The Swiss Ice Hockey national team - a role model

If you are a fan of ice hockey (as I am), you may have lived two amazing weeks watching and following the Swiss national team. Not being ranked in the top 8 of ice hockey nations, qualifying itself to quarter final would have already been considered as a success. But that was before… before the tournament which happened in Sweden. Which was magic!

Switzerland won every game, beating top ice hockey nations like Sweden, Canada and Czech Republic (twice, with quarto final). And then, USA in semi-final. Unfortunately, Switzerland lost the final against the host country, Sweden (BTW: congratulations to the Swedish team).

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It’s an authentic exploit for Switzerland and will remain in mind of everyone during years… or not. Because what we have been able to observe is a deep mentality change. Some years ago, everyone would have been more than happy with a quarter final. This year, everyone is disappointed not having won the gold medal! These guys are hungry, extremely hungry. And they will probably surprise us often in the future. This impression was well illustrated by Reto Suri, a few minutes after the end of the game:

We don’t know if we have lost the gold medal or if we have won the silber one.

This Playstation generation now doesn’t only ambition to be a well-paid professional player in Switzerland. They want to shoot the stars (that means, in ice hockey, play in NHL) and don’t take “easy” money:  players now refuse lucrative offers from Swiss clubs to seize the opportunity to play among the bests. With no guarantee to even play a few games in NHL. Ambitious. You named it!

What has surprised many observers is that even without some of the best Swiss ice hockey players (because they were still involved with their NHL club in playoffs), Switzerland played a world class hockey. Sean Simpson, the trainer of Switzerland, deserves a big credit for the journey of the team. He has been able to build a rockstar team. It was amazing to see so much solidarity among players. Everyone put his ego aside and provided his maximum in benefit of the team. And its ambitious goal. They believed in their capacities and were empowered by the certainty that everything is possible.

This exploit will probably inspire lots of young ice hockey players, and other sportsmen/-women. And also every Swiss citizen! It’s also inspiring for every entrepreneur. Stereotype is that startup founders in Switzerland often have to little global ambition. What is completely wrong, or at least, has totally changed in the last decade. Swiss startups are not the best funded startups (Swiss players are not the best paid players), but it doesn’t mean they can’t succeed. Money helps, but… realizing that if you believe in you and work hard, everything is possible… with a bit of luck! But you also need to put yourself in a position to provoke luck… and once you’ve gained momentum, you’re kind of unstoppable… or only on the last step!

You’ll fail… so what?

If you’re planning to start a business, you probably know that the odds are big that you’ll fail your venture. Or if you don’t know it, wake up. There are many smart guys out there who did many things right and finally failed their startup. You’ve probably heard about these statistics: on 10 investments, only one will be a big success, 2-3 will reimburse the investment and all the other ones will be worthless. What can be scary is that it only takes into account the funded startups. But how many get financing? One on ten?

If we take these (probably wrong) numbers as a basis to evaluate your success chance, we can assume that you have a 3-4% of beeing financially OK with the company you’re putting in so many efforts. OK, here, I’m consciously neglecting lifestyle business (you’re bulding a viable company where you don’t need investors and you don’t want / care growing big and fast - what is ABSOLUTELY OK, too!).

With this in mind, why do people start a company? You have to be a bit crazy to build a startup, that’s true. That doesn’t seem rational and you better should find a safe job in a bank… but hey, who told you there are still safe jobs? Except if you’re working in the administration or governmental companies (and even there…), there are no more safe job in 2013!

I think, and most of fellow entrepreneurs I’ve talked to, that the journey is so exciting and rewarding that it’s worth the potentially painful outcome. If you never try, you will never know if the amazing concept you’ve developed (with you and yourself) even has a chance to succeed. As well as it intellectually exciting and rewarding to brainstorm about game-changing concepts, it’s even more to take the next step: implementing it.

Even if you fail your startup, you will have learnt so many things that you can’t consider it badly (OK, financially speaking, it could be disastrous).

11 months ago, I’ve blogged about success tolerance  and failure acceptance (“What we still need to change”). I wasn’t thinking that this simple post would trigger guys to start something. Following the post, French startup activist and blogger Roxanne Varza commented and asked me if I didn’t wanted to launch a Fail Conference in Switzerland. And then we started the discussion with some of my readers.

David Butler, a startup activist and great networker based in Zürich, took the leadership to organize the first FailCon Switzerland, which will happen on 16th April in Zürich! David has assembled a little team to organize it and together, they’ve convinced some well-known Swiss entrepreneurs (like serial entrepreneur Dorian Selz) to share their experience. The one-day conference will gather a few hundreds entrepreneurs, investors and innovators. There are many aspects of failures and this uncommon event will bring you an opportunity to learn from guys who failed and recovered.

