Rahul Rana (Making Moonshots)
The author of Making Moonshots gives perspectives on investing in deep tech, the current moonshot ecosystem, and tactics for making your own moonshot.
Welcome to the second edition of Master Plan, a series of conversations with deep tech founders doing really hard things.
Rahul Rana isn’t a deep tech founder, but he literally wrote the book on moonshots. He’s a college student currently working at Lux Capital, one of the most active VC firms investing in emerging technologies. Rahul takes us through how to think like a moonshot founder, thoughts on the current state of deep tech, and maximizing serendipity.
Rahul’s book, Making Moonshots, is out now.
Rahul introduces himself
My name is Rahul Rana, I’m currently a sophomore at Rutgers studying finance and astrophysics. My passion for deep tech started as a kid—my dad works at Bell Labs. As a kid, he’d always bring me to the labs to look at their Nobel Prize winners, all their inventions, and their new cool research. I’d go into actual research labs and play around with all the fancy gadgets and tools and became obsessed with all things science and breakthrough tech.
Funnily enough, once I got to high school, I blocked off all that curiosity and fell into the finance and business crowd. I thought I was gonna go into investment banking when I got into college. But when I got to college, I realized that I wanted to go back to my roots and combine the two: finance and deep tech.
I wanted to do something bold. Around this time I decided I had all this passion, all this energy, I wanted to do something with it. I got this awesome opportunity to write this book. I don’t know if it was luck or serendipity, but it just came at the right time. I found the right mentor (a professor at Georgetown) and he’s been coaching me the entire time, really helping set me up with a publisher and stuff.
Outside of the book, I’ve interned at an AI startup, a nanotech startup, and 2 other VC firms in content creation roles. But in terms of the book itself, I started in January, I’ve been writing it ever since. I’ve met some awesome people and became tight with partners at VC firms, founders, people like that. I started building communities, creating content around this topic, and really trying to build a reputation around all things in deep tech.
How to make a moonshot
There’s a lot to it. A moonshot is a really lofty, seemingly-impossible goal to reach. It’s a metaphor for the Apollo Missions. I wanted to apply that concept to startups.
Moonshots are a 3-part spectrum. You take some sort of advanced technology (deep tech), you use it in a radically creative solution, and solve some big problem in the world. I call it more of a spectrum than a concrete framework because there are varying degrees of how you can apply it.
So how to make said moonshot? Well, there’s a couple of things. In my book, I break it down into 4 categories:
Psychology (mindset)
Philosophies
Strategies
Ecosystem
I specifically try not to make it a boring business management book. I wanted it to be something that’s fun, dynamic, and interesting. Looking at deep tech from all different angles, instead of just business.
Mindset
You have to be radically creative. You need to be extremely optimistic, but also a pessimist. Be super naive, but also be grounded in reality. All of these seemingly-opposing qualities. You also have your typical founder personality traits. Ambitious, bold, contrarian, disruptive, all these different qualities I break down and give examples for in my book.
At the end of the day, it’s about being an exception. It’s about being a complex level of genius, but it’s a level that anyone can harness. It’s so accessible. It’s not something that only Elon Musk can harness. I try to dispel all those myths and I give a tangible toolkit on how to actually do so. It’s actually actionable. I’m not gonna say something like “be creative.” I show you how some of the best founders do it.
Philosophy
Philosophy is about being resilient, rethinking failure, and being wise. Being wise is huge. Use mental models. I have a whole list of 11 mental models in the book as an homage to Apollo 11.
The book also incorporates a lot of theories about human potential. Moonshot founders—people who do this deep tech stuff—they’re really maximizing their human potential. I go into some stories that I hear from these founders, some awesome things that got them hyped up and inspired to work on these problems.
My favorite is this one theory that says that all life on Earth is the remnants of dead stars. A supernova releases all these elements and materials. After a long time, those elements somehow got to Earth, created life, and thus came us. It’s inspiring to me that we’re the remnants of dead stars because it means we should be doing things of cosmic magnitude.
Strategy
Strategy entails a bunch of things. There’s a whole discussion on how to get started on the problem and what’s the right problem to solve. Strategy also entails that moonshots are for everyone—it’s not just for conventional experts or rich people. Anyone can go about making a moonshot and I dispel those myths, revealing all the non-obvious factors in doing so.
