CEO at SAS | Creating Moonshots

I help founders and organisations navigate moonshot-scale ambitions using a methodology derived from NASA mission design.Most strategies fail because they confuse ambition with readiness. 

Leaders commit time, money, and reputation before they have learned what actually needs to be true. I help them work out what must be learned, so they don't spend years executing the wrong thing.

I spent 25 years building and scaling businesses, mentoring 100+ university spinouts (pre-spinout and many post-spinout) across Oxford, England, and Scotland, and working as commercial lead inside the complexity of deep-tech ventures. I am not just an advisor who parachutes in. I am an entrepreneur who's built the thing.

I am currently leading the Oxford Moonshot Programme, which launched in January 2026 with 18 deep-tech founders. I am also writing a book on how big ideas become reality, using case studies from Deeptech, the Eden Project to SpaceX.

When I work with schools or boardrooms, I bring authentic Apollo mission artifacts, including a lunar module contact light and an SCE to AUX switch, as proof that this methodology is not borrowed. It is rebuilt from the best framework humanity has for achieving the impossible under extreme uncertainty.

This is for Deep-tech founders, academic leaders, CEOs, and institutions with serious capability but foggy direction.

This is not for early-stage founders looking for tips, people shopping for "support," or those wanting validation rather than challenge. If you want navigation clarity, let’s talk.

Mark Zwinderman

Universities are sitting on unrealised value in spinout equity. Very little of it converts to real cash for the universities. How do we change that? By reducing complexity.

The value to cash gap is not about the quality of the science, or the quality of the support. The past ten years have seen a tremendous development in University ecosystem support.

The issue is complexity. Building a business for the first time is genuinely hard, and the distance between world-class research and commercial reality can feel vast for founders who never made that crossing before.

The TTOs and programmes doing the best work understand this. But even the strongest institutional support has limits when founders lack a clear map for the journey itself.

What moves the needle is reducing the complexity of business building for people who have not done this before, and building real bridges of understanding between the science and the commercial world it needs to enter.

That's the work I do. Tested with deep tech founders in Scotland, England and now at the Oxford Moonshot, and designed to sit alongside what institutions are already doing well.

If you are responsible for spinout outcomes and you're thinking about how to close the gap between paper value and real returns, I would welcome a conversation.

International Women's Day. Let's talk about the number that won't move.
For more than a decade, investment into female-led ventures has been stuck at around 2%.

Every year, the same speeches. Every year, more pledges, more programmes, more panels. The number does not move.
Because we keep trying to fix behaviour inside a broken process. Nobody is fixing the process.

The conventional investment sequence runs like this:
Warm introduction → Pitch performance → Pattern matching → Fundamentals

Steps one to three filter for familiarity before the opportunity is ever properly assessed.
A founder who has spent five years solving a hard technical problem in a university lab is not optimised for that sequence. By the time you get to the substance, the decision is largely already made.

This is not a bias problem. It is a design flaw.

The 2% is not just a funding gap. It is an innovation gap.

Every year, technologies that would have reached patients, customers, and communities are lost, not because they weren't good enough, but because the process that evaluates them was designed to find the familiar, not the best.

Healthcare solutions. Climate technologies. New materials. Food security. Education. The hardest problems, in the sectors that matter most, disproportionately abandoned at the point of investment.

Meanwhile, capital flows to propositions that pattern-match. We are all paying the price for this. Every one of us.

The research is unambiguous. When opportunity is assessed before identity, female-led ventures are selected at rates close to parity.

The gap does not exist at the level of quality. It exists at the level of sequence.

So fix the sequence.
Invert it. Assess the technology, the market, and the milestones first. Then make the introduction. Then meet the founder.
The founder still wins or loses on merit. They just reach the room having already established that the opportunity is serious, rather than having to prove the technology, the market, and their own credibility simultaneously in a 20-minute pitch to people who have never encountered their sector.

We call it the Structured Investment Protocol.
No new money required. No new fund. No new procurement.

Pilot it through existing co-investment infrastructure. Two years. One metric: does the percentage move?

If it does, and the evidence says it will, you have a replicable model.

Scotland becomes the proof of concept for the UK. The UK for Europe.

This is not a call for more awareness. It is a call for a Moonshot.

Mercury has flown, the research proves the mechanism works.
It is time for Gemini, build the protocol, pilot it, publish the results.

