From Scratch to Scale: Trillion Dollar Markets
🧬 Learnings from yesterday's champions for tomorrow's pioneers.
While scrolling through Twitter, I stumbled upon this thread talking about the heyday of the biotech research boom during the 70s and 80s, where a ragtag bunch of scientists openly published their groundbreaking research on producing synthetic insulin - this was Genentech’s 1978 paper in Nature.
Why reveal your golden formula to giants who could crush you, I wondered. Maybe because the founders of Genentech understood a profound paradox: sometimes the best way to capture value isn't to hoard it, but to release it thoughtfully, creating an entirely new market where you've already staked the first claim.
By endorsing recombinant DNA technology, they created a virtuous cycle of talent, funding and tacit knowledge, thus building the foundations of a trillion dollar market.
Trillion-dollar markets aren't just billion-dollar ideas with three extra zeros. They're fundamentally different beasts.
When we study the handful of industries that have crossed this threshold (semiconductors, cloud computing, biotech, hardware), we see creation at a different scale. These aren't incremental improvements; they're moments where multiple technological threads converge to create something entirely unprecedented.
What defines these trillion-dollar opportunities? They transform core human activities rather than optimise existing workflows. They give birth to entire economies of adjacent innovations. And critically, they create jobs, capture economic value and wield technological power on a scale of nation-states.
As a matter of fact, how many trillion dollar companies exist in the world today?
USA: 7, Europe & Rest of World: 0.
Europe has been sleeping at the wheel and you definitely did not need me repeating everything that’s being said around us. We've become adept at critiquing giants we never birth.
This is precisely why I'm building Curcuma with a community-first approach. The times we live in demand a radically different methodology: capital that thinks in decades rather than quarters.
The next trillion-dollar opportunities won't appear in pitch decks with neat TAM slides. They'll manifest in rooms where brilliant minds from disparate fields collide at the right moment.
But before we get there, how do we bring brilliant minds together to fuse at high speeds?
1. Scaling Tacit Knowledge: Lessons from Genentech
Tacit knowledge is lived experience that cannot be easily shared, if at all. It is experiential wisdom that allowed Genentech and other wily, ambitious companies to keep pushing harder at the frontiers of what was possible.
It wasn’t just about getting scientists together in a lab, it was about trust, agency, and solving sticky problems with fellow scientists in a flow state. Publishing their synthetic insulin breakthrough in Nature was a stroke of genius in creating a new market.
By openly sharing their discoveries, they didn’t lose their edge, only sharpened it as they soon became the place to be for the best scientists - creating a flywheel of talent & expertise that only compounded over time.
This approach never really died, it just changed hands and faces. In AI research, platforms & conferences like ArXiv and NeurIPS serve as an open-source, modern-day Nature, allowing researchers to freely publish their breakthroughs, without having to resort to the labyrinthine publishing houses that drown researchers with rules - both explicit and implicit, all the while signalling credibility to investors and collaborators.
We saw this with some of the seminal papers ‘GANs’, ‘Attention is all you need’, ‘AlexNet’ leading to the foundation of the leading AI labs we know today.
But scaling tacit knowledge isn’t just about sharing information—it’s about getting the right talent in at the right time.
2. Trading Talent: The AI Talent Wars
If Genentech’s era was defined by scaling tacit knowledge, today’s AI landscape is defined by trading it like trump cards in the form of talented researchers.
Talent has become the ultimate currency in the AI arms race. Companies like Mistral are creating new innovation hubs, especially in an announcement made by them to develop a new multi-billion euro data center in the Paris Region.
This fluidity in talent exchange mirrors what we’re building at Curcuma, a platform designed to cultivate ecosystems where talent can compound over time. At our agorae (small gatherings of founders, operators and domain experts), we’re seeing firsthand how this very tacit knowledge flows through human networks.
These aren’t just spaces for networking—they’re particle colliders where ideas, people and technologies are smashed together at high velocity and new industries are born.
However, with historic heavy European regulations & France’s modifications to its taxation scheme making it difficult for world-class talent to come take root, we have failed to fully take advantage of the breakneck speed of innovation, instead deftly hiding behind layers of bureaucracy. The current macroeconomic atmosphere has served as a great wake up call for Europe to finally set aside its nationalistic ardour and get back to building.
The lesson? Talent clusters drive innovation at breakneck speed, but retaining that talent requires more than compensation. It requires culture and a sense of collective achievement.
3. Community as Catalyst: Creating Markets
Deep tech ventures face a unique challenge: their technologies often outpace market demand. To bridge this gap, they must create markets ex nihilo, just as Genentech did for recombinant DNA or OpenAI did for generative AI.
Community is the secret ingredient here.