This event is a first step in the change of mentality we need to see here in Switzerland. Failing should be widely accepted and seen as it is: a huge opportunity to learn and become stronger!

So… what are you waiting for? Spread the word and register!

Where to get the skills you need for your startup journey

It is (or it should be) common sense that the team is what matters the most in a startup. And its ability to execute. Because if you have a rockstars team which fails to work together, well… It doesn’t bring the venture anywhere!

You can be extremely competent in sales or in UX or in software development. But starting is a business is often tricky. You have suddenly many things to learn on the go, alongside working on your product. And no time. Yes, no time. The scarcest resource for startup entrepreneurs is T-I-M-E (well, money comes second and is really close, of course). As an entrepreneur, you only have “priority 1 tasks”… and everything seems urgent. Scaring? But so exciting, too!

How do you get the skills you need as quickly as possible? Yeah, you can read blogs and or other documentation. Sure. You can also ask a friend who did it. OK (but he needs to have time). Or maybe can you invest a bit of time and money to boost your skills with smart mentors?

Switzerland has a good reputation in education. And has also strong entrepreneur training programs. During 8 years, venturelab provided an excellent training program, which was managed by two of the smartest guys on Swiss startup scene (Beat Schillig and Jordi Montserrat - help’ed by their killer team). The Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI - the federal agency of Switzerland) has decided in 2012 to split the national training program into regional programs, supervised by CTI… As well as the academic entrepreneurial programs (venture ideas and venture challenge) are still managed by venturelab, the formerly called Venture Plan program has stopped in 2012. Thanks to the energy of Jordi and Beat, the VentureLeaders initiative (business trip to Boston for 20 Swiss startups) has been saved and is always alive with the help of some foundations.

I’m not a fanatic of centralization, but the choice of splitting a national program in 3 regions is, well, strange. Did venturelab gained to much power or influence on Switzerland tech startup scene? Such a national program had at least 2 amazing advantages regarding to a decentralized  initiative:

  • training is similar throughout Switzerland (hey, wake up, we are competing globally, we don’t need adapted training for Swiss Germans or Romands);
  • networking. The venturelab people know each entrepreneur. And can connect you easily throughout Switzerland (OK, it’s not so big but it still helps)

Venturelab decided not to follow this political decision of splitting the training program. And even didn’t bid for the mandate. It can be hard to understand, but it isn’t: if you don’t believe in something, you have remain true to yourself and have the guts to say “NO”. Respect.

But enough of history, where can you get the skills you need as an entrepreneur, now?

Well, you have 3 consortia dividing Switzerland in 3 regions: Zürich and Eastern Switzerland (+Ticino), Mitteland (Basel to Bern) and Western Switzerland, which is called startuptraining. I don’t know personally the guys running the 2 first regions, but the ones for Western Switzerland are really great. They’ve divided their offering in two 5-days modules:

  • business creation: you’re in the early days of your venture, you need help to structure your venture and your strategy. The first session happened successfully in March and there will be 6 additional workshops this year. There is a few places available for May and June sessions, so don’t wait too long to register!
  • business development: you have a business (not only just an idea/concept/prototype) and you are selling. You need some insights on how to run and scale your company. There will be 2 sessions this year (September + November).

Trainers are experienced professionals, entrepreneurs and active investors covering all aspects of the startup journey. Even if you’ve attended some entrepreneurial courses before, it makes sense to participate. The training takes is a workshop, where you’ll get honest and constructive feedback on your project. It’s always good to have a neutral view on your project and you’d better get it before pitching everyone the wrong way… or with a ridiculous or naive idea! 

Both workshops cost CHF 300.- each, but are still highly affordable for a 5-days qualitative training. CTI is sponsoring the workshop, otherwise it would cost around 10 times more.

Last conditions to attend the workshop are to have an innovative idea, technology oriented (no, you don’t need any patent, don’t worry!). And you must apply (not every application is accepted), so care about how you describe your idea and yourself!

Enjoy! And be ready to conquer the world!

And so suddenly, your startup is “on the map”

This is a guest post from Christophe, CEO and co-founder of the the e-commerce startup Kireego.

A couple of weeks ago, we participated to the London WebSummit, where our little venture was nominated amongst the 25 Startup Award finalists.

The news came quite as a nice surprise in January, while we had still our hands full and heads down trying to finish some last tweaks before our Beta Release.

We were (literally) in our bunker/cave bootstrapping – ok, we admit a little bit of seed - our project since many months. Of course, we were pulling our heads up from time to time to check with our targeted audience (independent merchants) if what we were doing and our concept made sense to them.