Happy International Women's Day. Now let's move the number.

I architect Moonshot programmes for leaders, enterprises, and regions

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£17 billion. That is the annual economic reward sitting on the table for Scotland if women-led businesses achieved parity with male-led ones.

Women now start 54% of all new businesses in Scotland. The talent is there. The ambition is there. The ideas are there.

More women are starting. Fewer are surviving. The post-startup attrition rate is 61%.

We need to talk about Sequence.

The conventional investment process runs mostly like this:

Warm introduction → Pitch performance → Pattern matching → Fundamentals

Steps one to three filter for familiarity before the opportunity is ever properly assessed. By the time you get to the substance, the decision is largely already made, on non-fundamental grounds.

Fix the sequence and you recover the value.

This is a call for a Moonshot.

We don't need another programme. Not another pledge. Not more unconscious bias training. They accept the existing architecture and ask under-represented founders to perform better within it.

A structural intervention. A redesign of the investment process itself.

Mercury has already flown.

The research is unambiguous. When opportunity is assessed before identity, female-led ventures are selected at close to parity rates. The mechanism works. 

It is time for Gemini.

Build the Structured Investment Protocol (SIP). A practical framework that puts technical and commercial assessment first, before the warm introduction, before the pitch performance, before the pattern matching.

Pilot it with three investor partners through Scottish Enterprise's existing co-investment fund.

No new money. No new vehicle. No new procurement. Start now.

Run this for two years with one metric: does the percentage of capital reaching female-led ventures move?

If it does (and it will) Gemini is done. Apollo begins.

Apollo rolls it out across the full SE co-investment programme.

Not a pilot. Not a best practice recommendation.

A condition of participation.

Every investor operating with SE co-investment support applies SIP. Results published annually across the full programme. That dataset, the first of its kind in the UK, becomes the evidence base for national adoption.

Scotland becomes the proof of concept for the UK.

The infrastructure exists.

The evidence exists.

What is needed now is the decision to use them.

£17 billion is waiting to be unlocked.

If you are working on any part of this, as an investor, a university commercialisation professional, a policy maker, or a founder who has lived the sequence problem, I'd like to hear from you.

Full breakdown of the three-stage Moonshot plan (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo) on Substack. Link in comments.

Scottish Enterprise Adrian Gillespie

There is no greater mission nor a more important space in which we have to succeed.

Climate change is the big one.

On the 26 March in Edinburgh it is the Venture Cafe that will bring together the talent working to address the No 1 issue.

I’ll be there with the Moonshot Coffee Wall. A new way to connect those with a mission to those who can help.

Because often all it takes is the right introduction, the right conversation over a coffee, and the next level is unlocked. The path ahead a bit clearer.

Register now: 

https://lnkd.in/eF3ZNJjD

Venture Café Edinburgh

The very real launch of Moonshot Factory at B4 at amazing Rhodes House in Oxford.

A group of ambitious B4 members coming together to jointly work out their path to impact and develop their Moonshot clarity over the next six months.

Wonderful to work with Richard Rosser and his B4 folks.

What a morning 🙂

The UK's push to increase university spinouts makes perfect sense. That does bring with it structural risk, which is easy to miss.

World-class research. Deep intellectual capital.

So, the drive to increase spinout volume is understandable. When public funding rewards throughput, institutions will optimise for throughput.

But volume changes the structural risk profile.

When spinout numbers increase, three quiet shifts tend to occur.

Ambition thresholds become less explicit. Support resources spread more thinly. Governance conversations get deferred.

Individually, each one doesn’t sound that dramatic. Collectively, they will create fragility.

The danger is we create more structurally underpowered spinouts. Spinouts launched without clear 5–10 year ambition definition, explicit scale expectations, stage-gated progression discipline, early governance alignment, or deliberate capability mapping.

Volume can unintentionally dilute scale probability.

And when fragility surfaces later, stalled growth, misaligned boards, difficult fundraising, it's often attributed to "market conditions" or "founder capability."

In reality, the weakness was architectural.

Most universities already have strong components. TTOs, incubators, commercial champions, proof-of-concept funding, investor networks. What's often missing isn't capabilit, but integration.

Volume is a metric. Scale is impact.
If we are serious about both, structural coherence becomes more important as numbers increase.

I have been working on a framework that maps and strengthens spinout pathways under volume-driven policy, without replacing what already exists.

