Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, talks with Marianne Abib-Pech, Managing Partner at Transitions First, about the mindset shift that lets founders scale without losing what made them founders in the first place.
This episode is for founder-CEOs who worry that scaling their company means trading away the freedom and creativity that got them started.
Key Takeaways
- Venture capital orthodoxy holds that founders cannot scale a business past a certain stage. Marianne Abib-Pech, Managing Partner at Transitions First, rejects this framing and argues founders can scale if they redefine what scaling means to them.
- Scaling adds process, people, investors, and governance, but Abib-Pech holds that reframing scaling as “engineering with a greater impact” removes the perceived tradeoff between structure and creative control.
- In due diligence on deep tech investments, Transitions First evaluates founders primarily on two traits: resilience (how they respond to and recover from failure) and humility (willingness to say “I don’t know” rather than offer a half-baked answer).
- Investing in industrial deep tech requires underwriting an entire system, not just a technology: engineering maturity, field validation, commercial adoption, and deployment all factor into the decision.
- Abib-Pech treats AI as a force multiplier for analysis and pattern recognition, but holds that CEOs must never delegate judgment to it, since AI expands intelligence without replacing the trust and instinct built through human conversation.
How Founders Should Rethink What Scaling Means
Most founders enter scaling with the same fear: more process, more people, more investors, more governance means less freedom. Abib-Pech’s response is not to deny the tradeoff exists but to change how the founder interprets it. “It’s not about the founder, it’s about convincing the founder that they don’t lack the capability, but more importantly, that they should go above and beyond the perception that scaling means losing freedom,” she says.
Her reframe centers on one idea: scaling is not the opposite of building. It’s a continuation of it. “Scaling for me and for those founders, what I’m trying to bring them to their attention is scaling is engineering with a greater impact,” Abib-Pech says. When a founder builds a product, they’re exercising creativity within a small frame. Scaling forces them to exercise that same creativity at the level of architecture, which Abib-Pech calls “another challenge to your creativity” rather than a departure from it.
This distinction matters because the venture capital industry has a default assumption working against the founder. “In venture capital and private equity, you have the common theory that founders cannot scale,” Abib-Pech says. She holds the opposite: a founder who is willing to expand their remit, their knowledge, and accept guidance, whether from an investor or an executive coach, can become “extremely good scaling people.”
What Transitions First Looks for in a CEO Before Investing
When Abib-Pech and her team decide whether to back a founder, the product, the market, and the team all matter, but the underwriting decision ultimately comes down to two traits she evaluates directly in conversation.
The first is resilience. “How many times did they fail? How do they feel about failure? What happened? Have they been through losing a major investor, having a conflict at cap table? How can they very quickly pivot and build from failure?” Abib-Pech asks. She and her team listen for vocabulary and word choice as much as content, since Abib-Pech’s background in creative writing trained her to read a founder’s psychology through the specific language they use.
The second is humility, and Abib-Pech is explicit that this cuts against how most people expect a confident founder to sound. “I am much more comfortable with someone who says, I don’t know, I can’t tell, but I will make sure I come back to you with the answer,” she says, contrasting that response with a founder who offers “a half-baked answer” to appear knowledgeable. She holds that humility produces better problem-solving because it removes preconception: a founder who admits uncertainty is more likely to seek outside advice and think more deeply than one who “believes he knows everything about everything.”
Why Industrial Deep Tech Investment Requires Underwriting an Entire System
Abib-Pech’s biggest lesson from investing in industrial deep tech, one she says would have saved her time earlier in her career, is that the investment decision is never about the technology alone. “You are underwriting an entire system, an entire architecture,” she says of what industrial deep tech investing actually requires.
That system spans four distinct layers a CEO must manage simultaneously: engineering maturity, field validation, commercial adoption, and scale-up deployment. Each layer demands its own depth of expertise, which is why Abib-Pech says the space requires investors and founders alike to commit significant time and talent. This complexity is also why she chose to move her fund’s focus away from software. “I decide purposefully not to invest in SaaS or the bits, but move more into the deep tech and the industrial deep tech, so investing in atoms,” she says.
For a CEO navigating a local pilot toward global industrial scale, this framework reframes the challenge: the barrier is rarely the technology’s readiness on its own. It’s whether the surrounding system, engineering, validation, adoption, and deployment, can mature together.
