Swisspreneur Show

Timestamps:

1:39 - The START Lausanne

6:07 - The team

9:25 - The Covid challenge

11:58 - The resources of the Romandy ecosystem

15:09 - What's next for Tatiana?

About Tatiana Cogne and START Lausanne

Tatiana Cogne is the President of START Lausanne and Head of Communication at Swiss Solar Boat. Tatiana joined START in 2019 as an event organizer, after having participated in START Hack and START Summit in St. Gallen. After 9 months as Event Organizer, she advanced to President of the chapter in June 2020. Under her leadership, START Lausanne has been reinventing itself over and over again during the last couple months in order to comply with ever changing COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. Beyond that, Tatiana initiated the forming of a network of entrepreneurship organizations across the Swiss Romandy: rather than each organization working independently in their city, they now collaborate on news distribution and other opportunities. START Lausanne offers events, workshops and mentoring to students and other people interested in entrepreneurship. They also participate in the "Road to START Summit" initiative, a 6 month competition where startups receive support to refine their business idea and potentially win a CHF 30k prize.

START Lausanne is one of 10 chapters of the START Global organization in Europe. START Global was founded in 2005 out of the University of St. Gallen (HSG) and has since become one of Europe’s top startup events.

Memorable Quotes

"When I finish my presidency at START Lausanne, I want to do so with the knowledge that I motivated every single one of my colleagues to surpass themselves."

If you would like to listen to more conversation with entrepreneurs from the Swiss Romandy, check out our conversations with Anaïs Matthey-Junod, Alessandra Rojas, Sébastien Jaffaux and Aldo Podestà.

Don’t forget to give us a follow on our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin accounts, so you can always stay up to date with our latest initiatives. That way, there’s no excuse for missing out on live shows, weekly give-aways or founders dinners!

Timestamps:

1:26 - From Milano to Zurich

9:08 - The problem with the inspection of inaccessible areas

17:13 - Getting business know-how for your all-tech team

20:56 - New drones in town

32:44 - Preparing for the future

About Mina Kamel and Voliro

Mina Kamel is the co-founder and CEO of Voliro, a producer of robotic drones for inspection and light maintenance at height. Mina obtained his Bachelors in Automation Engineering Technology from the Politecnico di Milano before moving to Zurich to obtain his Masters and eventually his PhD in Mechatronic, Robotics and Automation Engineering from ETH Zürich. During his PhD, he contributed to the Aeroworks project, where much of the inspiration for Voliro was drawn from. He also met his 4 co-founders, Timo Müller, Dr. Marius Fehr, Dr. Anurag Vempati and Dr. Thomas Schneider, during this time. With all five co-founders coming from a technical background, they supplemented their business knowledge through advisors and coaching by Venture Lab. The team quickly realized that the timing for Voliro was right. Not only had the technology for robotic drones matured, but there was a strong pull from the oil, gas and infrastructure industries to lower operational costs through increased efficiency in maintenance. Voliro closed a CHF 2m seed round in 2020 with Alex Fries's Alpana Ventures as lead investor. They will use the seed round capital to get their product to the market faster and are planning to raise a series A round towards the end 2021 for CHF 5-10m.

Memorable Quotes

"Falling from a great height is the number 2 biggest cause of workplace injuries. With our solution, robots do the dangerous work, and people stay safely with their feet on the ground."

"Product development is a skill you can develop, but it takes a very long time. Sometimes it's just more practical to hire professional help."

Mina Kamel's Favorite Resources

Garmin Sports Watch

Dare To Lead, by Bréne Brown

If you would like to listen to more of our ETH co-productions, check out our conversations with Caspar Coppetti and Mark Essam.

Don’t forget to give us a follow on our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Linkedin accounts, so you can always stay up to date with our latest initiatives. That way, there’s no excuse for missing out on live shows, weekly give-aways or founders dinners!

Timestamps:

1:29 - Why create an AI startup?

9:00 - Having a great team

10:33 - Combining vision with short-term strategy

16:57 - Creating a company narrative

19:07 - Tips for students today

Biography:

Aldo Podestà is the founder and CEO of L2F, the company behind the platform Giotto.ai, which builds and hosts high performance machine learning applications. Before starting Giotto in 2017, Aldo Podestà worked in Sales Strategy at Philip Morris, in Lausanne. The idea for Giotto was born when he presented at a high level management meeting and was asked to provide an explanation for the recommendations his machine learning based strategy model had provided. When he was unable to explain the recommendations of his own model, he suspected that there would be tremendous value in a solution that would increase a machine learning model’s interpretability. Not long after its inception, Giotto.ai won a competition on Kaggle, one of the most prestigious data science platforms globally. In 2019, the company closed a CHF 3.2 Series A round which allowed them to pursue their ambitious vision. As a CEO, Aldo initially struggled to assemble the right team around him: betting on exclusively young and ambitious employees proved to be a mistake. Today, he counts on a more mixed team with various levels of experience.