More on that soon.

80,000 hours.

That's roughly what the average professional career contains. 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 40 years.

I was reading The Precipice by Toby Ord over the past weeks. Great book. Go find it.

Most of us spend the first 20,000 figuring out what we're supposed to want. The next 20,000 optimising for it. And somewhere around hour 40,000, if we're honest, a quieter question starts to nag us.

Is this trajectory actually mine?

Not the CV version. Not the dinner party answer. The real one.

I spent 25 years building businesses and the last decade working with founders at Oxford and in Scotland, and beyond on exactly this question, applied to their ventures. The methodology works. And I have been watching it work on something else entirely. 

The people themselves.

Something is in the works. A structured programme for senior professionals ready to stop optimising the wrong destination and define the biggest true thing they could do with their remaining 40,000 hours.

More soon. If the question is already in your head, drop me a message.

#Career #Moonshot #Leadership #Purpose

The killer quote:

“No account of what changed, what improved, what failed, and what was learned. A document genuinely interested in accountability would benchmark itself against its own history. This one arrives each year as if the previous one never existed.”

That is the key thing here for me. What went well? What did you improve? How did the founders see this?

£42M is a lot of cash. Any decent Moonshot is achieved by transparency and a learning forward methodology. 

What we could do with £42M…

Open article: Scotland's tech ambition and the numbers that won't add up by open.substack.com

Scotland's tech ambition and the numbers that won't add up

A quick weekend experiment.

If you are been thinking about changing something in your life or business, try this today.

Nothing dramatic.
No major announcements.
Just 30 minutes and a pen.

Go to a café or somewhere quiet and write down the answers to three questions.

1. If nothing really changes, where will I be in 5 years?

Your role.
Your income.
Your lifestyle.
Your energy levels.

Just the honest and likely continuation of the path you are on.

2. What else could I do?

Different industry.
Start something.
Advisory work.
Move country.
Build a portfolio career.
Scale a business properly.

Write down every realistic option that comes to mind.

3. What would I do if I didn’t care what anyone thought?

No reputation worries.
No expectations.
No “but people like me don’t do that”.

Just write the honest answer.

Something interesting often happens at this point.

People realise their current life wasn’t designed.

It mostly emerged from momentum and expectations.

And there may be other trajectories available.

You don’t need to change everything this weekend.

But clarity often begins with coffee, a pen, and thirty minutes of honesty.

Moonshot: Trajectory. The link is in the comments. Sign up to the wait list to say "Maybe this is something I want to explore"

We are being encouraged to increase spinout volume.

Volume is okay. More companies could mean more jobs created and more value created. Could.

Fragmentation is an issue.

Most universities already have:

– Incubators
– Commercialisation teams
– Mentor networks
– Investment readiness support
– Proof-of-concept funding

Individually, these are strong.

But spinouts tend to fracture later and in three predictable places:

Ambition Drift (Navigation in the Moonshot method)
The mission was never defined precisely enough. So every opportunity feels equally valid.

Capability Mismatch (Propulsion)
Founders optimise for immediate traction, not staged capability build.

Governance Lag (Life Support)
Decision rights, equity clarity and board composition are addressed reactively. Problems surface later. Academic control holds back decision making.

None of this is a capability problem.

This is a sequencing problem.

When Navigation, Propulsion and Life Support aren’t intentionally aligned, existing support structures don’t reinforce each other and they operate in parallel.

The opportunity is not to add more programmes.

It is to architect what’s already there so ambition, capability and governance mature in sequence.

Volume with coherence increases resilience.

We can create spinouts that succeed if we get the architecture right.

Books then.

I read an article in December on the beauty of reading. Imagine if you read books in different genres, essays, long form journalism, new writers, that book you would not normally pick up and buy, the type of book you would not normally read. 

How many new ideas you would be exposed to. New language. Analogies. Metaphors. Reasoning. Beauty.

Imagine if you stopped consuming news and social media.

Well, I did and do.

Just finished book 41 since Christmas. 

Not to brag. For some weird reason I read quickly. Always have. Not claiming greatness.

So much better to be absorbed by a book to consuming the 24 hour news cycle.

This might be the best one yet. Go pick it up.

The idea isn't the hard part.
Saying it out loud is.

