Yes, you as a scientist can also be a great entrepreneur
Simple steps to start seeing yourself as a startup founder
A couple of years ago, in my role of guiding researchers to become entrepreneurs at Fraunhofer Society, I was visiting one of our institutes in Freiburg. Opposite me: three researchers that had - for the fun of it - declared in a grant application that the path to commercialization for their research results might be a startup. Of course, they said, that’s not really what they wanted to do. Way too risky! They bombarded me with questions around the process of building a startup with a mix of intense curiosity and obvious dismissal. Most questions didn’t have a straightforward answer, but somehow I guess I got them to at least agree that they would join our internal accelerator and give ‘being a founder’ a try. Fast forward five years, and in 2023, Max Gulde, now founder and CEO of constellR, and his team raised a 17m€ seed round for their satellite based beyond-visual imaging technology. It was great to watch Max go from deeply skeptic to driven entrepreneur.