The book goes into pitching and storytelling, which is really important for all things deep tech because that’s how you get customers, how you raise capital, how you acquire talent, all those sorts of things.
You also need to de-risk it. Because a moonshot is super risky, you need to make the journey as doable as possible. I also go into leveraging all those cutting/bleeding edge technologies we have today. Science fiction and science fact, all those cool strategies.
Ecosystem
You have to really leverage the ecosystem around a moonshot. The book talks about startups, VC/investing, the government, education, and finally the secondary players: accelerators, incentives, media, and entertainment.
Your best startups know how to harness all aspects of that ecosystem. They partner with the government, and with university research labs. They usually get their breakthroughs to commercialize from university research labs, as well as talent from those labs. I go through the whole commercialization process, and also look at it from a VC perspective: how do you fix VC to support more moonshots? How do you fix the government to support more moonshots?
What kinds of investors to raise from
People on your cap table should have these 3 qualities:
Wisdom
Patience
Belief in progress
In my book, I talk a lot about making wise companies. It’s so important to have a wise company as much as it is to have a profitable one. That also goes for investors as well. You want people who are wise. They’re really looking to see the company grow, out of their appreciation for science and all things tech.
I’ve just realized that the investors who actually care about the product at hand do so much better than the ones that give you the money and leave, or the ones that don’t support the mission and vision of what you’re doing.
It’s so simple yet so important, but you should also bring on those who want to see some good in the world and have long-term visions. Most investors want quick wins and as a result of how incentives are set up in venture capital.
If you look at incentives, it’s obvious that people value software and consumer a lot more than deep tech because if you want quick wins—3-5 years is the standard lifecycle of a fund and that’s when you should get a solid company and quick returns out of that.
Deep tech operates on a much longer timeframe, so you need investors that understand that. These investors might come from academia or just really understand the sales cycle, product development cycle, and R&D stages that other software/consumer investors wouldn’t really understand.
You want the investors that believe in progress. Your investors should have that acumen and skillset for understanding the qualities of deep tech and all the industries that make up deep tech. People that really understand the markets themselves.
The most important indicator of a successful deep tech company
Commercial viability is absolutely huge. At the end of the day, it’s a company. If you want VC backing, it has to have a solid business model and reach profitability at some point in time. The business plan and model are so important.
That said, it depends on where you are as a company. In the way beginning, you need to focus on the team. Are these the only people in the world who can make this company successful? If that answer is yes, then you know you’re on to something. Once a company gets started, the most important thing is getting commercial viability.
We have all these fancy technology breakthroughs going on in the world. Mind control is real, we have 3D printing factories for the moon, we have all those super-advanced things. At the end of the day, what matters most is whether or not people adopt that technology. Can you make an actual business out of these breakthroughs?
Storytelling for deep tech
When it comes to demarcating whether or not someone’s an actual founder or a fraud, storytelling is huge. If you look at Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, she over-storytold. She storytold so much that she tricked people into believing her for the longest time.
You have to find the right balance between under-storytelling and over-storytelling. Get people curious, get them excited, but allow the investors to put the puzzle pieces together. Tell them just enough so they themselves understand that the technology is huge, but let them do the critical thinking. Storytell to the perfect level that gets them excited enough for them to realize by themselves that this will become huge.
How to evaluate technologies
Let’s say you have conviction in a founder and decided that they’re legit. After that, you need to look at the technology itself. A lot of deep tech investors have in-house resident experts, EIRs, or they have connections within academia or other industries, and they would consult those people. Having a network of expertise is important in realizing whether or not a technology is for real or not.
At the end of the day, the technology has to work. It’s so intuitive, but many people get it wrong. Nobody asked Elizabeth Holmes if her technology worked. Everyone just assumed that it did. It’s surprising that nobody asked Theranos if their technology worked, and at the end of the day it didn’t—there wasn’t even a product.
A solid mental model for realizing whether or not a moonshot idea can work is: does the technology work? There has to be an achievable journey to get to viability. There needs to be this very specific, tractable journey to get the evidence of whether it works or not.
I’ve always said to people: when it comes to moonshots, founders need bold goals in their long-term visions, but in the medium and short term, they need to be extremely clear and doable about what they’re going to do every month or so. Those short-term goals can’t be bold. They need to be a lot more achievable.
