Lab to Market Leadership with Chris Reichhelm
With over 25 years of experience in recruiting leadership teams and boards for advanced science and engineering companies, Chris Reichhelm, CEO of Deep Tech Leaders, offers an insider’s perspective on the pivotal decisions and strategies that shape the success of startups embarking on the lab-to-market journey.
This podcast doesn’t just celebrate innovation for its own sake; instead, it highlights what it truly takes to build, scale, and sustain a successful deep tech company. Through conversations with entrepreneurs, investors, executives, and other key players, Chris will explore the management disciplines, cultures, and behaviours essential for commercialising and scaling deep tech innovations. Each episode will aim to unravel the complexities behind turning rich, research-intensive IP into commercially viable products across various sectors like computing, biotech, materials science, and more.
'Lab to Market Leadership' is for those who are ready to learn from past mistakes and successes to better navigate the path from innovation to market. Whether you're an entrepreneur, an investor, or simply a deep tech enthusiast, this podcast offers valuable lessons and insights to enhance your understanding and approach to building groundbreaking companies that aim to solve the world's biggest problems and improve our way of life.
Learn more about Lab to Market Leadership: www.deeptechleaders.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/deeptechleaders
Podcast Production by Beauxhaus
Lab to Market Leadership with Chris Reichhelm
Graphene at Scale: How Paragraf Is Realising the Wonder Material’s Potential | Dr Simon Thomas
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Dr Simon Thomas never expected to be a founder. After 12 years inside TSMC, Samsung and LG, he was ready for a break from the pressure of the world’s biggest fabs. Then Professor Sir Colin Humphreys set him a challenge: could he make graphene at wafer scale – the same problem Samsung had spent $2.2 billion trying, and failing, to crack?
Five weeks of experiments later, Simon saw the first promising result. A short time after that, Paragraf was born, and by December 2024 the company had switched on the world’s first graphene electronics foundry.
In this episode of Lab to Market Leadership, Simon explains how a decade‑plus in Asian fabs gave him a process‑engineering lens no one else brought to graphene, how a chance train journey with Colin Humphreys became the turning point, and why copper‑free, transfer‑free graphene was essential to escape the industry’s 'trough of disillusionment.'
He also talks candidly about the hardest part of scaling a Deep Tech company: people. From hiring the first team to recognising when someone’s journey with the company is over, and from open‑door collaboration to faster, tougher CEO calls, this is essential listening for technical founders learning to lead as CEOs.
Learn more about Lab to Market Leadership: https://www.deeptechleaders.com
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/deeptechleaders
Podcast Production: Beauxhaus
