From SF to NYC, Deep Tech Week is “Burning Man meets tech”

“It’s like Burning Man meets tech.”

That’s how AgFunder founding partner Rob Leclerc, PhD, described the first Deep Tech Week in San Francisco last year.

Its opening party set the scene. The venue? The aircraft carrier USS Hornet with robot bartenders, cyber trucks, fashion shows, multiple floors, laser shows, DJs, crazy costumes… the list goes on.

Then over the next five days, some 5,000 unique attendees participated in over 45 deep tech talks, panels and presentations.

What few people know is that the whole thing was organized by engineering physicist Andrew Côté in just a couple of months. 

Now Deep Tech Week, which is free to attend, is going to New York from March 31 to April 4. To name just a few, expect sessions on:

• building a hardware company in NYC hosted by a16z American Dynamism
• a deep tech storytelling workshop
• the physics of consciousness
• longevity & regenerative medicine
• the role of electrochemistry as a key technology to decarbonize our economy by SOSV

(The full agenda of events taking place at Brooklyn Naval Yards can be found here.)

Andrew Côté is not your typical tech event organizer. A Canadian-born engineering physicist with a background in nuclear fusion, plasma physics, large language models for drug discovery (before LLMs were a thing), and robotics, he has quickly become a maverick in the deep tech ecosystem. 

Now, under the umbrella of his new business Hyperstition Incorporated (tagline: ‘Building a science fiction future’), Cote is bringing his unique blend of scientific passion, creative chaos, and boundary-pushing vision to New York. Deep Tech Week isn’t just an event; it’s a movement exploring technologies that could radically transform human existence—from biotech and quantum computing to emerging fields that challenge our understanding of reality.

AgFunderNews (AFN) caught up with Côté (AC) to hear more about that first event and how the New York event is shaping up.

AFN: Can you tell us about how Deep Tech Week in San Francisco first came together?

AC: It started off as a single event that was going to be a hardware showcase, mainly to give my friends’ companies a chance to have an open gallery, maybe a poster session, or just to show up for tech, as a sort of one day thing in my friend’s warehouse. Because all the events in town were based on AI.

And then I had this interview with Founders Fund in Miami as I was looking to leave my fusion job and I thought it would be super cool but I didn’t want to move to Miami, so I thought if maybe I expanded my hardware showcase into a deep tech week, I might be able to bait myself into getting hired by a cool VC fund here in SF.

And so it started off with me reaching out to a few of my friends at local VC firms to organize one event each day and then end with this hardware showcase thing – the original event – and then momentum picked up, and it kind of blew up. The opening party came together in three weeks, and people said it was the best tech party they’d ever been to. So that kicked off the week and then the whole week was great. 

AFN: What makes Deep Tech Week different from other tech conferences?

AC: I think deep tech has a very particular kind of clientele audience, where people are there building out of a lot of passion, and it attracts people that are very eccentric, very mission driven. There are so many easier ways to make a buck in the world; they’re not doing it because that’s really what they’re after. They want to build a technology of abundance, something that could radically transform what it looks like to be a human on the planet Earth.

So they have this intersection that’s actually kind of very similar to how artists live, eat, sleep and breathe; they’re doing something out of passion, out of creation, out of love of creation. So Deep Tech Week has kind of become this thing that’s like the center mass is science fiction, but that plays out across hardware companies and the investors in those companies, but also designers and musicians and artists and so on. So Rob [Leclerc] had this good phrase, “It’s kind of like burning man meets tech,” which I think gives you the flavor. 

AFN: What was the response to the first Deep Tech Week?

AC: Over 45 events during the week, there were 5,376 unique attendees, and of those, 43% were startup founders, and maybe 30% were venture investment funds. So 956 unique startups and 423 unique venture capital funds were in attendance, which is pretty good numbers for a first.

So at some point you just got to realize reality is strange and it’s suspicious as hell, and some things just assemble out of nowhere, and the right people just show up.

And I think it really is vision-based. I think that’s so much of the startup ecosystem as well if you have a compelling vision and you want to work with everyone. I do things in the maximum positive-sum way I can. All the events are free to attend. And there’s a hardcore rule: no discrimination on any basis whatsoever.

And I do as much as I can to mix up people at different stages, like someone who’s already successful sharing a stage with someone who’s just coming up in the world. It’s a huge deal to suddenly be on stage with a director of NASA or whatever? I’ve had people tell me that it changed their life or brought their career back. Tons of companies got funded from it. And so, you just play the maximally positive sum game you can and go all out on that.

It was also just insanity, and I worked insanely hard for weeks on end and went kind of crazy by the end of it, but that was pretty cool, too.

AFN: What’s your background?

AC: I’m an engineering physicist guy. I started this company [Eta.Bio] that was going to use large language models in 2021, before they were cool I guess, to use knowledge management for early-stage drug discovery.

And this is part of the chip on my shoulder; it was such a cool idea. We were going to use LLMs, extract raw text and build this knowledge graph database. And now everyone does that, but at the time no venture capitalist would fund it; just everyone didn’t believe this would work. And I was so pissed off.

And so we raised essentially no money and just ground ourselves into nothing. And it was a year and a half later, and I’d moved into my parents’ basement and I thought “this is just not working.” Meanwhile, people were raising $500 million to sell crypto punks. During that time, it was such a red pill on the state of funding; people just plow money into the dumbest stuff and they miss the coolest opportunities because they don’t understand them yet.

That’s why I have this massive chip in my shoulder and think you should raise as little capital as possible and build the coolest company according to how you think the world works, and make it awesome as hell. And then if you do that, you never have to explain yourself to anyone or give stupid updates. Revenue is way better than funding.

AFN: What deep tech areas are you most excited about?

AC: I still think, into the indefinite future, biotech is probably one of the most promising fields because it’s sort of just starting, and it’s already promising. I have this mental model where biology is by far the most advanced technology on the planet by literally billions of years.

It’s been under development in a way that uses all available physics. We can only design things according to physical principles. We reduce to standard engineering practice, but biology can evolve in this massively parallel way without having to care about how physics works. It doesn’t have to know; it’s agnostic.

It’s an evolutionary search algorithm in the space of possible physical configurations. And we all know that the most effective search algorithm is a massively parallel evolutionary search tree. So just being able to borrow stuff from living organisms that have evolved and then use it for stuff that’s basically crazy high tech.. it’s like now it’s nanotech… now it’s the robots, right?