Why Join a Deeptech Hardware Startup?

One of the perks of being a deeptech startup founder is the various opportunities I get to interact with students, from undergrads to postdocs. A surprising takeaway in my interactions with them is how little exposure most students have to the world of deeptech startups. For most college students, the default career path begins and ends at an IT firm or an old-school company (especially outside IITs/BITS).

Exposure to working at startups has increased over the last decade, but most online sources still talk of SaaS or AI startups when students try to find one to work at.

If you are a CS engineer, this is amazing.

But what if you are a mechanical/civil engineer who doesn't want to join TCS and write Javascript?

Or what if you are a BS/MS in Chemistry/Physics but don't want to follow the regular academic path? (Or write Javascript? 😉)

These alternatives are usually invisible to students.

And so they join the well-trodden path with everyone else, thinking there is nothing more exciting to work on.

Since the rise of IT companies in the early 2000s, most non-CS students end up in entry-level roles in such companies^[1] with very few going on to work in core companies in their respective domains.

This makes sense. Old-school companies hire very few graduates, and mostly from top institutes such as IITs/NITs/BITS. Even students who land core company roles often find themselves working on product lines established decades ago, with little room for genuine technical innovation early in their careers.

A large part of this is due to poor investment in R&D in the Indian private sector, with most companies investing less than 1% of revenue back into research and development, compared to 3-8% in US/China/EU.^[2]

But over the last decade, the new wave of deeptech startups has challenged this paradigm. For example, Ather Energy invests 13-14% of its revenue in R&D.^[3] Other deeptech startups are similar, with 8-15% R&D investments being the norm.^[4] This creates an incredible opportunity for young engineers and scientists.

In a deeptech hardware startup, you get unusually early exposure to the full arc of building a product: prototyping, manufacturing constraints, field failures, and (hopefully) a working product which the customer loves. That kind of learning is hard to compress into a classroom or a narrowly defined entry-level job at a large company.

My belief is that building domain expertise in the age of AI will lead to exponential career growth for early-career aspirants over the next decade. The engineers/scientists who deeply understand materials, manufacturing, or semiconductor physics will use AI as leverage to amplify their output. The ones who only learnt to prompt it won't have that advantage.^[5]

You could help build 3D-printed rockets, semiconductor chips, battery systems, industrial robots, medical devices, carbon capture systems, or advanced materials for green hydrogen.

These companies also put India on the path of accelerated development, something countries such as US/Germany/Japan realised post-WW2 and China/Korea starting in the 80s. Without R&D, and especially private R&D, our country remains only a source of cheap labour for developed countries.

Deeptech hardware startups will become the backbone of 'Viksit Bharat'.

And I hope the next generation joins such startups and helps make our possible future a reality.

This was top of mind when I was building the deeptech careers website. I wanted students to have an easy way to find jobs which matched the fields they had actually studied.

So if you are one of the dreamers who wants to build the future in India, visit the website to find the hardware startup that fits who you want to be, and I hope you find your dream role!