Why industrial research labs are so good at moonshots
R&D labs like PARC or DARPA are bringing smart people all around the world together to work on some awesome bold thing that inspires them. A lot of these things are very intuitive and many people miss them, but getting people excited about a common goal or vision is huge. Especially if you can get really smart people excited. Things like the Manhattan Project and Apollo missions are examples of that.
Once you get people excited and incentivize them to win, they’re going to do what they do best—make breakthroughs.
I’d break it down into 3 things:
You need an internal infrastructure within the organization to incentivize people and make for a solid ecosystem.
You need a social/cultural attitude that inspires people.
You need the social incentive, whether that be benefits, money, or status, to intrinsically motivate people to work on big ideas.
If you have those 3 things, that makes for a solid research organization.
Moonshots are expensive
There’s one single argument against my entire book, and that’s moonshots are expensive. I recognize that. They require some money. But nonetheless, that doesn’t mean it’s only for rich people. Anyone can do it, but there’s just a higher barrier to entry as opposed to software.
Those barriers to entry are decreasing ever so slightly year over year, but ideally: deep tech should be like software, where you can build things in your bedroom or garage. We’re not at that stage yet. We can’t lie to ourselves. But hopefully, with more resources and awareness around deep tech, those barriers will go down and it’ll be less expensive to do things.
For example, the cost of gene editing went down exponentially since the 90s. There’s a lot of things like that. It’s still relatively high compared to all things software, but it’s slowly going down and within the next decade, I think deep tech is going to really boom because of these lower barriers to entry.
How to cultivate radical creativity
We have regular creativity, which is about making connections with a linear assumption of the future. You make all these new ideas and connections, but it’s assuming that progress is linear. It’s about making new things out of existing things.
Radical creativity assumes a nonlinear future with exponential possibilities. Nothing incremental. It’s radical because you’re making newer things out of new things in a forward-thinking context. With radical creativity, you’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and being on the outermost edges of science and tech.
In terms of actually how to harness it, radically creative individuals have a lot of seemingly-opposing qualities. They’re charismatic and extroverted, but also quiet and introverted at the same time. They’re super smart, but also naive. They’re playful but also grounded in reality. They’re passionately dispassionate. They’re responsibly irresponsible.
The harmony between these opposing traits is what defines a radically creative person. A lot of the best founders also have a relentless curiosity to learn more about a given field and become obsessed with it.
On the flip side, radical creativity is also about having a growth mindset and a desire to improve oneself. Maybe it’s also about growing up with challenges, which builds character. There are so many ways to do it.
I would recommend someone keep those qualities in mind, but also ask very uncomfortable questions. Figure out what you want your human potential to be. Experience and explore lots of different things. Question assumptions, do unsexy things, brainstorm freely, align yourself with the super lofty goal, operate at the extremes, and have a contagious passion for something. Maximize serendipity. I can go on and on, but that’s what really spurs radical creativity.
How to get to the frontier of an industry
Most research breakthroughs start with PhDs, but it’s not necessarily the ideal state to be for a startup. I have a subchapter in my book called Moonshots are for Everyone. I’m a sophomore business major in college. I have no background in deep tech, and yet I’m writing this book. I can hold conversations with experts, and I wrote an entire publishable book about this topic.
The easy example that everyone knows is Elon Musk. He only has a bachelor’s degree in physics and economics. That by no means makes him an expert in anything deep tech. And I’d say he’s not an exception. We should view Elon Musk as a normal human being. There are more people out there that don’t have the media attention that Elon does. And what he and all these people have in common is that they’re incredibly resourceful.
The internet made access to resources easier. Moonshot founders are resourceful enough to take all of that information from the internet and figure out what they need to do. But it all starts with the mindset. You need a mindset like Elon, Laura Deming, Naveen Jain, Sam Altman, etc. These people aren’t experts with credentials. They don’t have PhDs, and yet they’re making the most impactful companies out there. It goes back to being relentlessly resourceful and talking to the right people.
It’s as simple as cold-emailing experts. Literally, Laura Deming cold-emailed a professor in the US as a 12-year-old in New Zealand. And that was enough to get her that research position at age 12. Using whatever you have to your advantage and maximizing serendipity however you can and putting in the work.
Credentialed and non-credentialed experts are not more or less important than each other, but non-credentialed experts can be equally as effective as credentialed ones in terms of startups.
