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 …
Financing Your Startup: Use the Power of the Crowd
Financing a startup is quite a hard job. Especially in Switzerland, where there is less and less money from Venture Capital firms flowing into web and mobile startups these last few years. It’s quite contradictory, as there is a ton of money in Switzerland. Thanks to crowd-funding, many people can now also invest in new projects and startups. On November 19th at 18:00, I’m organizing an event named “Financing your startup: use the power of the crowd” in Biel/Bienne. It will take place at the local technology park INNOCAMPUS (it’s 5min walk from train station!). We will have two speakers presenting 2 aspects of the crowd-funding: Julien Pache: Managing Director of the participative investment platform investiere.ch; Marie-Sophie Pocha: responsible of crowd-funding and special project at startup company Dacuda, (which raised 10 times the targeted amount of CHF 50k earlier this …
Win a free ticket to WebSummit 2014!
Really? Yes… Web Summit is 2 weeks ahead and you may have forgotten to register… Web Summit and startupolic.com partner to offer one free ticket to the conference! Share this post on social media with the hasthag #startupolic, and register here to win a free ticket to the biggest tech conference in the world! Deadline: Friday 24th of October, 7pm (CET)
The magical word to raise money
Doing a startup is quite hard. And growing it is harder. And raising funds probably even harder! You may have heard that there are investors out there who write a check to cool founders with « just » a great idea. It’s time to get back to reality. Don’t dream, it doesn’t happen like this in the real world. Or it is extremely rare. It may have been possible some years ago (I’ve never seen it myself), but I think it is not possible anymore. Or at least in Switzerland. This belief is unfortunately wide spread among wannabe founders. I think it has to be corrected. In 2014, it has never been easier to “do a startup” (in the web or mobile space), technically speaking. There are so many resources and open libraries you can use to build functional prototypes! Therefore, having …
The 6 Startup Events To Attend In Switzerland (in Q4 2014)
Early 2008, as I’ve diven into the startup world, I often heard that there were too few events for entrepreneurs in Switzerland. There were almost only the venture ideas and venture aperos organized by the pioneer organization venturelab. People were talking about Silicon Valley as a place where you can go to 5 interesting events every day, or almost. In 2014, the Swiss startup scene has completely matured and there are many events to attend to, if you consider Switzerland as one place (the distances are small in international comparison). There is a big offer of events. And of course, as a person interested by innovation and startups, you sometimes have the feeling you must attend as many as possible. It’s true if you’d like to meet as many people as possible… But you can’t attend every event, otherwise you’re …
Biel/Bienne is back on the Swiss startup map!
Some months ago, I’ve written about the Swiss Tech Association, which has the goal to foster entrepreneurship and networking across Switzerland. The first initiative of the association was to launch an event serie named Swiss Tech Talk. After successfully testing the concept in Fribourg, the association is extending across (Western by now) Switzerland, with Biel/Bienne, Neuchâtel, Geneva and Sion. Each of this city will host 4 events until June 2015. I’m fan of the format of the event (learn something useful in a 1 hour event, in a relaxed, non-commercial atmosphere) and will therefore… be the owner of the Biel/Bienne chapter! Yes, Biel/Bienne is my « home city » (I live a dozen km away) and am particularly happy that something can finally happen here! In the beginning of the 2000’s, the local web startup scene was quite lively… but almost everything collapsed afterward …
Demystifying Entrepreneurship
Last week, I was invited to take part to a panel with 5 other startup founders (Ivan Orlov, Eric Lucien, Vincent Renevey, Alejandro Salcedo and Tommy Stefanelli) of Western Switzerland. The panel was part of a 2-days workshop (Rencontre Romande de Formation et Entrepreneuriat) where startup coaches and mentors of the Western Switzerland region were present to discuss how to best support entrepreneurs. As I’ve been on their side (I used to be a “startup coach” formerly), it was quite interesting to me to be asked how they can best help us. But first of all, we had the chance to listen to Mr. Benoit Leleux, who is in charge of the startup program at the prestigious IMD school of business since more than 15 years. He hold a keynote about the stereotypes regarding entrepreneurship and how to demystify it. You can find …