Memorable Quotes:

"You don't run a company alone. You run it with every single one of your employees."

Resources Mentioned:

- VentureLab (Venture Kick)

- Innosuisse

If you would like to listen to more episodes on AI, check out our conversations with David Alain Bloch and Martin Keller.

Don’t forget to give us a follow on our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, so you can always stay up to date with our latest initiatives. That way, there’s no excuse for missing out on live shows, weekly give-aways or founders dinners!

Timestamps:

2:19 - Why doesn't Europe get employee participation plans right?

7:04 - How much equity should you give your employees?

16:26 - How to communicate stock option plans to your team

23:35 - The politics of stock option plans

27:53 - Rapid fire questions

Episode in 60 seconds

Getting employee participation plans right.

Why participation plans are important

- As a startup, you’ll often struggle to compete with established companies on the salary front. Stocks are your secret weapon to attract top talent in spite of limited cash.

Participation plans in Europe vs the US

- Employees in Europe hold less than half of the company stock than their US counterparts. This is among other things due to lower awareness of the value of participation plans amongst the European workforce.

The mechanics of participation plans

- How much stock should you reserve for employees? Generally good bench marks are 5-10% in the early stages of your company and up to 20-30% in later stages

Pitfalls of participation plans

- When you are short on cash, it’s tempting to think you can make up for a low salary with stocks. This is not a fair way to treat your employees as you are forcing them to bet their financial security almost entirely on the success of your company.

If you want to listen to more conversations with Yoko, check out our story episode with her.

Don’t forget to give us a follow on our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, so you can always stay up to date with our latest initiatives. That way, there’s no excuse for missing out on live shows, weekly give-aways or founders dinners!

Timestamps

1:21 - Motivation for starting your own business

4:24 - Rocking with your friends

7:46 - Struggling with team management

10:54 - What is the Swiss Romandy ecosystem doing well?

16:07 - More about Sébastien

Biography

Sébastien Jaffaux is the founder and CTO of the Swiss Solar Boat Association, a project created by engineering students from EPFL and HEIG-VD. Swiss Solar Boat aims to create a solar powered racing boat from scratch, to compete in contests such as the Monaco Solar & Energy Boat Challenge 2021. Swiss Solar Boat is not your typical startup. It emerged from the EPFL Hydrocontest Team which represented the EPFL at the Hydrocontest competition for maritime energy efficiency. Sébastien started out as communication manager at the Hydrocontest Team and became president of the association in 2018.  As president, he led the transition from Hydrocontest to Swiss Solar Boat in 2019. Today, the Swiss Solar Boat Association is made up of over 60 students from various technical backgrounds who work together to create a solar powered boat from scratch, including producing the individual boat parts. Currently, Sebastien lives and breathes his project and enjoys pulling off such a challenging feat with some of his closest friends. But due to the nature of the association, he will be handing over his responsibilities as CTO and Vice President once he finishes his Masters degree in mechanical engineering at EPFL in the Summer of 2021.

Memorable Quotes

"The Swiss Romandy is missing a place where all entrepreneurs can meet to exchange know-how and enrich their perspective."

For more marine tech episodes, check out our conversation with Christian Fehr.

Don’t forget to give us a follow on our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, so you can always stay up to date with our latest initiatives. That way, there’s no excuse for missing out on live shows, weekly give-aways or founders dinners!

Timestamps:

2:37 - From studying physics to becoming an entrepreneur

9:55 - Splitting roles

18:01 - The initial idea for Ledgy

22:10 - Finding your first clients

30:12 - Dealing with American competitors

Biography:

Yoko Spirig is the co-founder and CEO of Ledgy, an equity management company for startups and high growth companies. Yoko studied Physics at ETH Zurich, the University of Oxford and CERN. She was also project lead of Swissloop, helping to build the first Hyperloop pod in Switzerland. Yoko met her two co-founders, Ben Brandt and Timo Horstschaefer, during her time at university. It was also during that time that they were first made aware of the problems related to equity management that many young companies (and their investors) face through a conversation with the Doodle founders, Michael Näf and Paul Sevinç, who were looking for a startup team on cofoundme. After graduating from ETH Zurich, the three friends went on a journey with the transsiberian railway from Vladivostok to Moscow where they read up on startup business strategy and sharpened the idea which would eventually become Ledgy. The company pivoted after 1.5 years from a free product to introducing business pricing and targeting larger companies rather than early stage startups. In the early days, the co-founding team also toyed with the idea of using Blockchain technology to enable their product. They however abandoned that plan after evaluating the regulatory framework and their customer needs. Today, Ledgy serves companies like Frontify, VIU and Sherpany and employs a team of over 10 people.

Resources Mentioned:

Zero to One, by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters

The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries

Memorable Quotes:

"A good board is a hands-off one — they don't try to micro-manage the company. But they are also always there to offer good advice."

"I became an entrepreneur because I wanted to have a direct, short-term impact on society."

