Closing Keynote: The Death Zone, and the Level Up Awards Winner
Scaling past product-market fit, and the 2026 winner
Overview click to collapse
The closing block of Level Up 2026: a keynote from a semiconductor-metrology company CEO (introduced on tape as both "Ahmed" and "Hamed" — the audio is inconsistent and the exact name is unconfirmed; his company is heard as "Nearkuild Instruments," most plausibly Nearfield Instruments, a real Dutch semiconductor-metrology company, though this spelling is also unconfirmed) on scaling past initial success, an interview with Constantine van Oranje (special envoy and co-founder of Techleap, advisor to the European Commission on quantum and startup technology, board-adjacent to the National Growth Fund and NATO Innovation Fund) on what actually separates funded from unfunded startups, and the live reveal of the 2026 Level Up Award winner. Source: `Evoluon 5.m4a`.
Framework: The Death Zone click to collapse
The keynote's central metaphor, built around high-altitude mountaineering: above roughly 8,000 meters, climbers cross an actual, named "death zone" — a line above which there is not enough oxygen for the body to function or recover, no matter how strong the climber. You cannot rest your way back to health there; you must move, fast, or deteriorate.
The business parallel: a company's own "death zone" begins exactly at its moment of apparent success — funded, systems live, an ecosystem of customers and 500 employees' families now depending on the company continuing to work. This is framed as the highest-risk period, not the safest one, because the stakes compound with size and any misstep has outsized consequences.
What "oxygen" is in this metaphor: customer trust. The longer scaling takes, the faster trust erodes — and once you're in the death zone, you cannot "camp" and recover slowly; you have to keep moving. The example given: a 2am Saturday customer escalation in the middle of a holiday period is exactly the kind of moment that defines whether trust survives — customers remember whether you showed up, not whether the timing was inconvenient for you.
Why K2, not Everest, is the chosen metaphor: Everest has established infrastructure — fixed ropes, established camps, Sherpa support. K2 has essentially none of that. The speaker's point: past a certain scale, a company is navigating largely unbuilt territory with no established playbook, and any small execution mistake has an outsized, sometimes fatal, effect — precisely because there's no existing infrastructure to catch the error. "Reaching the summit is not enough — success is when the intended outcome has been achieved," which the speaker tied to needing genuine end-to-end ownership and people with the grit to keep going past what looks "done."
Q&A Highlights (Death Zone keynote) click to collapse
- On whether the challenges he faced were avoidable in hindsight: yes, in the sense that specific mistakes were made and could be named individually — but the category of challenge (hitting a death-zone-style moment at all) is treated as essentially inevitable at scale, not something a better plan avoids entirely.
- On ever doubting the company's core technology bet made years earlier: yes — he described periodically re-validating the underlying pain point directly with customers ("yes, this is indeed the problem we face"), which is different from doubting the technology itself. His explicit warning: founders can fall in love with their technology and lose the ability to see any other path — passion has to coexist with genuine self-criticism about a technology's real shortcomings and risks, not blind commitment to it.
- On building a strong internal culture at scale: surround yourself with people who share the underlying mission-level passion, and actively exclude "nagging," excuse-making energy — explicitly citing The Oz Principle (a management book on personal accountability) and the idea of staying "above the line" (owning outcomes) rather than "below the line" (blaming and excusing).
- On personal cost — was there ever a point he wanted to quit: no single moment where he seriously considered stopping, despite describing the semiconductor industry as unusually aggressive, competitive, and customer-concentrated — his framing was that on the hardest days, what matters is having people around you who can carry you rather than the reverse.
- On what he'd do differently starting a new company today, hypothetically outside semiconductor metrology: he'd still start from customer pain, not technology — and specifically named a live opportunity he sees in today's chip industry: as chips move to complex 3D-stacked designs, thermal management and interface/co-packaging problems multiply, and there's a gap for a company that acts as a systems architect for chip stacks — taking hyperscaler compute requirements, designing the system-level chip stack, and outsourcing fabrication itself to existing foundries (TSMC, Samsung, etc.) rather than trying to compete with them directly. He noted this specifically as a fit for a perceived Dutch/Netherlands strength in systems integration and systems thinking, as distinct from a weaker position in leading-edge fabrication itself.
- On how he actually makes hard calls at the edge of what's knowable: "gut feeling, at the end of the day." His stated principle: a fast decision is more valuable than a "right" one, because you can monitor and correct a fast decision once new information arrives, but you cannot get back the time lost waiting for certainty that never fully arrives. "You manage the unavoidable, and you avoid what later becomes unmanageable."
