As a Swiss founder, it's great to randomly see this popping up on HN :)
Switzerland has everything to produce successful startups: top universities and talent, stable and sovereign infrastructure and government, capital, and liberal tax and company laws.
However, the reality is different:
As if starting a company isn't hard enough, Swiss (and I guess EU) culture doesn't really recognize entrepreneurship as a valuable career path. You hear a lot of "Are you sure about taking that much risk?" and when you fail you get a "I told you so".
You would think there's plenty of capital here, but unfortunately not in VC. It's getting better, but many Swiss early-stage investors still ask for a detailed 5-year business plan and four due diligence calls for a 5k ticket in your round.
In SF, everyone helps each other out with their network, intros, and so on. In Switzerland, most startups and scaleups still operate in closed gardens and ecosystems are rare or slowly developing, which makes building a network really hard.
Events like these hopefully help to change this :)
this is a joke I may sound salty, but the only innovations I see coming from Europe are plastic bottle recycling and fining American companies for GDPR violations.
Seems pretty ignorant. If you take a historic perspective, the WWW and things like HTML, HTTP, URLs etc. are technically from a British guy working in Switzerland (CERN) but I suppose crediting it to any country is kind of pointless. These days a lot of it runs on machines that run on a Linux kernel, also technically from Europe. Python/C++/PHP/Erlang/Prolog/Pascal and many others I'm probably forgetting on the programming language front.
If you're talking about current VC-backed hyper accelerators...there's probably also plenty. I think there's also a lot going on in the non-IT sectors (medicine, pharma, genetics, energy etc.)
But the bigger question is...does it really matter which country innovation comes from these days? As an end-user/customer I certainly don't care too much.
You don’t sound salty: you’re speaking from a place of ignorance and offering an opinion based on literally no evidence whatsoever so you merely sound uninformed.
In the UK, for example, we don’t suffer from a dearth of innovation. What actually happens is that successful companies get hoovered up by foreign, and particularly US, investors. It’s extremely frustrating.
For myself, I’m pleased to see events like this happening in other European countries.
Ha, so there is an amazing Swiss startup (that took some wrong steps), KA-EX. They make an isotonic drink (btw Isostar is/was also Swiss), and my personal sample and annecdotal news from my friends, well it works (worked). Super easy recovery, hangover cure too. But lately they moved onto drinks with Caffeine added, stopped their original product, and it's not as effective. But well, there are some Swiss startups doing just fine.
I've worked for a few start-ups in Europe. We have real problems around the scale-up stage, venture capital and taxes + regulations are making things harder than it should be but it would be wrong to assume that there's no (successful) startups at all.
Spotify, Ayden, Revolt and N8N are some examples that come to mind.
Also, whenever something is mildly successful, some foreign investor fund will swing a nice back of money in front of the founders and *poof* European company gone.
The startup scene in Germany is alive and flourishing. They just don't make headlines and a lot of what they develop may be considered not exciting to the general public.
Switzerland has everything to produce successful startups: top universities and talent, stable and sovereign infrastructure and government, capital, and liberal tax and company laws.
However, the reality is different:
As if starting a company isn't hard enough, Swiss (and I guess EU) culture doesn't really recognize entrepreneurship as a valuable career path. You hear a lot of "Are you sure about taking that much risk?" and when you fail you get a "I told you so".
You would think there's plenty of capital here, but unfortunately not in VC. It's getting better, but many Swiss early-stage investors still ask for a detailed 5-year business plan and four due diligence calls for a 5k ticket in your round.
In SF, everyone helps each other out with their network, intros, and so on. In Switzerland, most startups and scaleups still operate in closed gardens and ecosystems are rare or slowly developing, which makes building a network really hard.
Events like these hopefully help to change this :)
If you're talking about current VC-backed hyper accelerators...there's probably also plenty. I think there's also a lot going on in the non-IT sectors (medicine, pharma, genetics, energy etc.)
But the bigger question is...does it really matter which country innovation comes from these days? As an end-user/customer I certainly don't care too much.
In the UK, for example, we don’t suffer from a dearth of innovation. What actually happens is that successful companies get hoovered up by foreign, and particularly US, investors. It’s extremely frustrating.
For myself, I’m pleased to see events like this happening in other European countries.
Spotify, Ayden, Revolt and N8N are some examples that come to mind.
Europe has some very real work to do to stay competitive but fortunately things are slowly changing.
Sad that people on HN can’t make the difference between funding and startup mindset/innovation potential.