“Kireego’s been selected for the finals at the London WebSummit!”.

Well, it seems that out of hundreds of other applicants from all over Europe, they thought our Startup/Concept/Service/Idea was worth a shot.

And so suddenly, we were on the map!

We will certainly remember that moment as an important milestone, because we realized how this could be used to shift gears and attract media attention, locally and internationally.

We had suddenly an angle to get through to journalists and bloggers.

But the challenge was, how does a startup leverage that news, with no PR nor any existing network of media contacts.

So we started the old fashion way and looked for emails on newspaper articles, through forums, with the help of some friends, or just by spending hours analyzing tweeter accounts to see who might bring a potential spark for some online exposure.

A great example is how we just boldly got in touch with a few “twitter influencers” we didn’t know before (you might know one of them if you read that blog!). Sébastien tweeted about us, got retweeted by several people which triggered interest by a couple of journalists who got in contact with us. That happened in a 6 hours period and ended up with a couple of online news article! Followed then by newspaper articles and even Radio and TV interviews.

So we must admit having milked that as much as possible… and on the other hand, we prepared for the event with the intention of meeting as many interesting people as possible.

The event itself was extremely interesting for us, and although we did not go through the last final stages of the Final, we had an amazing opportunity to sit down with some VCs or startup scouts that we would have had a real hard time getting in touch with otherwise – such as Index Venture, Redstone, Octopus, Ventech, and many more.

Time will tell how all the conversations we are having with them now will end up, but we will certainly remember this London adventure as a pivotal moment in our history:

A moment when you can proudly feel that you may be going the right direction.

London - some learnings

London is the older European startup hub that everybody is talking about, even if Berlin, Dublin and Stockholm are gaining a good reputation to launch businesses.

As well I’ve heard and read a lot about London, I’ve never been there (except half a day as I was in language school in Brighton!) and I’ve seized the opportunity of London Web Summit (happening today) to fly here.

I’ve managed to organize some meetings and discovered a bit the city following them. Many people have heard about the Google Campus, but I had never seen how it was looking. Here how the entrance look like:

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Impressive? Nope. Need to be impressive and extremely modern (as our technology parks in Switzerland we are so proud of)? Nope.

Once you enter the building, you get a better sense of where you are when you’re looking to this:

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I think there is no need to present the 2 first ones. The third one is kind of a coworking space. I had never heard about Centralworking and decided to go downstairs to find out what it is. I was directly stunned by how many people were in this restaurant/cafeteria in the middle of an afternoon:

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Looks like a space for students, right? Centralworking is in matter of fact a free coworking space, where you can seat and work with a really good internet connection. I’ve heard that it was very recent and 6 months ago, it was less (over)crowded. And that you don’t find many developers / designers there anymore, but mostly business/visionary/product guys.

What also impressed me in visiting the Google Campus website is that there is almost everyday (or 2 or 3 times a day) workshops, keynotes, etc. And not from government organizations trying to tell how good they are.

The Campus is kind of unique and there are not many similar places, if any, at least in Europe.

And what’s about the price to get a desk there? It’s affordable, moreover for a place in the Center of London. GBP 275.- a month for regular workers. And GBP 375.- a year for occasional Campus workers, which are subject to a “fair use” (no fixed time like once a week, etc.). Interesting concept.

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I’ve also seen that most restaurants let people have a free usage of their WiFi connections. What is too rare in Switzerland (even Starbucks make it too complicate – 15-30 minutes surf “offered” by the coffee chain… so generous, thanks) and what need to change once soon.

As well as there are many, many advantages to be established in London for a tech startup (presence of many investors, no talent crunch, big enough local market, many big potential customers, things move quickly

etc.), there are also some dark sides, as for instance:

  • Software engineer salaries are extremely high, that is at least GBP 60k a year, even for purely juniors ones. Current conversion rate is 1 GBP = 1.5 CHF, so it doesn’t look so different from what were experiencing in Switzerland. But remember than around 2 years ago, conversion rate was CHF 2.3 = 1 GBP. Furthermore, I’ve learnt that most engineering teams of London-based startups are not local: they are kind of partnerships in Latvia or Serbia for engineering.
  • A Swiss entrepreneur based since 15 years in London also told me that he thinks there is kind of a startup bubble. Everyone comes with an idea. And many are just crappy ones.
  • Transport costs are extremely expensive. It will cost you about the same as a year with the Swiss General Pass, and for London only.

Please write your comments and share your knowledge of London startup scene. Swiss entrepreneurs need to know how it works in London!

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