It was a 40-degree summer day in 2014, the sun pushing hard down on the heated streets somewhere in the Arabian desert. I was a project manager at a Tier-1 consultancy, working with a team of young locals for months to make a difference to their school system. That day, I did something I still believe was right.

A young, talented associate wanted to lead a critical client workshop. I gave her full ownership and my full trust. We walked into a room that was not forgiving: the client's CEO and his entire leadership team, several partners from our firm. It did not go well. She had underestimated the precision the moment demanded, and I had not checked in enough.

The client took it well and stayed completely at ease. We mapped the gaps live in the room, reached a decision, and moved on. My firm's partners did not take it that way. I had worked with my team day and night for that client; we had a very good standing. None of it mattered. For days afterwards, they emptied bucket after bucket of frustration over my head. How could you let this happen? Do you have any idea how this looks to the client? How could you not involve us? On and on, for days.

The lesson has never left me: do not build a system of fear. Build a system of courage and honesty — where errors are tolerated, where you can debate openly, and where you are not punished when things go sideways, as long as you are genuinely committed to making them better.

Ever since, I have tried to inject that culture into the companies I build. And I have to admit: not always successfully. I belong to a strange middle generation — not boomer, not quite millennial. And over the years, often for very good reasons, many of us seem to have unlearned constructive conflict.

Which brings me to a term that has become fashionable, and badly misunderstood: psychological safety.

More and more, the phrase is invoked as a reason to avoid conflict. "We need to protect psychological safety" has quietly become code for "let's not have the hard conversation." That is the precise opposite of what the research says.

The concept comes from Amy Edmondson at Harvard. As a doctoral student she set out to show that better hospital teams made fewer errors — and the data came back inverted. The better teams reported more errors, not fewer. Not because they were sloppier, but because they felt safe enough to surface mistakes, discuss them, and learn. The weaker teams were not error-free. They were silent. Her core finding is the part everyone drops: safety does not drive performance directly. It drives learning behaviour — asking the awkward question, admitting the mistake, challenging the senior person in the room. That candour is what drives performance. Years later, Google's Project Aristotle studied 180 of its own teams and reached the same conclusion: of every factor they could measure, psychological safety was the single strongest predictor of a team's effectiveness — ahead of talent, seniority, or who was on the team.

So the popular usage gets it exactly backwards. Psychological safety is not comfortable conformity; it is the opposite — safety in dissent and difference, the condition that lets you challenge the system itself.

The lesson runs in two directions. Yes, we should build systems where speaking up is rewarded, not punished — that is the work of any leader worth the title. But we should also stop waiting to be handed our safety. No one is coming to grant you permission to be brave. Psychological safety is what a good team creates around you; courage is the thing you find in yourself.

So why has a concept built to enable disagreement flipped into an excuse to avoid it?

Because productive conflict is a skill, and we have stopped practicing it. Async, text-based communication lets us route around the live, unscripted moment where real disagreement happens. We hide behind anonymous surveys, behind aliases online — the "degree of separation" feels safer, but the more you avoid direct conversation, the harder the skill becomes. And concept creep finishes the job: when ordinary disagreement gets recoded as "harm," the rational move is to avoid whatever causes it.

And yet. This is why I remain an optimist, and why I have been a founder almost all my professional life. The startup and technology ecosystem is the one corner of Europe that still runs on courage rather than fear. It is a beacon — of optimism, of hope, of confidence. It is where people still take the interpersonal risk of saying this is wrong, let's try, I don't know yet — openly, even to the most senior person in the room — and are rewarded for it rather than punished. Because the alternative is suffocating.

We need more problem-solvers, not permission-seekers. More imagination, not obedience. More wild painters than paint-by-number followers. More dreamers than test-takers.

The choice is the one I faced in that desert room. A system of fear, or a system of courage. Europe does not need more comfort. It needs more people willing to be sometimes uncomfortable but honest, together — and an ecosystem brave enough to reward them for it.

To courage over comfort,

Martin

DEEP TECH OPEN | SPACE TECH STARTUPS

Billions of Euros are flying into launch and Earth observation startups in Europe. Less obvious is what comes next: Once Europe has more satellites in orbit, it needs the ability to see them, protect them, communicate with them, repair them and prevent orbital infrastructure from becoming another fragile dependency. Here are promising companies taking care for our stuff in space. 

U-Space | Toulouse, France

Infinite Orbits | Toulouse, France

Archangel Lightworks | Oxford, United Kingdom

→ Has the ability to turn optical ground infrastructure from a specialist capability into a deployable communications layer for defence, telecom and critical infrastructure.

NewOrbit | Reading, United Kingdom

→ VLEO can become a commercially viable operating layer rather than a technical curiosity.

Vyoma | Munich, Germany

Europe’s space economy is quietly moving from prestige infrastructure to operational infrastructure.

The EU Space Market Report 2026, published by the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), maps the downstream markets and shows how navigation, Earth observation (EO), secure connectivity and orbital safety are converging into a strategic resilience layer for Europe.

1. Europe’s space market is no longer just Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and Earth Observation — it is becoming a resilience stack.

The report’s most important structural shift is that EUSPA now frames the EU Space Programme around four connected layers: Galileo/EGNOS for navigation, Copernicus for Earth Observation, GOVSATCOM/IRIS² for secure communications, and SSA for orbital safety. 