Deep tech ecosystems thrive at the intersection of two critical forces:
On one hand, you need a critical mass of technical virtuosos working in close proximity: scientists, engineers, and domain experts who collectively push past what's currently possible and draw upon expertise in disparate industries.
On the other, you need ruthless clarity about value creation, precisely who will pay for these breakthroughs, at what price point, and how solving today's challenge unlocks even more ambitious ones tomorrow. This commercial lens isn't separate from the technical work but intimately intertwined with it.
In emerging fields like nanopore-based DNA sequencing, fully automated labs, bioinspired robotics, etc., early adopters aren’t just customers — they’re collaborators who are paying to solve a big, thorny problem. By fostering open ecosystems, deep tech startups can accelerate adoption while reducing risk.
This is where we see the crucial role played by industrial partners in establishing FOAKs (First Of A Kind plants) and design partnership agreements for startups to test run, gather data and build a better product in the early days. It takes a village as they say…
At Curcuma, we’re live players of building such villages as well as the roads and bridges that connect them.
Our agorae bring together founders building at the intersection of trillion dollar markets and frontier technology with domain experts who can spot early potential and call bullshit on redundant posturing. These gatherings aren’t about scaling products—they’re about scaling action systems.
This approach echoes Genentech’s “pizza and plasmids” culture of us against the world but updates it for today’s world of bits and tomorrow’s world of atoms.
I’m also seeing this take shape with the folks at FR8 who have started a unique place in the Aalto University campus in Finland that can only be resumed as a hacker hotel, incubator and research lab mashed into one.
Without further ado, once we have this community kettle boiling, how do we create energy out of it?
4. Speed Scaleth Markets
In emerging trillion-dollar markets, velocity isn't a tactical advantage—it's an existential necessity. When I read Sarah Guo's brilliant piece on pace, it crystallised what I've observed across deep tech: being fast isn't just about efficiency, it's about darwinism and market creation.
Unlike consumer apps where perfect polish matters, frontier technologies face a different equation. When breakthroughs happen weekly rather than yearly, the company that completes thought-to-test-and-deployment cycles fastest often wins, even against competitors with 100x the resources.
What does true velocity look like at the bleeding edge?
It's not frantic acceleration or burnout culture. It's a profound comfort with ambiguity—the willingness to make high-quality decisions with incomplete information. It's the intuition of using the Pareto principle well. It's the artful balance between speed and precision.
In deep tech, three velocity patterns separate market creators from footnotes:
Experimental Density:
The teams creating trillion-dollar opportunities maximise their learning velocity. While others debate perfect experiments, they've already run five imperfect ones, extracted the insights, and moved forward. They're pattern-matching machines, turning weeks of learning into days.
Infrastructure Minimalism:
The next ASML, BioNTech or Mistral isn't built on bloated infrastructure or perfect tooling. They make ruthless trade-offs, investing deeply in the core technologies that matter while accepting constraints elsewhere. When crossing uncharted territory, you travel light.
Compounding Clarity:
Perhaps most critically, they maintain a North Star so compelling that individual decisions become obvious and autonomous rather than requiring constant alignment. Without this clarity, speed becomes chaos. With it, velocity becomes unstoppable.
This is what we look for at Curcuma, not just in the founders we back, but in how we build our own community. Our agorae run lean by design. Our investment process optimises for quality of thinking, not quantity of spreadsheets. We measure ourselves by insights per month, not meetings held.
Because in markets that don't yet exist, the fastest learner becomes the market creator. And market creators shape the rules that followers must obey.
Conclusion: Building What Matters
Market creation follows a pattern we can learn from. From Genentech's open publishing to today's frontier tech, successful market creators combine three essential elements: communities where tacit knowledge flows, talent that moves with velocity and meaning, and a clear vision of value creation.
Europe has the technical brilliance needed to build trillion-euro markets. What we're working on is connecting the dots - bringing the right minds together at the right moment and backing them with conviction.
At Curcuma, we're focused on this intersection. Our agorae create spaces where ambitious founders meet domain experts who can separate signal from noise. We're backing teams that move with purpose and pace, recognising that in nascent markets, velocity often determines who shapes the rules.
We don't have all the answers, but we're committed to the questions that matter:
How do we translate European excellence into market-defining companies? How do we build for decades, not quarters? How do we create value that compounds across generations?
This isn't just about building unicorns. It's about nurturing the ecosystems where trillion-euro markets emerge. Because ultimately, those who create markets shape their future in ways that mere participants cannot.
The journey from molecules to markets is never straightforward. But with the right community, clarity, and conviction, it becomes possible. That's what we're building toward.
This is so well written. In a laid back culture, learning fast is sometimes seen as road to burnout.
In the right circles, you get to learn faster without burning out. In fact, you are more energised.
Looking forward to your agorae!