I was rejected for being a commodities trader. Now it's the only thing that makes me different.

I spent four years trading commodities. Then I became a deep tech investor. The two worlds look nothing alike, although the mental models are almost identical.

The first time I interviewed for a role in venture capital, the feedback was polite and clear: your background is interesting, but we’re looking for someone with more relevant experience. I heard some version of that sentence more times than I can count. Commodities trading, they implied, was finance adjacent but not quite finance. It didn’t map onto the mental model of what a VC analyst should look like.

I want to tell you what that period felt like, and then I want to tell you what I’ve realised since, because the two things are connected, and neither is what I expected.

Where it actually started: a metallurgy lab

Before trading, before venture, I was a metallurgy and materials engineer. I studied how metals fail, about fatigue, fracture, creep, the behaviour of grain boundaries under stress. I spent time on dendrites: the branching crystalline structures that form when molten metal solidifies, whose geometry determines whether a turbine blade survives or fails at 1,400 degrees Celsius. I learned about nickel superalloys, about what happens to a material when you push it right to the edge of what its crystal structure can hold.

I had no idea what any of this was for, commercially. It felt like the kind of knowledge that mattered enormously inside a lab and almost nowhere else. So I moved into energy and commodities; real physical assets, price discovery, things that moved on ships and through pipelines. That felt like the real world. The metallurgy felt like a chapter I was closing.

I didn’t close it. I just stopped looking at it for a while.

The trading years

Four years on an energy and commodities desk teaches you things you don’t know you’re learning. You’re staring at screens, yes, talking in basis points and spreads. But from the inside, what you’re really doing is pricing the physical world: refinery throughput, shipping congestion, drought in a grain belt, a power grid going long on solar and short on storage flexibility.

The concept that shaped me most was contango. A market is in contango when the future price of something is higher than its spot price. The spread encodes a single question: what does it cost to hold this thing from now until delivery? Storage, insurance, financing, the risk of the world changing between now and then. Contango is the market’s way of paying someone to provide that service or charging them for refusing to.

“Every position you hold is implicitly a view on the physical world. I didn’t know yet that this was also a description of venture investing in deep tech.”

The other concept was basis risk: the gap between the price of the thing you’re hedging and the price of the instrument you’re hedging with. You think you’re protected. But the two prices don’t move together perfectly, and the mismatch can kill you in the tail.

I will come back to both of these. They matter more than I realised.

The rejections

When I decided to move toward investing, I assumed the trading background would read as a strength. It didn’t, definitely not at first.

What I kept hearing

“Your background is interesting, but we’re looking for someone with more traditional finance or operator experience.” / “Commodities is quite specific and we’re not sure how that translates.” / “We’d love to stay in touch as your profile evolves.”

There’s a version of this story where I tell you I was never discouraged. That’s not true. The pattern of rejection was specific enough to be instructive: it wasn’t that people thought I was unqualified in a general sense. It was that I didn’t fit the template. VC, like most professional services, has a canonical origin story; either consulting or banking, then an MBA, then a principal role. I had none of that. I had a trading desk and a degree in how metals break.

What got me through it, honestly, was other people. Not abstract inspiration but specific people who were willing to take a call, share how they thought about problems, give me access to their mental models even when I had nothing obvious to offer in return. That generosity is not evenly distributed in this industry, and I am aware of exactly how much of my current position depends on people who chose to be generous with their time when they didn’t have to be.

If you’re stuck somewhere in a similar position with the wrong background, wrong template, not fitting the profile, all I’d say: ask. The worst outcome is silence. The best outcome is that someone recalibrates what your profile is actually worth. Both of those things happened to me.

What the trading background actually transfers

When I look at an early stage deep tech company today, I think in contango terms. What is the “storage cost” of this technology reaching commercial scale? How much capital, how many years of demonstration, how many regulatory cycles does the molecule or the device or the process need to pass through before it clears? And who is being paid to hold the position while the world catches up?

Most deep tech failures I’ve seen in diligence aren’t failures of science. They’re failures of contango math. The technology works, but the implied storage cost i.e the capital required to bridge from prototype to commercial deployment is higher than anyone modeled, and no one has the conviction or the balance sheet to hold through the delivery date.