Interview: Constantine van Oranje (Techleap) on funded vs. unfunded startups click to collapse
What separates a startup that gets funded from one that doesn't
Directly building on the prior keynote's point: it comes down to a demonstrated, specific customer need with people who will actually pay for it — because ultimately, investors want a return, which means they are underwriting sight of future revenue, not technology quality alone. The second factor: whether the founder is someone investors believe can navigate genuine uncertainty, because the business plan, the market, and the technology will all keep changing — the founder's judgment under change is what's really being bought. Everything an investor does from there is an exercise in de-risking the proposition for themselves.
Where Dutch founders specifically get stuck
Not only in the "death zone" moment itself — founders can get stuck in the technology, the market, or simply running out of cash at any stage. Van Oranje's sharper diagnosis: many Dutch founders are under-educated about the cost of capital-avoidance — some bootstrap or chase non-dilutive grant funding for far too long, underestimating how directly money converts into speed, and how running out of money means running out of time, full stop. He also flagged Dutch founders as, on average, too transactional and too individualistic to invest properly in investor relationships before they actually need money — contrasted with founders who build the relationship first, which then lets an investor offer more capital than initially requested once trust and momentum are already established (his example: asking for €500K when momentum would have justified offering €2M, simply because the relationship wasn't built early enough to surface that).
On learning to "hustle" like American founders
Van Oranje's direct comparison: American founders are disproportionately better at creating FOMO — leaving a room so an investor feels like they're the one who might miss an opportunity, even when (in his words) "the engine room" behind the hype might be smaller than it looks. Dutch founders tend to instinctively distrust this style ("we have better technology" as a substitute for salesmanship) — but his blunt framing: better technology funded at €10M will lose to worse technology funded at €100M, so some amount of deliberate hustle and narrative-building is not optional, it's a competitive necessity.
On the "fat, dumb, and unhappy" complacency risk (referencing Peter Wennink's phrase from earlier in the day, session 02)
Van Oranje connected this to what he called "the Dutch disease" inside growing companies: an overly generous, low-accountability work culture (his specific example: an employee taking extended paid leave with minimal consequence) breeds complacency that directly undermines the velocity needed to compete internationally. He connected this to Techleap's own initiative — a physical "national AI hub" campus (already at 1,000 sqm, opening a second 2,000 sqm phase, targeting 4,500 sqm by year end) deliberately designed to co-locate deep-tech, software, and more commercial AI companies together in one dense physical space, explicitly modeled on how Silicon Valley clusters talent, energy, real estate, and infrastructure conversations together rather than segregating "deep tech" and "software" geographically the way the Netherlands currently tends to (deep tech concentrated around Eindhoven/Delft, software/commercial companies in Amsterdam).
Advice for whoever wins the CES 2027 trip
CES is fundamentally a media event, not primarily an investor or customer event — and in the US, media attention (including some awards) is frequently something you pay for directly rather than earn purely on merit; his advice was blunt: know the rules of that specific game and play them rather than resent them. His more distinctive tip: your most valuable connection at CES might be another Dutch founder you'd never otherwise meet at home — an internationally shared observation that domestic professional communities often only actually connect once everyone happens to be abroad at the same event.
The Winner click to collapse
After the jury reveal narrowed the field to a top three (from the original five finalists in session 06), the 2026 Level Up Award was awarded to Merrick's company, Heptal Tech — the programmable haptic-material startup that had opened its pitch with a live touch-demo instead of slides.
Jury's stated reasoning: the panel specifically cited the rarity of a genuinely new interface category — most attention in the room goes to visual and audio interfaces, and a credible new tactile interface layer stood out as something they "couldn't stop thinking of use cases for" (cited on-the-spot examples: discreetly checking the time by touch during a meeting; giving visually impaired users a real-time tactile read on their surroundings). The jury's one flagged challenge for the team going forward: the technology's breadth across multiple potential product forms (haptic screens, wearable Braille-style coatings, and more) may itself become a distraction, and choosing a sharper initial focus was explicitly named as their recommended next step — echoing the "one beachhead market" advice given earlier in the day (sessions 01 and 04).
Notable Quotes click to collapse
“"What is the oxygen for us? Customer trust is the oxygen. The longer it takes to scale, the more it costs."
on the Death Zone metaphor's central point.
“"You manage the unavoidable, and you avoid what later becomes unmanageable."
on decision-making under real uncertainty at scale.
“"Better technology funded at ten million will lose to worse technology funded at a hundred million."
Constantine van Oranje, on why narrative and fundraising hustle are not optional.
“"If you want to get an award, you pay for it. It doesn't mean you get it, but if you don't pay, you will never get an award... in Las Vegas, fairness is not the main feature. You have to play by the rules."
van Oranje, on how to actually get value out of CES.
“"Only one winner. CES 2027 in Las Vegas awaits."