detail that affects everything from fundraising to team planning: “With the typical qualification timelines in the semiconductor industry, we’re looking at two year qualification timelines. That means starting late 2026, early 2027, we will see mass adoption of that technology in various applications in various production lines.”

Two-year qualification timelines mean your sales cycle isn’t months, it’s years. Early customers aren’t buying finished products. They’re committing to multi-year qualification partnerships. Your runway needs to accommodate these realities. Your investors need to understand that semiconductor adoption doesn’t follow SaaS metrics.

For 2025, Patrick outlined clear objectives: launch the Generation 3 platform with 100+ nozzles in Q1, move large projects into qualification phases, and close a funding round that would accelerate development of the next generation 1000+ nozzle platform requiring AI capabilities.

Looking further ahead, Patrick’s vision was ambitious but grounded: “Starting late 2026, early 2027, we will see mass adoption of that technology in various applications in various production lines. So this will help us to actually internationalize the company and also help us to diversify into new fields.”

The sequencing revealed sophisticated strategic thinking: prove the technology in core markets where the team has advantages, achieve adoption in those markets, then leverage that credibility to internationalize and diversify. “We will see a much larger platform company, a real platform company,” Patrick said. “On the way up still.”

Patrick’s journey at Scrona reveals that commercializing deep tech isn’t primarily about having the best technology. It’s about understanding that luck and timing matter, that supply chains need end market champions to overcome resistance, that product availability beats technical perfection, and that saying no to opportunities often matters more than saying yes. The founders who succeed aren’t necessarily those with breakthrough innovations. They’re the ones who understand that getting breakthrough innovations into industrial production requires a fundamentally different playbook than building software companies.