Gus Domel is a Principal at Boost VC, a venture firm investing in pre-seed deep tech startups.
What is Boost VC’s investment thesis?
Boost VC invests in deep tech pre-seed seed rounds and we like to be the first investor into a company. I know there are a lot of definitions of deep tech out there, so when we say deep tech we mean using innovative technology, science, and engineering to solve the world’s hardest and most important problems. Some of the stuff we love to invest in include bio, health, AI, robotics, space tech, materials, ocean tech, climate, energy, crypto, XR, etc.
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What kinds of founders and startups does Boost VC invest in?
Our slogan at Boost VC is “be the cockroach.” The idea is that a cockroach is something that will always survive. Like a cockroach, no other startup wants you in their space. And when conditions are right, you can massively expand.
We love people who are really committed to the company and who are obsessed with solving an important problem. This is particularly important for deep tech founders because building deep tech companies is really hard. You’re building deeply technical stuff, and it can take years and years to bring it to market. You’ve got to be in it for the long haul.
We look for really talented individuals who are incredible builders because you have to be able to build if you’re running a deep tech company. We like founders who are very agile and fast at iterating. We call that “default movement” in the sense that they always default toward a solution. I can’t emphasize the importance of founders enough. Great people execute great ideas, but bad people botch great ideas.
How do you diligence deep tech startups at such an early stage?
What’s great about having been a deep tech builder and then switching over to the investment side is that I can really level with founders. I can understand the details of what they’re building. However, I want to emphasize that we focus mostly on the founders when diligencing a company, that’s what matters most. When we’ve over-indexed on just an incredible idea but the founder wasn’t great, that’s where things tend not to work. It’s easy for deep tech VCs to overthink the immediate implementation and state of the technology. I think what matters more is finding really incredible founders building in a space that you have a strong belief in long term.
What should founders consider when they’re weighing that first check in the door, whether from Boost or another VC?
From a founder’s perspective, the awesome thing about Boost VC is that we’re willing to take that first shot on someone building something that everyone else still sees as too crazy right now. We want to be the first check into really difficult companies. I think that’s really helpful for founders. Once we take that shot, we can help in a variety of ways. For our really early stage companies, we have a go-to-market program where we work with our deep tech founders in trying to understand their customer and their market. A lot of the founders we work with are very brilliant technical individuals, but they need help on the sales and customer piece.
We also have very deep networks across industry, investors, and founders so you’re able to tap into that strong community. We see our portfolio companies helping each other all the time and there’s a lot of cross-pollination there. And we also just really understand what it takes to build deep tech from zero to one. We’ve been doing it for a long time with a lot of great companies.
What emerging technologies are you particularly excited about at the moment?
One is decentralized science or DeSci. The way science is currently done involves a lot of misaligned incentives. DeSci is working on finding ways to bring the brightest individuals together around a topic and find new ways of funding research, publishing research, and so on that are not owned by these big journals and massive grant institutions. Really powerful things can happen when you have a really passionate community like this.
Another area is ocean tech, which is really underserved. The ocean is a $3T economy, important for defense, essential for food security and climate, over 80% unexplored but improved autonomy can map it now, critical minerals, interesting biological phenomena, undersea cables power international data transmission and communication, most of the world’s trade is via the ocean. Feels like a lot of big opportunities in a legacy space.
The last one I’ll touch on is robotics, which I’ve been very excited about for a long time. One of the most exciting subfields here is soft robotics, which is exactly what it sounds like. As robotics are becoming more and more prevalent in our day-to-day, it will allow us to interact with them in a more seamless and safe way.