On the sidelines of the recent Tech Tour Growth 50 Europe event in Paris, we had a chance to sit down with Timo Toikkanen, an early investor and advisor to, and these days chief executive officer of Finland-based professional mixed reality company Varjo.

Toikannen talks about the origins and early, R&D-focussed years of the deep tech scale-up, lessons learned on the road to commercialisation, and the ongoing transition into a period of finding solid product-market fit and scaling the business in various verticals.

Varjo's CEO also talks about making contrarian technology and business choices that turned out to be the right ones, the heated competition with giants like Apple and Meta through focus and specialisation.

Keep listening after that, though, because Toikannen also talks about Europe's potential to build global, category-leading deep tech companies.

Spoiler alert: he is skeptical about it.

Enjoy the listen!