Why this matters: The downstream market is moving from individual space-enabled products toward integrated, mission-critical systems for transport, agriculture, emergency response, public safety and infrastructure resilience.

2. GNSS remains the economic heavyweight — but the value is shifting from devices to services.

The global GNSS downstream market is projected to grow from more than €300 billion in 2024 to more than €580 billion by 2034. Device revenues are expected to rise from around €82 billion to nearly €122 billion, but the larger shift is in value-added services, which are forecast to grow from more than €220 billion to €460 billion. By 2034, GNSS-enabled services are expected to account for almost 80% of total GNSS revenues, while the installed base approaches 10 billion receivers.

Why this matters: Navigation is becoming invisible infrastructure. The strategic value is not the receiver, it is the software, automation, timing, authentication and sector-specific services built on top of positioning data.

3. Earth Observation is becoming an operational intelligence market.

The EO downstream market is forecast to grow from €3.5 billion in 2024 to €7.9 billion by 2034, with value-added services expanding from around €2.8 billion to more than €6.7 billion. The report identifies agriculture, energy and raw materials, climate/environment/biodiversity, and insurance and finance as core growth areas, with agriculture alone accounting for 21% of EO revenues in 2024.

Why this matters: EO is moving beyond imagery. The strongest companies will not simply sell satellite data; they will sell risk models, compliance signals, asset intelligence, commodity insights and decision support.

4. Secure SATCOM and SSA are becoming the hidden infrastructure of sovereignty.

Secure SATCOM is being pulled forward by demand for resilient connectivity across border surveillance, crisis management, law enforcement and key infrastructure. At the same time, SSA is becoming critical as satellites, orbital activities and debris increase. The report notes that the EU SST Partnership now brings together capabilities from 19 EU Member States and provides services such as collision avoidance, re-entry analysis and fragmentation detection.

Why this matters: Europe’s next space bottleneck is not only launch or imagery, but the ability to keep orbital infrastructure connected, secure, observable and operational.

5. LEO is changing the operating logic of downstream space.

The report frames Low Earth Orbit (LEO) as a major infrastructure shift across EO, SATCOM and emerging PNT. LEO constellations offer faster revisit times and higher resolution for EO, lower latency and higher capacity for SATCOM, and potential resilience benefits for navigation. EUSPA estimates that there are already around 350–400 LEO EO satellites in operation, with the number expected to roughly double by 2030.

Why this matters: LEO compresses the time between observation and action. That creates opportunities for startups building tasking software, multi-source data fusion, autonomous decision systems, optical links, orbital traffic management and secure edge infrastructure.

What if your next venture wasn't just backed by a source of capital, but an ecosystem with unfair industrial advantages? Bosch Business Innovations is building it now: a new independent venture building model. Founder-led ventures. Access to its hard-tech "crown jewels". Transfer of IP. Spin-off in less than a year. And many more.

The model is set, how we communicate it is critical. To ensure our message cuts through the noise, we need to understand your unfiltered perception. This short pulse survey is your chance to sharpen our positioning and help us speak the language you'd like to hear. 

Make your voice heard, stay in touch.

→ Complete the survey today

On June 12, BAD1 Conference, an invite-only gathering brings 500 hand-selected founders, investors and young builders to The Delta Campus in Berlin-Neukölln. 

BAD1 is the flagship event of Berlin auf die Eins, a community-led movement to make Berlin the most builder-friendly tech city in Europe. The initiative focuses on practical ecosystem friction — talent, capital, administration, global relevance and density in AI, deep tech and life sciences — and aims to turn Berlin’s startup momentum into measurable commitments over the next 12–24 months.

The format is deliberately not a classic conference: fewer panels for the sake of panels, more room for the people actually building and financing Europe’s next wave of companies. 

The room is strong: BAD1 lists 200 founders, 200 investors and 100 under-25 builders, including founders behind companies such as n8n, Enpal, GetYourGuide, The Exploration Company, sennder, ResearchGate, SumUp and Localyze, alongside investors from firms including Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed, Accel, General Catalyst, Atomico, EQT Ventures, Balderton, Cherry Ventures, Speedinvest, Vsquared, World Fund, Lakestar and Earlybird. 

→ Apply for a last minute spot: BAD1 is invite-only, but applications are open via the official “Apply to attend” link on the BAD1 website

Most deep tech founders do not struggle because the science is weak. They struggle because the story is still trapped inside the company.

The product is complex. The market is non-obvious. The timing matters. The team has spent years building the logic — but when the fundraising process starts, that logic has to become a crisp, investable narrative that works in a 30-minute investor meeting.

That is exactly where Stew Bewley from Amplify Presentations comes in.

Stew recently spent two days in Colorado with a space startup preparing a $20M Series A, followed by two days with a German quantum computing company preparing a $50M Series B. His work sits at the intersection of fundraising narrative, deck creation, investor readiness, delivery and rehearsal — the part of the process where technical depth has to become conviction.

One founder put it well after their first day together: “I have had these thoughts in my head for six years and you have just put it into words.”

For deep tech founders, that is not cosmetic work. It is leverage.

Stew is offering a free 30-minute pre-coaching call to pressure-test your pitch.
➔ To win a session, just drop us an email. Reply with “STEW” - best of luck!