How everyone chooses gear (and what he did differently)

Ask any mountaineer how they pick equipment and you'll hear the same routine: read the reviews, study the product manuals, ask people who've been up there. Dilip did all of that too.

Dilip is climbing Mont Blanc. At 4,808 meters it's the highest point in Western Europe. He works as a Technical Account Manager at GetFocus, where his job is taking complex technical questions from R&D leaders and turning them into simple, actionable insights: which technologies are winning, which are quietly being disrupted, and where an industry is heading before it announces it.

So when it came time to choose the gear his life would depend on, he did what almost nobody does. He ran it through our technology intelligence system.

Mountains as a way of life

Dilip grew up in Kathmandu, Nepal, where mountains aren't a bucket-list item, they're the view from the window. Every year he went on a trek, a different region, a different trail. When he moved to Europe, the question came naturally: what's the highest point here? The answer was Mont Blanc. The decision followed shortly after.

Trekking in Nepal teaches you one thing quickly: the mountain doesn't care about your plans. Weather changes. Situations turn. The only variable you control is how prepared you are. And preparation at altitude mostly means gear. What you wear and carry isn't convenience. It's technology you're betting on. Sometimes with your life.

How everyone chooses gear (and what he did differently)

Ask any mountaineer how they pick equipment and you'll hear the same routine: read the reviews, study the product manuals, ask people who've been up there. Dilip did all of that too.

But he had something most climbers don't: access to a system that reads the patent record and measures how fast every technology inside a product is actually improving. The geek in him wanted to know what's really going on behind the label. So he broke his gear down into its component technologies and looked at the data.

The jacket that tells the whole story

Take the hardshell jacket, the waterproof outer layer no serious trip goes without. What makes it waterproof and still breathable is a membrane laminated inside the fabric.

In most jackets on the market today, that membrane is based on ePTFE, short for expanded polytetrafluoroethylene. It has been the standard for decades. The material is well understood, easy to source, and after all those years of production it's cheap to make. If you own a waterproof jacket, chances are this is what's keeping you dry.

The patent data tells a more complicated story. ePTFE is barely improving anymore. A competing technology in the same application, electrospun nanofiber membranes, is improving much faster, and it comes with better breathability, which is the thing mountaineers actually complain about most.

So why isn't it in every jacket already? Mostly for the usual reasons. ePTFE has decades of manufacturing scale behind it, which keeps it cheap, and nanofiber membranes are still proving themselves. Much of their current use sits in other fields entirely.

It's not hard to see where this is heading, though. The industry is moving away from fluorine-based materials, with PFAS regulation pushing it there whether it wants to go or not, and every step in that direction adds pressure on ePTFE. A few brands already ship jackets built on nanofiber membranes. Most don't yet. Disruption usually looks like this from the inside. The incumbent still owns the shelf while its successor quietly gains ground in the patent record.

What the data changes

The jacket Dilip is taking up Mont Blanc is built on the incumbent technology, and for this climb, given where the market stands today, that's the right call. The difference is that he knows exactly why it's the right call, and he has a pretty good idea of when it will stop being one. Almost nobody who buys a jacket can say that.

This reaches well beyond outdoor gear. Every R&D leader is wearing an ePTFE jacket of some sort, an established technology that works well and that every review recommends. The trouble with reviews is that they describe the present. They can't tell you which technology is improving fastest, and by the time the difference shows up on the shelf, the strategic decision was made years earlier by whoever went and read the patents.

Dilip does that analysis every day for technology leaders across industries. This time he did it for himself, because in a month he'll be the one trusting the verdict at 4,800 meters.

Watch the conversation

Sascha, Head of Marketing at GetFocus, sat down with Dilip to talk about the climb, growing up trekking in Nepal, and what the data says about the gear on his back. Watch the full interview and follow along as the climb gets closer.