Most big ambitions die quietly, not from lack of effort, but from lack of permission. Permission to be taken seriously. Permission to be a little bit crazy.

The Moonshot Coffee Wall gives you that permission.

Write down your moonshot. Put it on the wall. What you're building, what you need, who you need to find.

That's it. No stage. No slides. Just your idea, in your handwriting, in a room full of people who showed up because they have one too. 

Someone will stop. Someone will read it. Someone will say "me too."
Come find your people.

Register for the next Venture Cafe Edinburgh: https://lnkd.in/eF3ZNJjD

Venture Café Edinburgh March 26. Launch of the #MoonshotCoffeeWall
by The Moonshot Factory 

#Scotland #Innovation

How do you tell your story?
I was at the The James Hutton Institute in Dundee yesterday to satisfy the Environmental engineer in my head. It all combined quite nicely with Moonshots.

It's a wonderful place and with some great people. I loved the micro plastics removal technology. A future partner of SAS Environmental Services Ltd? I hope so.

Some excellent discussions around how we get Scotland's innovation to have an impact at home and abroad.

My take then.

1. More female led businesses funded. The Structured Investment Protocol will lower the hurdle for women looking to raise money. 

2. The system must stop measuring success only. All the public funding for innovation requires, if not demands, success numbers. Founders need to fail, stop, move on, recombine, learn. Failure must be a required element of funding.

3. Get to London. Or, at least, get out of Scotland. There is money. Go to London. Spend a week meeting investors.

Thanks to Rachel Clark and Zachary Sorrells for the invite. They are amazing at what they do. 

Zach converted the 54 slide PPT on microemulsion technology, interfacial surface tension, and molecular structure we had for SAS into a single slide with this image here. In fairness, he suggested no slides, 17 years ago 😃. 

We kept just this one slide as it tells the story of what SAS does for our customers. We take oil waste and we separate it.

Today is Men's Day across much of Eastern Europe.

Not just Father's Day. Not just for heroes. For all of them.

The man who shows up without being asked. The one who listens more than he speaks. The friend who drives three hours and never mentions it again. The brother who makes the call when things get hard. The son who's quietly becoming someone you're proud of.

Today, think about the men in your life who carry things without complaint, who show up, and who make the people around them feel steadier just by being there.

And let them know. A message. A call. A drink raised in their direction.

It’s a happy day. And I always liked how it it is for all men, not just Father’s Day. Sons, brothers, friends, uncles, dads, husbands, partners.

Have a toast. Have a great day.

Elon Musk says he approaches everything from first principles.

Most people nod along. But what does that actually mean in practice?

First principles thinking is a form of intellectual demolition. You strip away every assumption, every analogy, every "this is how it's always been done", until you hit bedrock. 

The irreducible truths. Then, and only then, do you build back up.

SpaceX asked "what is a rocket, fundamentally, made of?" The answer changed everything.

The reason most deep tech breakthroughs never reach the world is not a lack of funding. It is not a lack of talent. The reason is that the entire system surrounding the founder is built on assumptions that were never questioned. 

Assume the research is enough. Assume IP protection comes first. Assume a business plan is the bridge between lab and market. Assume equity ownership is the most valuable.

Strip those away and you are left with a harder, more honest truth. This is a brilliant founder with a world-changing idea is standing at the start of a mission with the wrong navigation system, insufficient propulsion, and life support that was never designed for the journey ahead.

They have a map, but it's a road map. And you can't navigate an ocean with a road map.

They have momentum, but it's pointed in the wrong direction, or not nearly powerful enough to escape gravity.

They have support, but it was built for the academic environment they're leaving, not the commercial one they're entering.

That's not a funding problem. That's a systems problem. And systems problems require first principles solutions.

If you are a Scotland based business or founder I can not urge you strong enough to register on GlobalScots.

The global network of people happy to help, talk, guide, or in some way just assist you is one of the most valuable resources I have used over the years.

Register. It's free. Free! What is free these days? Then, search by sector, geography, etc.

When you register on the GlobalScot platform, you can connect with experts from around the world 🌏

There are over 1,200 GlobalScots across 68 countries around the globe, and they are all willing to help you boost your business 📈

So if you're looking for expert advice, global connections, and fresh perspectives, GlobalScot is here to help. 

Sign up today ➡️ https://ow.ly/JCJx50YiaJh

#GlobalScot #Business

David Equi carousel.pdf

Women's day is over for another year. That means 364 days to not worry about all that stuff. Right?

