Dear all,

Some leadership environments are, if we are honest, relatively easy.

Think of a top-tier consultancy. A well-funded corporate in a growing market. A brand-name venture firm. They share a quiet superpower: money. Enough to pay top salaries, enough to make the job aspirational. You post a role and a thousand strong candidates apply. You hire the best of them, drop them into an established system with clear incentives and proven playbooks, and much of the people leadership is already done for you (though not at all on the strategy and execution side!). The machine selects, socialises, and aligns. You mostly steer.

Now picture the opposite. An early-stage startup. A scaleup in crisis. A corporate mid-transformation. These are resource-constrained environments, and they are where (people) leadership gets genuinely hard. You cannot buy your way to alignment. You cannot out-hire a problem. The playbooks do not exist yet, or have just stopped working. Every hour, every euro, every hire is a sharp trade-off, and the person setting direction, you, becomes the main instrument through which the team makes sense of the work.

There is an underused tool for exactly these environments: a personal operating manual.

It is not a new idea. It has circulated in tech for more than a decade, sometimes called a "user manual to me" or a "README." Claire Hughes Johnson wrote one leading teams at Google, and again as COO of Stripe. GitLab made its CEO's version radically public, published in the open for anyone to read. The format varies. The purpose does not: to make a leader legible on purpose, on both direction and execution, before the team has to reverse-engineer them the hard way.

I came back to mine for a simple reason. At Deep Tech Momentum we have been growing fast, towards twenty full-time people, and at some point I noticed our onboarding was no longer good enough. There is a threshold, somewhere around this size, where you can no longer see the whole team at once or align everyone with a quick word in the office. Past that line you need a scalable way to transmit two things: the North Star we are marching towards, and how each of us actually works. I had built a version of this at N26 during a steep scaleup phase. Now I have upgraded my own.

I believe every founder of a fast-growing company should have an operating manual. So should every corporate leader whose team is scaling and getting larger and harder to see. And every investor who runs a larger team. It costs a few pages and an honest afternoon, and it saves your people months of guesswork about what your silence means, whether your strong opinion is a verdict or a first draft, and what actually earns your trust.

Mine is not a set of rules. It is an invitation to a conversation, written to be challenged and added to. It has three parts: why I do this at all, what drives me, and an honest interview with myself, built from the questions a new colleague or investor would actually ask:

You can read my full answers, and borrow the structure for your own, here.

In an easy environment, the system makes you legible. In a hard one, you have to do it yourself.

With hope that you find time to look inward before the next sprint,
Martin

Deep Tech Momentum is hiring 4 senior operators. And if you know the right person for any of them — someone who ends up in the role for at least six months — we will fly you to Cape Town for New Year's Eve, all expenses paid*.

We are hiring:

👤 Chief of Staff

👤 Director of the Guardian Program & Executive Membership

👤 Director of Strategy & Programming

👤 Director of Partnerships

To apply: email [email protected] with your CV or LinkedIn.

To refer: email the same address with the candidate's details, and use the subject line "CAPETOWN – Referral for [role]".

*T&Cs: referral must be a new candidate not already in our pipeline. Candidate must be successfully hired and remain employed for at least six months. Trip budget: €5,000.

Best of workflow AI: These are the category-defining European companies building process, automation and agent orchestration layers for the next enterprise stack. 

Celonis | Munich, Germany

→ Celonis is positioning process data as the operating layer for enterprise AI.

Camunda | Berlin, Germany

→ Camunda is becoming a control layer for enterprise-grade AI workflows.

n8n | Berlin, Germany

→ n8n is one of Europe’s strongest AI-native workflow automation players.

Tines | Dublin, Ireland

→ Tines shows how security-native automation can become enterprise-wide orchestration.

Kestra | Paris, France

→ Kestra is building orchestration infrastructure for the AI-native enterprise stack.

The Global Deep Tech Report 2026 is useful because it moves the debate beyond anecdotes: Europe is not short of science, founders, or startups — it is short of scale-up capital, patent conversion, and capital-recycling infrastructure.

The team of ARQIS, Bayern Kapital, D11Z. Ventures, DeepTech & Climate Fonds (DTCF), HTGF, IHK für München und Oberbayern & Onsight Ventures conducted the first global, comprehensive analysis of Deep Tech startups and their founding teams, based on a unique dataset of 13.6k Deep Tech startups (5k validated) and 11.5k founder profiles, sourced from Dealroom, PitchBook, Crunchbase and LinkedIn.

Here’s 5 key take-aways:

Paris, Geneva, Kitzbühel and Puglia all host formats where startup founders, investors, corporates and policymakers can meet around AI, venture, digital infrastructure and European scale-up momentum.