2012 is the 25th anniversary of the creation of De Vigier Foundation, which aims to foster entrepreneurship in Switzerland. Bill De Vigier was a successful swiss entrepreneur, who was the man who revolutionized the building industry worldwide. The foundation created by Mr. De Vigier has one unique goal: foster entrepreneurship and bring a bit of friendly money to promising startups. Each year, 10 startups are selected for the award ceremony, and 5 receive a prize money of CHF 100’000.00. I’ve written down 3 interesting quotes from Bill De Vigier that are displaid in the De Vigier residence (amazing building by the way!), like: “Never spend seed money – spend income” “It’s better to aim big and fail than stay in the shadow and neither experience success nor failure” “If you can dream it – you can do it” For the …
HOW TO Make The Perfect Pitch (Part I/III)
Four years ago, I’ve dived into the startup world and I’ve seen a few hundreds (or more?) startup pitches since then, from early stage to mature companies. With this experience and a great presentation from the amazing Jean-Pierre Vuilleumier (who I’d like to thank for his energy at helping Swiss startups and what he taught me) in mind, I thought that some tips on how to pitch your startup could be helpful. I’ve also recently observed that the need for pitch coaching/training is really present, for first time entrepreneurs as well as for more experienced ones. I do not pretend to reinvent the art of pitching, but sincerely hope that it will help you make a greater impact… To make it digestible, I’ve decided to split the content in a blog serie that will be published on Mondays. Don’t forget …
8 web startup unveiling the Blue Lion Incubator in Zürich
Monday was time for the 6th ICT Investor Day, organized by Business Angel Switzerland‘s president Jan Fülscher. The concept is rather interesting: 8 startup pitch their idea in 90 seconds (with or without slides), and investor’s crew then select the 4 ones they’d like to see in 7 minutes presentation. Host of the event was this one the brand new startup incubator Blue Lion, which focus on ICT and clean tech. Tthe infrastructure of this coworking place seems really adequate, with a big open space of 36 desks and around 10 separated offices. The park has already tenants, but is far away from beeing complete. Normal, it’s just the beginning! Everything seems perfect… except if you’re coming from outside Zürich by train… you need more than 30 minutes. But come back to what you’d like to learn about: the startups! …
Meet Christophe Maire, a successful serial web entrepreneur (from Switzerland!)
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Build your Minimum Viable Product in 3 weeks… and get early funding!
A new interesting early stage startup support program was launched a few weeks ago and will probably attract a lot of wannabe entrepreneurs: the International Create Challenge (OK, the name isn’t so sexy, but keep reading!). This challenge is taking place in September 2012 in Martigny and is started by “Idiap Research Institute” and the “Association for Interactive Multimodal Information Management”. Think on it as a Startup Weekend lasting 3 weeks (so you have to be in a good shape!), where you also have the possibility to get early stage funding at attractive conditions in the end. Focus will be mainly on the development of a Minimum Viable Product (that is, a first working prototype you can launch in order to test the market… before iterating until reaching the market fit) and has to be correlated to human-computer interaction, research …
Discover 17 venture leaders, who build cutting-edge startups!
Tuesday afternoon has seen the first public appearance of the “Swiss Startup nationa team”, selected by the Switzerland-wide entrepreneurship education program venturelab. These 20 founders will travel to Boston early June and have the chance to present to US VC’s, meet US startups and many more other cool stuff. Here they are: STAFF FINDER is a startup dedicated to smooth the peaks and downs for Human Resources needs. It represents a “just-in-time” gap management solution for HR. OsmoBlue Energy provides a solution to transform low heat (<100° Celsius) into electricity, thanks a patented technology. Elodie Dahan, the founder, has been nominated captain of the team and was also granted the newly launched « Helbling innogrant award ». Swissto12 is supplying components and systems for terahertz signal transmission. SoSense is an online market place to match philantropy and entrepreneurship, selecting quality proven social …
Wake up, warm up… JURA startup!
This weekend was the first edition of Startup Weekend Jura, taking place in a crazy location: a wellness center! Around 50 people were participating to this event and not less than 23 ideas were presented on Friday night to the crew (just 60 seconds to tell what’s your idea, why you think there’s a great potential and who you’d like to recruit to work with you during the weekend!). After this pitch session, speakers had to get investors to finance their idea (each participants had dollars to spend on the 3 projects he likes most). Finally, 8 projects were selected and project leaders had to convince other participants to join the team… and 48 hours later, they had to pitch the project to a jury… But stop explaining what a Startup Weekend is, here are the projects! PickSell: a service …
7 new laws for a world gone digital
Velocity is a book written by Ajaz Ahmed (Founder of AKQA) and Stefan Olander (Vice President of Digital Sport at Nike), who experienced the rapid changes in digital technology and how they had to evolve in their businesses to adapt. The speed at which we are all having to adapt and change as technology drives our businesses forward breaths new dynamics into the way we need to work. Here are these 7 new laws added from some interesting and inspiring quotes used during this presentation and that I’ve tried to catch: A Smith and Wesson beats four Aces: Velocity doesn’t care of who you are or how good you were yesterday. Evolve immediately, entitlement kills. Have a passion for innovation as much as making profit. Change is often seen as a threat, but to an entrepreneur it’s oxygen. By Sir Richard …