E26: Matt Ocko, Cofounder DCVC on Lessons from 30+ Years in DeepTech Venture Capital

Intro

Matt Ocko is the Cofounder and Co-Managing Partner of DCVC, a firm he started with Zachary Bogue 16 years ago. Matt started his career at Oracle and then went on to join a $1B AUM fund called Helix Investments in the 90s where he learnt the lesson that venture is 90% people from Ben Webster.

Matt coined the term “deeptech” almost a quarter of a century ago with Steve Jurvetson on a late 1999 winter night when they were talking about quantum computing being an investable category.

DCVC has been investing in deeptech since its inception and has invested in companies like RocketLab, Oklo, Planet, Agility Robotics, SentinelOne, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Confluent, Evolv and many more.

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Introduction04:45 - The Oracle Mafia08:45 - Why venture outcomes are 90% people?12:45 - The Great Man Theory 16:45 - What It Takes To Build a DeepTech Franchise? 20:45 - Customer trust in deeptech24:45 - Disucssing Latus Bio 28:45 - How Moore’s Law and open-source enabled modern deeptech32:45 - Validating nuclear energy on venture dollars 36:45 - The strategic failure of Chinese supply chain dependency 40:45 - What policy changes we need to decouple from China? 48:45 - Protecting energy markets and homeowner Equity 52:45 - How Pivot Bio disrupts global fertilizer monopolies 56:45 - The parallel journeys of Peter Beck and Elon Musk 1:00:45 - It takes a team to execute on vision 1:04:45 - Why every failed investment comes back to people 1:08:45 - First to market vs. first to scale 1:12:45 - You need a 100x better product at seed 1:16:45 - Overcoming the risk aversion of market 1:20:45 - Tidal Metals and the future of critical minerals 1:24:45 - Culture for successful organizations 1:28:45 - Closing

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