Basis risk translates just as directly. Every pitch deck I’ve read in the last year has a version of the same slide: “India is the world’s fastest growing X market, and we are positioned to capture Y%.” The technology might be globally validated. But the basis: local grid quality, local supply chains, local procurement cycles, local regulatory approval paths is never the same as the global benchmark.

~82%

Revenue decline I saw in one company’s FY25 numbers. A real technology with a real basis problem. The product worked. The Indian deployment pipeline didn’t.

Trading also taught me that volatility is not risk, rather it’s the price of optionality.

Deep tech is extremely volatile, technically and commercially and regulatorily. But that volatility is exactly what creates the asymmetric return profile that makes the asset class worth backing. A deep tech investment with low volatility probably has no upside. What matters is whether the founding team is structurally long or short the volatility in their own company.

The full circle I did not see coming

Here is the thing I genuinely could not have predicted when I left the metallurgy lab: almost every deal I look at today has something to do with materials.

Battery chemistries and the dendrite formation that causes lithium cells to short-circuit and fail. Carbon fibre composites and the fatigue behaviour of aerospace structures. Nickel superalloys and their role in next generation turbines for industrial heat. Band gap engineering in GaN and SiC power semiconductors. Bio crude oil and the material science of thermal conversion. Sodium-ion intercalation chemistry and why the crystal structure of the cathode determines cycle life. Creep behaviour in high-temperature superconducting wire.

I sit in diligence calls and I understand what founders are describing at some level not because I’m smarter, but because I spent years in a lab learning the vocabulary of how materials behave at their limits. That vocabulary turns out to be the vocabulary of deep tech.

“The education I thought was too narrow turned out to be exactly wide enough, but just with a five year delay on the returns.”

The commodities trading gave me the financial and physical intuition. The materials engineering gave me the technical depth. Neither looked like the right background for venture capital. Together, they might be exactly the right background for the specific kind of venture capital I’m trying to do: early stage, deep tech, energy and materials, India.

What didn’t transfer and had to be rebuilt

Trading rewards fast, reversible decisions. You are wrong, you close the position, you move on. The P&L is marked daily. Early stage deep tech investing is the opposite: a slow, largely irreversible decision with incomplete information, where the feedback loop is years, not hours. My first instinct when diligence turned uncomfortable was to cut quickly. That instinct is almost always wrong. The right move is usually to hold the company harder: more calls, more questions, more founder engagement to figure out whether the problem is actually fixable.

Trading also trains a deep cynicism about narratives. Every story a counterparty tells you is designed, in some sense, to move you off your price. That cynicism is healthy on a trading desk and genuinely damaging in early stage investing, where the founder’s narrative is often the most important asset the company has. It took me a while to learn to be skeptical of the content of a narrative while still taking the quality of the narrative seriously as an independent signal.

The thesis that emerged

A year in, having sat across from founders working on everything from long duration energy storage to cryo cooling systems to green propulsion to power electronics, what I’ve landed on is this: deep tech investing in India is essentially a market making problem.

There is a massive gap between where India’s physical infrastructure is today and where it needs to be in 2035. On the other side, there is a generation of technically extraordinary founders working on exactly these problems. What is missing is the institutional architecture to bridge the two: patient capital, procurement pathways, testing infrastructure, regulatory clarity, anchor customers who can turn a pilot into a reference deployment.

“India doesn’t have a deep tech talent problem. It has a market design problem.”

That’s the trade. A long dated, high conviction, high volatility position. Which, it turns out, is exactly the kind of position a former commodities trader and a materials engineer, is reasonably well equipped to hold.

To whoever is reading this from the wrong background

The rejections hurt. The template is real. The gap between where you are and where you’re trying to get is probably wider than it should be, and some of the people holding the gate don’t have good reasons for it.

But the nonlinear path accumulates in ways that aren’t visible until much later. The metallurgy I thought was a detour is now a core analytical tool. The commodities trading that “didn’t translate” is now the sharpest thing in my differentiation. Every door that didn’t open kept me in a room where I was learning something I didn’t know I needed.

You cannot see that when you’re in it. You have to trust it retrospectively, which is not satisfying advice when you’re in the middle of the uncertainty. So the more practical version is: find the people who are willing to invest their time in you before you have anything obvious to offer. Ask them questions. Take their calls seriously. And when your turn comes, and it will, be that person for someone else!

The industry gets better when the templates get wider. That only happens if people decide to make it happen.

Sometimes, your best ideas will come from someone who doesn’t do what you do