Investing Talent and Capital Into Hard Problems

Note: The following contributions are personal impulses from Max Eckel. They represent individual reflections and are intended to stimulate discussion and further thought.

Europe needs more people who are willing to build things that still sound slightly impossible. This is useful for anyone thinking about their own career: your talent is also a form of capital, and you decide where to allocate it.

I had this thought while reading Robin Haak’s interview with our alumna Jenny Dreier. Jenny spent six years at EQT Ventures & Growth, saw around a thousand founders, and invested in DeepTech before it became the more obvious thing to talk about in Europe. Then she met Hélène Huby and The Exploration Company. At some point, watching from the sidelines was no longer enough, so Jenny left VC and joined the company full time.

I like that story because it is such a clean example of conviction. Not conviction as a nice opinion about Europe needing more Deep Tech. Conviction as a personal decision to put your working life into one of the hardest possible categories. 

Spacetech is almost comically difficult. Long timelines, public customers, huge technical risk, physical failure, regulation, geopolitics, capital intensity, and the small detail that your product literally has to work in space. But that is also why it matters. If you want to turn science fiction into reality, you can hardly do this more literally than by building capsules, launch systems, orbital infrastructure, and the companies around them.

And I keep seeing this second signal in our community as well. Jannes Fischer is channeling his own money through P3A into infrastructure and spacetech. Different role, same direction: invest capital into hard things. Jenny invests her talent. Jannes invests capital. Both are decisions against the easy lane.

And working on hard problems makes sense because difficulty itself can be a filter. If something is technically complex, capital-intensive, regulated, slow, or simply annoying to build, fewer people even try. But if the problem is important enough, that pain becomes part of the opportunity. You can anyway only place so many unlikely bets in your career (which are all VC-cases in the end), so why not maximize impact and upside.

For Europe: We talk a lot about sovereignty, future industries, and strategic capability, but at some point these words have to become career choices, investment choices, and company-building choices. Someone has to decide: I could do something easier, but I’ll work on the hard thing.

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