Swimming in the Ocean: SEMRON’s Four-Year Journey Building Hardware Without Customer Feedback

Swimming in the Ocean: SEMRON’s Four-Year Journey Building Hardware Without Customer Feedback

Every startup book tells you to talk to customers early and often. Get feedback. Iterate quickly. Validate your assumptions. And for four years, none of that advice matters because your product doesn’t exist yet and won’t exist for years.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Aron Kirschen, CEO of SEMRON, an AI chip maker that’s raised $7.3 million, described the experience with startling honesty: “For a semiconductor startup that for three, four years worked like it feels, it felt like swimming in the ocean. And you never had the real feedback.”

No customer validation. No product-market fit testing. No iterative improvement loops. Just years of development with nothing but superficial signals to guide you.

This is the reality of deep tech that nobody talks about: the ocean years when you’re building something that requires fundamental innovation before you can have any meaningful market feedback.

The Feedback That Isn’t Feedback

During those ocean years, you get signals. But they’re not the signals lean startup methodology tells you to optimize for.

“Mostly the market feedback you get from very superficial parks with them. Yeah, we might be interested, blah, blah,” Aron explains. Potential customers expressing casual interest. “And probably investors that talk to our customers or introduce it to them just to get a sense whether it holds potential or not.”

This isn’t feedback you can act on. It’s not telling you what features to build or how to position your product. It’s barely confirming that the problem you’re solving matters.

For deep tech founders, this creates a disorienting experience. You know you’re supposed to be customer-driven. You know you’re supposed to iterate based on market input. But the market can’t give you meaningful input because the thing you’re building doesn’t exist in any testable form.

Software founders can ship an MVP in weeks and learn from real usage. Hardware founders spend years developing the foundational technology before anyone can use anything.

The ocean metaphor captures this perfectly: you’re swimming, expending enormous energy, but you can’t see land. You can’t tell if you’re making progress. You can’t verify you’re heading in the right direction.

The Timeline That Creates the Ocean

SEMRON’s timeline illustrates why these ocean years are unavoidable. “As a semiconductor startup, you don’t have the timeline or the roadmap usually of 1 year for go to market to really have to think in three, four, even five years,” Aron notes.

The timeline depends entirely on where you start. Working with existing semiconductor technology and just designing a chip? One to two years. Starting with a new semiconductor device like SEMRON? Three to five years because “you really have to open the semiconductor process and make some changes there together with the foundry.”

Four years into SEMRON’s journey, they’re “close to process freeze”—the moment when device development and testing complete, and they can finally start building demonstrators.

Process freeze isn’t when you launch to customers. It’s when you can finally start proving your technology works for customer use cases. The actual market entry comes after that.

This creates a brutal reality: you spend years building before you reach the starting line of traditional go-to-market. Everything before process freeze is pre-market. You’re not even swimming toward shore yet. You’re preparing to start swimming.

What Keeps You Oriented

Without customer feedback to guide decisions, what keeps deep tech founders oriented? Aron’s journey suggests three anchors:

First, technical milestones that you control. Process freeze isn’t market-dependent. It’s determined by whether your semiconductor device works as designed, whether you can fabricate it reliably, whether it meets your technical specifications. You can’t control market adoption during the ocean years. You can control technical progress.

Second, trusted advisors who understand the landscape. SEMRON had “a great advisor in Berkeley and he’s really into AI” who told them about transformer-based language models a year before ChatGPT. This kind of guidance—from people who understand both the technology and the market—provides orientation when you can’t get it from customers.

Third, staying close to potential customers even when they can’t give actionable feedback. The “we might be interested, blah, blah” conversations serve a purpose: they keep you connected to market realities even when you can’t validate specific product decisions.

For deep tech founders, these anchors replace the rapid feedback loops that software founders rely on. You’re navigating by different stars.

The Moment Everything Changes

Then you reach shore. For SEMRON, that moment is just beginning. “Now it’s really like we understand what they need in an application. And of course it completely reshapes your coordinate system. You never thought about that before,” Aron reflects.

They’re finally having substantive conversations with “very big, well known companies that are market leaders in their application or in that vertical.” They’re receiving proprietary AI models, running real benchmarks, proving out performance against actual requirements.

“We get proprietary AI models, really exciting benchmarks or model architectures. In general. And we have to deploy that on our hardware that we currently have to emulate and we have some test structures and so on, and then we try to make it fit into that.”

This is what reaching shore feels like: suddenly you have specificity. Customer problems aren’t hypothetical anymore. Performance requirements are real. Integration challenges are concrete. You can finally have the detailed, actionable conversations you couldn’t have during the ocean years.

“Yeah, it’s going to be a very exciting time. I’m really looking forward to next year. I can’t wait to start,” Aron says about 2025. The enthusiasm isn’t about launching or achieving some vanity metric. It’s about finally being able to engage meaningfully with customer needs after years of building in isolation.

The Psychological Challenge

Perhaps the hardest part of the ocean years isn’t technical. It’s psychological. When you’re swimming in the ocean, how do you maintain conviction that you’re heading the right direction?

Aron reveals one approach in his fundraising philosophy: “My biggest learning was that I tended to be too arrogant in the beginning because, you know, you spend in fundraising, you spend like talking to 200 investors, I don’t know, giving all the team the same pitch.”

When investors don’t understand your technology or don’t see the opportunity, it’s easy to dismiss them. But that creates a trap. “What I learned is that it might be true for some of the investors, but most of them are pretty smart and there’s a small fraction of them that I really admire.”

The lesson: stay humble even when you can’t get validation. Assume people asking hard questions are smart, not stupid. Use their skepticism to stress-test your thinking, even if you can’t pivot based on market feedback yet.

This psychological discipline—maintaining conviction while staying intellectually humble—might be the most important skill for navigating the ocean years.

How to Know You’ve Reached Shore

Aron provides a clear signal for when the ocean years end: “It’s about customer engagement.” Not customer acquisition. Not revenue. Engagement.

Specifically, the shift from superficial interest to deep technical collaboration. When customers start sharing proprietary information, when they engage their engineering teams in substantive discussions, when they’re willing to invest time in custom proof-of-concept work—that’s shore.

The conversations shift from “this sounds interesting” to “here’s our specific model architecture, here are our performance requirements, here are our power constraints, here are our cost targets.” You move from hypothesis to validation.

For SEMRON, shore looks like sitting down with customer engineering teams and “discussing with them about, okay, what can we do about your models? And come back with a nice performance simulation.”

That level of specificity—working on their actual models, generating their actual performance data—is only possible after you’ve completed the ocean years of foundational development.

The Framework for Deep Tech Founders

If you’re building deep tech that requires years of development before meaningful customer validation, here’s what SEMRON’s journey suggests:

Accept the ocean years as unavoidable. Don’t fight the timeline. Build your fundraising strategy, team structure, and company culture around multi-year development before market entry.

Navigate by technical milestones, not market metrics. Process freeze, successful fabrication, validated test structures—these are your progress markers during the ocean years.

Stay connected to potential customers even when conversations are superficial. The “blah, blah” interest still keeps you oriented toward market realities.

Maintain conviction while staying humble. You need confidence to swim for years without validation. But you need humility to learn when you finally reach shore and discover everything you didn’t know.

Recognize shore when you see it. Deep technical engagement, proprietary information sharing, substantive collaboration—these signal the end of the ocean years.

Sometimes the hardest part of building isn’t the building itself. It’s maintaining direction while swimming in the ocean, trusting you’ll eventually reach shore even when you can’t see it yet.