Timestamps:

1:34 - The reason behind Tech For Impact

7:20 - Who's the target student?

11:51 - Milestones so far

17:40 - Toughest challenge

25:56 - More about Alessandra

About Alessandra and Tech4Impact

Alessandra Rojas is the manager of the EPFL Changemakers program, an incubator program which is part of the EPFL’s Tech4Impact initiative for accelerating ground-breaking and sustainable technological solutions to create positive societal and environmental impact. She was also a co-initiator of Versus Virus, a hackathon to develop solutions against the COVID 19 crisis.

As one of the world’s top universities for technology and science, EPFL is one of Switzerland’s most significant hubs for innovation. The EPFL Changemakers program emerged from the EPFL’s grant program and belongs to the unit of the Vice Presidency for Innovation at EPFL. Where previously entrepreneurs at EPFL were mostly supported through financial means such as grants, the goal of the Changemakers program is to provide more holistic support to early stage entrepreneurs and to make sustainability a cornerstone of what it means to be an  EPFL startup. The program was launched in October of this year with a first cohort of 20 students across the Bachelor, Master and PhD level. Due to the challenging circumstances presented by the pandemic, the program has had to evolve rapidly over the past months. Nevertheless, the 20 students will receive 6 months of intensive training and mentoring through peers and experts and are on track to graduate successfully from the program in February 2021.

Memorable Quotes: 

"Our GameChangers program has shown to us that the EPFL's students' interest in sustainable solutions is much higher than we had originally anticipated."

"The changes that Covid has brought about have really helped startups with founders spread all across Switzerland cooperate better among themselves."

If you would like to listen to more episodes on green startups, check out our conversations with André Borschberg, Anastasia Hofmann & Naomi MacKenzie, Jutta Jertrum, Nicholas Hänny, Mark Essam and Anaïs Matthey-Junod.

Don't forget to give us a follow on our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, so you can always stay up to date with our latest initiatives. That way, there's no excuse for missing out on live shows, weekly give-aways or founders dinners!

Timestamps:

7:35 - Reasons for leaving the corporate world

16:19 - Finding the right problem to solve

23:11 - Do solo founders work?

38:09 - Dealing with rejection

46:07 - The scalability issue

Biography:

Luiza Dobre is the founder and CEO of Komed Health, a healthcare communications platform. She started Komed Health in 2016, after a long time toying with different ideas and struggling to find the right co-founder. Komed Health emerged from the realization that while communication is a challenge in every sector, in healthcare, the consequences of failed communication can be the difference between life and death. Four years onwards, Komed Health helps health practitioners all over Switzerland communicate faster and more effectively among themselves, which results in better decisions, a happier staff and healthier patients. With Marc Bornträger, Luiza has also finally found a technical co-founder to complement her skill set.

Before starting Komed Health, Luiza worked as a marketing and sales specialist for major brands like Swarovski and Schindler. She also obtained a CEMS Master of International Management from the University of St. Gallen and ESADE Business School.

Don't forget to give us a follow on our Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, so you can always stay up to date with our latest initiatives. That way, there's no excuse for missing out on liveshows, weekly give-aways or founders dinners!

Timestamps:

1:22 - Starting a student project

8:32 - The team behind sun'n'go

16:15 - Tips for making remote teams work

17:34 - Advice for future entrepreneurs

22:07 - The French-speaking Swiss startup scene

About Anaïs and Sun'n'go

Anaïs Matthey-Junod obtained a BA in Environmental Science and Engineering and an MA in Energy Management and Sustainability from the EPFL. In the last year of her masters, the idea for sun'n'go was born, after a trip to India with EPFL in 2019. In the following months, they developed their idea further, creating a portable energy center which can be used in impoverished communities to light up the community's households and charge phones. These energy centers are sold through micro credit schemes. Running entirely on solar power, they are a green catalyst for economic development. In December 2020 Anaïs and her co-workers will be finalizing their prototype. In parallel, they are preparing to conduct their first field study in Malawi, as well as a pilot project in the first half of 2021. Anaïs Matthey-Junod is currently also a research assistant at the EssentialTech Centre, and has just joined the NORCAP Accelerator Program at NRC.

Timestamps: 

2:30 - Meeting future co-founders 

9:19 - Deciding to go up against Nike and Adidas 

21:35 - Finding a business partner 

47:14 - Dealing with competition 

49:47 - Investors 

Biography: 

Caspar Coppetti is co-founder of On, one of the world’s fastest growing sports brands. Caspar started On together with his two co-founders Olivier Bernhard and David Allemann in 2010 based on their patented CloudTec® technology. On shoes have famously been worn by  Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and of course, their brand ambassador, tennis star Roger Federer. Over the last 10 years, the company has expanded to over 55 countries and has become one of the top 5 leading running shoe brands in the DACH area and in the US. Now On is expanding into the trekking shoe market, launching their extremely lightweight Cloudrock trekking shoe in 2019.