On May 7th, I had the pleasure to be invited by IFJ/venturelab (Institute für Jungunternehmen, based in St-Gallen), the oldest and renowned entrepreneurs training in Switzerland, to share my journey so far to students from the Berner Fachshochschule in Biel/Bienne (very close to my home city village). To my big surprise, there were only German-speaking attendees (Biel/Bienne is the only true bilingual city in Switzerland (65-70% German-speaking, 30-35% French speaking) and only one woman present. The latter point doesn’t surprise me that much, however. Tech startups are mostly (and unfortunately) a “man-thing”. It’s the reality, even though I had the pleasure to organize a pitching event on May 11th (SICTIC Investor Day Lausanne) with 5 (out of 8!) female entrepreneurs pitching. Probably the exception confirming the rule (…). But back to my presentation. The first speaker was Matthias Hell, an …
The Importance of Startup Board Members
When you start developing your startup, you are often 2, sometimes 3 co-founders. You may have seen more than 3 co-founders, but experience shows that it is not sustainable to be more than 3 (because everybody has less ownership for instance… but also because it becomes difficult to take decisions move forward quickly). The ideal composition of an internet/software startup is to have one UX/UI designer, a software engineer and a businessman/-woman. The 2 first members are the ones who will actually develop the product and the last one, the one who cares of everything else (administrative tasks, product management, marketing, business development, financials, fundraising, recruiting, etc.). You need to understand and to respect each other really well to make it working. As the businessman/-woman of the team, you need to be on the field, going to meet as many …
Learnings from emerging markets
Seedstars, a Geneva-based organization co-founded by Pierre-Alain Masson, Michael Weber and Adrien de Loës, aims to build and to grow companies. Seedstars World is one of their project, powered by Alisée de Tonnac, one of the few « women in tech » in Switzerland. Alizée and her team are travelling around the emerging world to discover the best startup of each country/city. They hold a local competition in 20 cities in 2013, 36 in 2014 and 2015 will see Seedstars World coming in 50+ cities. Winner of each competition is then invited to the final event (with a bootcamp), which was hold in Geneva early February (I’ve written about the 36 startup finalists here). The winner scores $500k in funding and all entrepreneurs get global exposure, as well as an international network of entrepreneurs (that’s one of the fringe benefit of the …
9 Learnings from The Swiss Venture Capital Report
This week, the Swiss startup newsportal startupticker and Swiss Private Equity & Corporate Finance Association (SECA) published their report on Venture Capital in Switzerland. You can download it here. The total Venture Capital raised in Switzerland in 2014 (or at least, the fundraising deals that were published) reached CHF 457M, 10% more than in 2013. A big, huge success? Sounds so, but… there are a lot of learnings here, confirming what a lot of startup entrepreneurs are experiencing on the ground: The 5 biggest rounds sum up to CHF 205M. Almost half of the total amount. Exclusively in Biotech. The 2 biggest, Biocartis (78M) and NovImmune (60M) are responsible of 30% of the total Venture Capital raised… 78% of this total amount is going in Life Sciences (Biotech and Medtech). Only 19% funds flow to Information & Communication Technologies (what …
“Am I Wrong?” A question that you probably ask yourself (more or less often) as an entrepreneur!
Some entrepreneurs will tell you that they never have any doubts on what they are doing. In my humble opinion, if you never question yourself, you may be over-confident or living outside of the reality. I’m not telling that you should express your doubts publicly, not at all. Startup life is made of so many “downs” (fewer “ups”, but make you forget the downs!) that you have to question yourself. Not too much, otherwise it’s paralyzing and you can’t move forward. Just enough to learn from the downs and prepare yourself to rebounce to the next UP! Except if you have been outside of the civilization this year (travelling in Antarctica for instance), you have probably heard the song from Nico & Vinz “Am I Wrong”. Not only it’s great, addictive music (I personally love it), but moreover, the …
5 tips on how to fall with grace (by Barbara Maim)
Last week was the Global Entrepreneurship Week and EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne) finally joined the movement this year. What an event! The team behind the event (Aurélie, Yann) had organized a very cool program over 3 days – congratulations, it was a success! On Thursday evening, the theme was “Fail, Learn and Succeed”. 6 speakers (from VC to corporate manager to serial entrepreneurs) shared their personal experience regarding failure.One presentation that I particularly liked (but all were wonderful, except maybe one from the corporate manager, which was maybe hard to follow) was the one of Barbara Maim. She was also Venture Leader (in 2009), I’ve been following her startup journey almost from the start and we have been friend from this time. She shared her experience with Minsh (a startup she created with her now husband Jonathan …
Web Summit 2014 – Wrap Up
For the third year in a row, I’ve been attending Web Summit in Dublin early November. In 2012, around 6’000 people attended the event, which made it already the biggest tech event in Europe. It has become much bigger (and according to its founder, Paddy Cosgrave, « it can, it will be even bigger next year »), to reach 22’000 people. Around 2’200 (!) startups over 3 days had a booth in the startup village (it’s even more « The Grand Bazaar of startups » than last year), of which 10% had a chance to pitch on one of the 3-4 dedicated stages. Among all these startups were a lot of Swiss startups (but « who cares? Shouldn’t be a startup global citizenship from day 1 »?), like WiCard, Unono, Bookbedder, Prodibi, Fitaborate, iRewind, Swispon Corp, PrYv, mobino, Konduko, Shoreli, etc. And probably a lot more …
Learnings from the Venture Leaders’ experience
As you may know, I had the chance to be selected as a Venture Leader 2014 (I’ve written about it here – Gregory had to cancel at the last minute and was replaced by Samuel Welten, founder of Sunbeat). I came back from the trip to Boston and New York 10 days ago, and thought that what we’ve learnt or experienced could be profitable to everybody. For the first time, the Venture Leader team was not travelling “only” to Boston. We’ve spent 7.5 days there and 2.5 in NYC. The experience is simply unique. It sometimes looks like a school trip, in the sense that Jordi, his team and Swissnex organized everything. We didn’t need to bother with hostel, program, taxi, training, etc. During these 10 days, I was surrounded by 19 of the brightest current Swiss entrepreneurs (delibaretely not mentioning our amazing mentors/guides). …