We keep going. The world is full of talent and the world is full of problems needing solving. We all have a stake in the success of half the world population...

AI then. How do we apply AI in creating a more equal investment climate?

Building on the Structured Investment Protocol (more on my Substack) that Scottish Enterprise should trial. 

Blind the evaluation process where humans can't. The most immediate application is using AI to strip identifying information from initial pitch materials and score them on business fundamentals. The first gate. An AI system that ingests a pitch deck, anonymises it, and scores it against a structured rubric (market size, unit economics, defensibility, team capability framed as skills not pedigree) would force every deal that clears the threshold into a human meeting on merit. The critical design choice is that the AI doesn't make the investment decision. It controls what gets through to the humans. That's where the current bias sits. In who gets the meeting.

Analyse the question bias in real time. That Harvard research showing investors ask men promotion questions and women prevention questions. AI can monitor pitch meetings (with consent) and flag the pattern live. Imagine a dashboard that sits alongside a Zoom call and shows the investment committee in real time: "You asked three prevention-framed questions in a row. You asked the previous male founder zero." People change behaviour when they can see it. This could be deployed in any accelerator demo day or VC partner meeting tomorrow.

Model the counterfactual portfolio. I wonder if you take the last ten years of UK VC deployment data and use AI to build a model. Then ask if the same capital had been deployed gender-blind based on business fundamentals alone, what would the portfolio returns look like? 

There's evidence that female-founded companies deliver better returns per pound invested. An AI model that can demonstrate, with real UK fund data, that gender bias isn't just unfair but is actively damaging LP returns would change the conversation. I would hope. 

AI trained on historical data will replicate historical bias unless we are deliberate about the training set and evaluation criteria. If we train a "good founder" model on ten years of UK VC-backed companies, we will get a model that thinks good founders look like the people who already got funded, which is overwhelmingly male. 

The design principle has to be that AI evaluates the business, not the founder's resemblance to previously funded founders. That's a fundamental architectural choice, not a fine-tuning problem.

Who will step forward?

More on my substack

Open article: The 2% Moonshot by open.substack.com

The Moonshot Coffee Wall is coming soon.

Keep your eyes out at an event near you 😀 

A new way to connect people with great ideas to people who can help.

A Moonshot passes four tests. Number four is where people really struggle. 

1. Is it Specific? There is no way two people could understand the goal differently.

2. Is it Time-bound? A defined horizon. Not "one day", not eventually.

3. Is the Scaling explicit? Not incremental improvement. That's a milestone.

4. Is it Costly? There are trade-offs. Something meaningful must change.

Do you have a Moonshot?

There is an architecture that enables the successful creation and growth of spinout companies.

Not a tool. Not a stage-specific programme. A spine that runs from the first definition of a mission all the way to scale, and holds under pressure at every point in between.

I spent years developing it and using it. I call it the Moonshot Architecture.

It applies at pre-spinout. When you're defining the mission before the company exists. It applies post-spinout, when you need to sequence capability before the gaps become crises. It applies at scale-up, when growth pressure tests whether the original mission still holds.

And it applies to the people designing the pathways. TTOs, commercialisation teams, programme leaders asking whether their support arrives at the right moment, in the right order.

This year I will be running a small number of pilot workshops at universities. Three hours. Mixed cohorts, pre-spinout, post-spinout, scale-up in the same room. That mix is deliberate. Seeing the same architecture hold across all three stages is the point.

If you're leading a deep tech programme, running a TTO, or building a commercialisation pathway, then I'd like to bring this to you.

DM me or drop a comment below.

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Wood RecyclAbility is a recognised training centre, offering practical work experience for adults with additional support needs. Over the last 21 years the organisation has grown steadily from 2 staff and 6 trainees in a small croft and out buildings to 10 staff and up to 40 trainees each day in a purpose-built workshop, yard and 5 acres of land.

Trainees, who have a range of additional support needs, including autism, Downs Syndrome, and ABI (acquired brain injury) are involved in all aspects of the business. There are opportunities to work with hand and power tools, de-nail wood and construct various products as well as enjoy interaction with fellow trainees, customers, staff and visitors. Some trainees have used the project as a stepping stone towards full employment.

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The Battle

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Mark Zwinderman's LinkedIn Performance

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