Pivot even when you think your done pivoting

I spent a week this summer retracing my roots on Korčula. Somewhere between the ferry schedule and the third espresso of the day, I stumbled onto my great-uncle's old olive grove:  overgrown, quiet, and next to it his vrtujak, the little stone hut herders built to hide from the heat. Both had clearly given up waiting for him decades ago. 

It got me thinking about the bet he made: leaving an actual paradise behind because, at the time, it looked like the smarter move. A better tomorrow, somewhere else. Standing there now, in a grove that could probably fund a small startup in olive oil alone, I found it hard to understand why he'd ever walked away. 

Standing there – with my marketing team’s reminder that it was my turn to write a blog post this month – it really did it hit me. He didn't fail. He pivoted. 

It was a far more drastic pivot than anything I deal with day to day, and born of a much harder kind of necessity – but structurally, it's the same decision I watch deep tech founders wrestle with constantly: a bet on an idea, forced by market conditions, at the expense of something you're emotionally attached to. 

The Emotional Attachment Problem 

Deep tech founders fall in love with their product - the olive oil, the advanced material, the new peptide, the analytical protocol. Understandably. It's usually years of PhD-grade work compressed into one asset. But that attachment is exactly why research projects stay research projects, or take three years longer than they should to reach market: the use case gets picked because it feels right, not because it tested right. The business model gets built around what the founder is comfortable defending, not what the market is asking for. 

There's a long list of reasons deep tech projects stall - bad cap tables, premature scaling, hiring the wrong CTO, running out of runway before proving TRL - but in my experience, weak early-stage validation beats most of them for sheer damage per euro spent. 

Why This Bites Harder in Deep Tech 

Having IP that solves a real problem is genuinely great. Believing it solves every problem, or that you have to chase the biggest one first, is how you end up with runaway spend, multi-year development cycles, and a team quietly burning out on a mission that keeps moving. 

Deep tech horizons are already long. Get the application wrong early and you lose more than time – you lose years of patent protection clock ticking on the wrong claim, you sign licensing terms with a research institution that don't fit where the tech actually ends up going, you leave real economic opportunity on the table, and – the one that actually keeps founders up at night – you burn investor trust you won't easily get back. 

Validating early lets you tinker, pivot, or kill a direction while it's still cheap to do so. Nobody regrets the pivot that happened in month six. Plenty of people regret the one that happened in year four. 

How You Validate Matters More Than Whether You Do It 

Talk to industry early, and talk to a lot of it - as many people as fit your technology, not just the ones who'll be nice about it. And be careful how you ask: 

• Leading questions bake in more bias than you already started with. 

• Talking solely to people you know just deepens the confirmation loop you're trying to escape. 

• Talking to different industries, countries, segments, roles and focusing relentlessly on their pain points is what gets you honest, actionable signal. 

• Unless you want a polite but often dishonest yet, don’t ask “would you use this”.  

• A polite no with a specific reason attached is worth ten enthusiastic maybes with none. 

• Don't stop at the first pattern that confirms your thesis – keep going until you've talked to enough people that a contradictory answer would actually surprise you. 

Don't build what you think they want. Build what they need, and deduce that from what they're actually struggling with. It's basic human psychology: focus on the problem, and the solution you bring becomes obvious. 

Try not to sell in these conversations. Try to listen. Ironically, a pilot or first partner is far more likely to come out of a conversation where you asked good questions and shut up than one where you pitched hard. 

The hard part is staying genuinely open to what comes back, even when it stings, and even when it costs you a roadmap you liked. That's doubly true when the feedback contradicts the deck you just pitched investors on – walking back a story you've sold with conviction is uncomfortable, but a founder willing to say "the market just told us something different" earns more long-term trust than one who rides a bad thesis into the ground to save face.  

/TLDR: pivoting isn't failure, it's usually progress. 

Back to the Grove 

Standing in that overgrown grove, I found myself wishing my great-uncle had just kept it up. Then I remembered: he pivoted when the market wasn't ready, so that someone like me could come back when it was. 

Don't believe extra virgin olive oil is worth waiting a generation for? Go check the price per liter in a supermarket right now. Turns out he was early – not wrong.