Why CleanJoule’s CEO Tells Deep Tech Founders to “Sequester 20 Years of Your Life”

Why CleanJoule’s CEO Tells Deep Tech Founders to “Sequester 20 Years of Your Life”

The startup mythology celebrates speed. Move fast and break things. Fail fast, iterate faster. Find product-market fit in six months or pivot.

Then there’s Mukund Karanjikar.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Mukund Karanjikar the CEO of CleanJoule, a sustainable aviation fuel producer that’s raised $55 million, offered advice that shatters every assumption about startup timelines: “I would say start with sequestering 20 years of your life if you’re not prepared to do that. I would think twice and three times and four times.”

This isn’t motivational speaking. It’s qualification criteria. And it reveals the brutal truth about deep tech that most founders don’t discover until they’re years into a journey that conventional wisdom says should take quarters.

The Math That Doesn’t Work

CleanJoule’s timeline tells the real story. Founded in 2009, the company won’t reach full commercial manufacturing scale until 2029. That’s 20 years from founding to commercial production. Two decades to transform molecular transformation technology from dark alley exploration to millions of gallons of sustainable aviation fuel.

“Okay, let’s say you are two x the smart, then rest of us, then start with a decade in your mind, anything short of that, if you think you are going to make a substantial impact, I think you need to search elsewhere,” Mukund says.

The implication is clear: if you’re exceptionally talented, maybe you can compress two decades into one. Maybe. But the physics of deep tech innovation don’t care about your ambition or your intelligence. Some problems require time that can’t be bought or hacked.

Why Deep Tech Can’t Be Rushed

The difference between SaaS and deep tech isn’t just technical complexity. It’s that software can iterate its way to success while molecules, materials, and manufacturing processes have to actually work at scale before you know if you’ve solved the problem.

When CleanJoule started in 2009, they had a chemical engineer with oil and gas experience, a serial entrepreneur in his eighties, four walls, and a roof. No defined plan. Just conviction that human civilization shouldn’t be designed around “this gunky, dark, nasty looking substance that we take out of the ground ten mile below sea level.”

The first three years were what Mukund calls going down “many dark alleys, coming back, restarting.” They were framing the problem, testing approaches, learning what didn’t work. By 2012, they thought they’d hit gold in understanding what needed to be built.

That was year three. Just to frame the problem correctly.

The Tesla Parallel

Mukund references Tesla to make his point about deep tech timelines. “Just look at Tesla’s story, right? A lot of people don’t know where it started and how it end. It goes back to two decades and longer. It’s always going to be like that.”

The parallel isn’t accidental. Tesla was founded in 2003. It didn’t become profitable until 2020. Seventeen years of losses before achieving sustainable profitability. And that’s with Elon Musk’s force of will, billions in capital, and government support through EV credits.

“They say, it’s like overnight success that took 20 years to happen. It’s almost like that always in everything, hard take, deep take,” Mukund explains.

The phrase “overnight success that took 20 years” captures something essential about deep tech. From the outside, it looks like sudden breakthrough. From the inside, it’s two decades of grinding through technical challenges that don’t care about your burn rate or your board’s patience.

What You’re Actually Signing Up For

When Mukund says sequester 20 years, he’s not being dramatic. He’s describing what the commitment actually looks like.

It means packing up your wife and dog and driving from Houston to Salt Lake City for an undefined “something” with a serial entrepreneur. It means years in a room with four walls and a roof, learning something new every day but with no clear line of sight to revenue.

It means reading government contract rejection reviews and learning from them even when you want to tear them up. “You can tear that and swear within yourself, but learn from it and hit back harder,” Mukund says about the rejection process.

It means operating for 14 years without venture capital because standard VC timelines don’t align with your innovation timeline. It means accepting that “first five to ten years, it’s you and the pack of wolves.”

The Promised Land

So why would anyone choose this path? Mukund’s answer cuts to the psychology required for deep tech.

“The promised land is when you come out, you are not coming out with a social network for people with six toes. You are coming up with something that changes our society, uplifts our civilization for the better.”

