The Founder Mindset by Fifty Years

​​You've had the spark — a discovery, a technology, an insight that could reshape an entire industry.

​But most breakthrough research never makes a real impact in the world. It stays in papers, gets buried in approval processes, or dies when funding runs out.

​Building something civilization needs requires unreasonable conviction in a future only you may see. "NO" is often all you hear. You start wondering: Am I being too audacious? Is my idea worth pursuing? Can my research become civilizationally important? Am I the right person to do it?

​Alex Teng, Partner at Fifty Years, has helped hundreds of scientists and engineers transition from the lab bench to founding deep tech startups.

​If you're a PhD, postdoc, or engineer curious about what it takes to build a deep tech startup, this talk is for you. We'll cover how to identify if your research has commercial potential, navigate IP, choose the right team and market, iterate quickly, and grow into a great founder.

​No fluff. Just unfiltered advice to navigate the journey from scientist to founder and build an indispensable company.

​Whether you're actively spinning out or just curious about deep tech entrepreneurship, see you at HMS!

​At Fifty Years, we’ve built deep tech companies ourselves. We’ve backed over 100 deep tech companies from the earliest stages and helped them raise over $4.6 billion. We've helped our founders achieve many “firsts”: like the first carbon-negative molecule factory, the first in-orbit space factory that manufactured pharmaceutical drugs or the first de novo synthesis of a 1000+ base DNA molecule.

We've distilled everything we know about deep tech entrepreneurship into 5050, a free program to help great scientists and engineers become great founders.