The painful gap from prototype to product

What actually breaks deep tech startups isn’t lack of vision, but running out of patience before reality catches up.

Follow the Gradient sits down with Roland Siegwart, Professor of Autonomous Systems at ETH Zurich and one of Europe’s most influential robotics mentors. Over two decades, Roland has helped shape ETH’s spin-out culture and advised companies like Anybotics, BlueBotics, and 7Sense from research to real-world deployment .

This conversation explores how deep tech companies are really built when timelines are long, capital is patient but finite, and founders must constantly trade ambition against survival.

We talk about:

• Why abundant early-stage capital can quietly reduce urgency in deep tech startups

• The hidden cost of the last 10 percent from prototype to market-ready system

• How early revenue from “unsexy” applications can enable bigger long-term bets

• Why Europe’s strength in hardware systems also makes scaling slower and harder

• The role experienced operators play in grounding PhD-driven founding teams

• When founders must step aside to prevent becoming the company’s bottleneck

Rather than offering formulas, this episode examines how founders learn to make irreversible decisions with incomplete information, balancing engineering rigor with the pressure to move before the window closes.

Our biggest takeaways, including Roland’s view on where founders most often misjudge deep tech reality:

https://followthegradient.io/p/roland-siegwart-podcast 

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Where to find Roland Siegwart:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roland-siegwart-85466912/

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00:00 Introduction 

03:51 How Switzerland built a self sustaining robotics ecosystem 

05:02 Turning university research into real world companies 

07:39 Why Europe struggles to scale deep tech globally 

09:46 Funding strategies for long hardware driven timelines 

12:16 The painful gap between lab prototypes and products 

14:09 Early signals that founders can survive the transition 

15:37 Finding a first market with real customer pain 

19:00 When pilots turn into scalable robotics businesses 

20:47 Bringing business leadership into technical teams 

23:24 When founders must step aside to let companies grow 

31:49 Navigating dual use and ethical responsibility in robotics