On personal connections
I’m at Rutgers. It’s a non-targeted school. I came into the tech world with absolutely no connections. All I knew going to college was finance. I actually came from a 4-year business administration magnet program in high school. I’m not technical whatsoever. I made those personal connections by literally cold-emailing, by jumping on Twitter, and creating content.
Maximize serendipity. That’s the way to go for everything.
To get interviews for my book, I would really research the person and their background. I would identify things that they really like or things that stand out and look for patterns within all the content that they create. I throw in all those buzzwords that they like into my cold emails.
My one for Josh Wolfe when I first emailed him, I would throw in all of his little phrases and words he would say in every single podcast and essay. He always says some of these words, and I used them to make a hyper-personalized, really concise email.
I got him and 50 other experts that no college kid has ever talked to. Twitter was also huge for me. I only started tweeting in May, and I’m almost at 900 followers by just being really active and engaging and creating a solid stream of articles and thoughts.
GPT-3 and the Tech Twitter Bubble
I’d say all things deep tech are underrated. Literally, nobody is giving attention to it. Tech Twitter is a bubble, but in the real world, nobody knows about anything deep tech, biotech, and defense tech. With GPT-3, which came out in June or so, everyone on Tech Twitter was raving about it. I was looking through traditional news media and Reddit, and nobody has heard of it. I’d tell them about it and they’re like “holy shit, when did this come out?”
I saw this thread on Reddit where they were talking about the next up and coming technology and only one person mentioned GPT-3, and their comments section was huge and everyone was like “wait, what is that? I’ve never heard of that” and it was so funny to me.
Why biotech is an underrated trillion-dollar industry
The next super company is going to be deep tech, whether it’s drug discovery or a space company. But I think biotech is going to be absolutely huge. That’s going to be a trillion-dollar industry, easily. I think it’s because of its versatility.
We’re at the stage where biotech is starting to act like software. Just like how you can write code, you can write DNA. Sequencing, editing, and making drugs are becoming so much easier. You can use biotech to help mitigate climate change. You can use it to cure diseases. You can use it to improve the health of people in inner-cities. It has national security applications and even branched into the automotive industry. All of those things, biotech can solve.
How to get more people to work on deep tech instead of big tech
That’s my life’s goal: get all the solid talent away from big tech. Saving lives is so much more important than maximizing advertising revenue.
Not everyone wants to work on a risky moonshot. People have different financial situations, passions, interests, and circumstances. Working at a big tech company provides solid pay and benefits, and they can also be a great environment for mentorship and learning. People at big tech companies do great work, but those smart people could also be working on more impactful problems.
At the end of the day, you need to fix the incentive structure. You need to get more funding and attention towards deep tech. With deep tech, what I’ve realized is that it’s so easy to align yourself with the mission and vision of the company. Everyone wants to do good in the world, and that’s what deep tech does across any industry.
However, you need to give them the right pay, benefits, ecosystem, and culture. Once you can do that, you need media attention. To get more people into deep tech, we need to increase the social status of the people who are in that industry. The way I look at it is this is: FAANG and high finance are so popular because they’re incredibly competitive. Because they’re competitive, the pay is larger. Because the pay is larger, the more smartest of the smartest are competing for that position. If we could have that flywheel in deep tech, it’s going to boom.
Rahul’s Secret Master Plan
I have no idea. I asked people for career-building advice on Twitter.
What I’m thinking of—on a high-level—is to build a reputation around moonshots. My absolute dream job is a full-time position at Lux because they also incubate companies in-house, so it’ll be really cool for me to be both a venture investor and a venture builder.
I want to build this personal brand around moonshots and create more content, jump on podcasts, inspire people. I’m thinking of making a community around the book, though I’m not sure yet.
It’s just a process of developing that personal brand while also building skills. I really wanna build the skills to be a value-add in the deep tech space, which is why I’m a minor in astrophysics so I can learn more about all things deep tech.
I do want to have a solid following on Twitter and other media accounts, so I can become a go-to person for moonshots. How am I going to do that? I’m still figuring it out, but those are the next steps once the book is published.
Rahul’s book, Making Moonshots, is out now!
You can follow Rahul on Twitter at @rrana03_ if you haven’t already. If you want to be notified every time we send out a new interview (we have a few more coming up soon), you can subscribe here. For any questions, feedback, or requests, send them to me via Twitter.