This is the trade. Twenty years of your life in exchange for solving problems that actually matter at civilization scale. Not incremental improvements to ad targeting or another productivity tool. Actual transformation of how humanity powers flight.

“Even if you have to look back 20 years later and God forbids you do not succeed, you should derive the satisfaction out of, well, I tried and I was in it for the long haul and it just wasn’t my time,” Mukund explains. “I think that’s a much better solution than getting a quick, making a quick buck in three quarters from now and walking away to do something else.”

The Societal Impact Equation

Mukund references economist Larry Summers to explain why deep tech timelines work the way they do. “If you are looking at society changing innovations that have permanently uplifted our civilization, it has always taken longer than anybody had thought, but the impact has always been substantially larger than anyone ever dreamt of.”

This is the actual equation deep tech founders are solving. Not quarters to profitability or years to exit. It’s decades to commercial scale in exchange for permanent civilizational uplift.

For CleanJoule, that means making aviation 100% independent of petroleum while lifting millions of people in rural areas out of poverty through biomass feedstock markets. “Sustainability has two components. It has the planetary sustainability and the economic sustainability,” Mukund explains.

The Self-Selection Mechanism

Mukund’s 20-year warning serves another purpose: it filters out founders who shouldn’t be building deep tech companies.

“There is a nice life and you know, power to the SaaS entrepreneurs who think like that,” he says about founders optimizing for speed and financial returns. There’s no judgment in the statement. Just recognition that different problems require different founder psychology.

If you can’t commit to 20 years, that’s fine. Build the SaaS company. Create the social network. Solve problems where iteration speed and capital deployment can compress timelines. Those problems matter too.

But if you’re drawn to molecular transformation, advanced materials, fusion energy, or other deep tech challenges, you need different mental models. You need to be comfortable with the fact that “the targets are for 2050. It’s not for next quarter.”

The Counter-Narrative to Fast Failure

Silicon Valley’s dominant narrative celebrates fast failure as learning. Mukund’s experience suggests the opposite for deep tech: slow persistence as wisdom accumulation.

Those three years from 2009 to 2012 going down dark alleys weren’t wasted time. They were necessary exploration to frame the problem correctly. The 14 years of government-funded development from 2012 to 2023 weren’t slow progress. They were the minimum viable timeline to de-risk technology that has to work at commercial scale.

“And I don’t mean to discourage anybody. This is very factual because I hang out with people of my kind who have given decades and decades,” Mukund says about the 20-year timeline.

The word choice matters. “People of my kind” suggests there’s a tribe of deep tech founders who understand that decades-long commitments aren’t anomalies. They’re the baseline for solving hard problems in atoms, not bits.

The 2029 Milestone

For CleanJoule, the 20-year journey has clear milestones. Up to 2022 was the rear view mirror period of solving technological problems. 2023 to 2025 is engineering scale-up. 2026 marks the beginning of commercial scale construction. And 2029 is when full scale manufacturing operations come online.

“Come 2029, we will have a full scale manufacturing operation of manufacturing at what would be called a commercial scale,” Mukund projects. “Away we go from there on geographical expansion.”

Twenty years from founding to commercial scale. Then the real work begins: geographic expansion, ecosystem development, and the long march toward making aviation 100% sustainable by 2050.

The Real Question

Mukund’s advice about sequestering 20 years isn’t meant to discourage. It’s meant to force honest self-assessment.

Can you commit to a problem for two decades? Can you operate in dark alleys for years while learning rather than earning? Can you derive satisfaction from attempting to change civilization even if you ultimately don’t succeed?

If the answer is yes, deep tech might be your path. If the answer is no, that’s equally valuable self-knowledge.

The worst outcome is starting the journey without understanding what you’re signing up for, then quitting at year five when you’re still in the dark alleys. Not because you failed, but because you didn’t know the journey required fifteen more years.

Twenty years isn’t a bug in deep tech. It’s the feature that makes civilization-scale impact possible.