Where AI Fits in a CEO’s Decision-Making Process
Abib-Pech describes herself as “super optimistic about artificial intelligence,” but draws a firm line around what she’ll delegate to it. “I will delegate analysis, pattern recognition, challenge to AI, but I will never delegate the judgment part,” she says. Her concern isn’t that AI will out-think a CEO. It’s that CEOs who over-rely on it lose the depth of their own thinking, because AI-generated answers “look sophisticated” without necessarily holding up under scrutiny.
To test this in practice, Abib-Pech ran a six-month experiment while designing a new capital architecture for her fund’s second platform. She built a synthetic, AI-based think tank to stress-test her ideas, running scenarios against simulated LPs and founders. She also convened a real think tank of people across the US, Europe, and Asia working on the same problem. Her conclusion: “Both output are valuable and both are complementary. They’re not redundant. They actually feed from each other.” The AI sharpened her thinking before and after human conversations, but the human conversations delivered something AI couldn’t: “texture, instinct, life experience that still today is not codifiable in artificial intelligence,” and the trust that Abib-Pech considers foundational to business.
On the investment side, Abib-Pech looks for AI embedded directly into physical products, not AI as a marketing label. “AI is used for precise product formulation, better yields, better material, faster testing, or lower waste,” she says of the startups she considers strongest. When AI is built into a physical system this way, she holds it becomes “a real leverage for industrial deep tech startup.”
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Scaling is engineering, not surrender | Founders should treat scaling as an extension of the creativity they used to build the product, applied to organizational architecture instead of just the product itself | Abib-Pech deploys this reframe as a working counter to the venture and private equity industry’s default assumption that founders “cannot scale,” positioning her portfolio founders to expand their remit rather than exit the CEO role as they grow |
| Resilience and humility outweigh polish in founder evaluation | Investors should test a founder’s response to failure and willingness to say “I don’t know” rather than rewarding confident, half-baked answers | This screen determines which founders Transitions First actually backs: the firm passes on confident-sounding answers that lack substance in favor of founders who show they will pivot after setbacks like losing a major investor or a cap table conflict |
| Deep tech investment underwrites a system, not a technology | Evaluating an industrial deep tech company requires assessing engineering maturity, field validation, commercial adoption, and deployment together | This lesson drove Abib-Pech to redirect her fund’s entire focus away from SaaS and toward “investing in atoms,” reshaping which companies Transitions First will underwrite |
| AI expands intelligence but never replaces judgment | CEOs should delegate analysis and pattern recognition to AI while keeping final judgment calls human, since AI outputs can look sophisticated without depth | Abib-Pech’s six-month synthetic-versus-human think tank experiment, run while designing her fund’s second-platform capital architecture, found the AI and human outputs complementary rather than redundant, with human conversation supplying the trust and instinct AI could not |
Quotes from This Episode
- “Scaling for me and for those founders, what I’m trying to bring them to their attention is scaling is engineering with a greater impact.” — Marianne Abib-Pech, Managing Partner, Transitions First
- “I am much more comfortable with someone who says, I don’t know, I can’t tell, but I will make sure I come back to you with the answer.” — Marianne Abib-Pech, Managing Partner, Transitions First
- “In venture capital and private equity, you have the common theory that founders cannot scale.” — Marianne Abib-Pech, Managing Partner, Transitions First
- “Texture, instinct, life experience that still today is not codifiable in artificial intelligence.” — Marianne Abib-Pech, Managing Partner, Transitions First
- “AI is used for precise product formulation, better yields, better material, faster testing, or lower waste.” — Marianne Abib-Pech, Managing Partner, Transitions First
Frequently Asked Questions
How can a CEO convince a founder that scaling won’t cost them their freedom?
Marianne Abib-Pech recommends reframing scaling as “engineering with a greater impact” rather than a loss of creative control. The added process, people, investors, and governance that come with scaling are not a departure from the founder’s original creative work, they are an extension of it applied to organizational architecture instead of just the product.
What should investors look for in a CEO before backing a deep tech startup?
Abib-Pech evaluates founders primarily on resilience and humility. Resilience is assessed by how a founder discusses past failures, including how quickly they pivot and rebuild after setbacks like losing a major investor. Humility is assessed by whether a founder is willing to say “I don’t know” rather than offer a confident but incomplete answer, since Abib-Pech holds this produces clearer problem-solving without preconception.
How should a CEO decide what to delegate to AI versus what to keep as a human decision?
Abib-Pech’s rule is to delegate analysis, pattern recognition, and initial challenge to AI while never delegating final judgment. In her own six-month experiment running a synthetic AI think tank alongside a real human one, she found the two complementary rather than redundant, with human conversation providing trust and instinct that AI could not replicate.
Executives Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Careers
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach, he coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
