TechDrive Zurich

Most offices are clean, quiet, and a little boring. Stefan Zimmer built the opposite. In this episode of TechDrive Zürich, I drive through Zürich with Stefan, employee number one at FlexOffice and the head of DARE Campus.

FlexOffice started in 2018 with nothing but an idea and four laptops. Today it is the biggest serviced-office provider in Switzerland, with 11 locations and around 30,000 square meters of space. DARE Campus is Stefan's boldest bet yet: a home built on purpose for deep-tech and robotics startups, with raw concrete, no fancy double floors, and big rooms where teams can get a little wild with heavy hardware.

We also get into how an office company survived a COVID home-office mandate, the day a humanoid robot ran through the campus, the one piece of office tech everyone secretly hates, and why the "far away" neighbourhood of Schlieren is actually nine minutes away by train.

⏱️ Chapters
00:00 Welcome
01:15 From four laptops to Switzerland's biggest
02:05 From 15 years in nightlife to running an office
03:02 Where the name came from: Join, Explore, DARE
03:52 Why the campus is all raw concrete
05:07 Taking the distractions away from founders
06:53 Building a community, not just renting desks
08:22 How the model changed, and surviving COVID
10:30 A humanoid robot running through the campus
12:37 The office tech everyone secretly hates
13:39 Who DARE Campus is for
15:46 Is Schlieren really that far? The 9-minute playlist
16:04 Events, hackathons and knowledge sharing
17:28 Wrap-up

💡 A few takeaways

• Start small, think big: four laptops became Switzerland's largest serviced-office provider in under a decade.
• Build for your user, not for looks: raw concrete and big rooms beat polished floors when customers bring robots.
• Remove the friction: founders do their best work when someone else handles the boring stuff.
• A crisis can be an accelerator: when offices were "banned," FlexOffice leaned into flexibility and came back stronger.
• Community is the real product: people come for the space, but they stay for the people.

🎁 Special offer for builders
DARE Campus has space open right now, from a single desk to hundreds of square meters of maker space. Mention "TechDrivePodcast" when you sign for a desk or a space, and your first month is completely rent-free. If you work in robotics, deep-tech, or AI and want room to get a little wild, this one is for you.

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🔗 Connect
Guest: Stefan Zimmer - https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefan-zimmer-flexoffice/

DARE Campus: darecampus.ch

FlexOffice: flexoffice.ch

TechDrive Zürich - hosted by Justinas Mišeikis - https://techdrivezurich.lovable.app/

🎧 Also available on YouTube

#TechDrive #Zürich #Switzerland #robotics #deeptech #startups #FlexOffice #DARECampus #makerspace #innovation

What turns brilliant Swiss research into a company the world actually wants? This episode of TechDrive Zürich is a driving conversation with Raffael Kellner, who has spent six years at VentureLab / Venture Kick - the programs behind roughly 80% of Switzerland's innovation-based startups.

Raffael shares his own path (business school → the startup scenes of Slovakia and Vienna → a failed app startup → consulting → VentureLab), then unpacks what he looks for when a scientist wants to commercialize their work. The recurring theme: mission comes first - "the key thing is to know that you want it" - and everything else can be taught.

In this episode:

• Why a PhD is surprisingly good preparation for startup life - "you've already learned how to suffer"
• The mindset flip from research perfectionism to startup "good enough, and easy to scale"
• Why you must validate demand before you build
• The data behind the method: an ~84% success rate for completed Venture Kick projects
• Switzerland's "unfair advantage" - world-class IP and an ecosystem that's international from day one
• The blind spot: the world's growth is shifting to Asia, and why founders should learn those markets
• A wow-moment from China's "dark factories," where robots - not cheap labour - build (self-driving) cars
• What Raffael would build if he started a startup today, and the values that would guide it

About the guest: Raffael Kellner works at VentureLab / Venture Kick, supporting Switzerland's most promising deep-tech and innovation-driven startups from first idea to global markets.

About the show: TechDrive Zürich is a series of candid, in-car conversations with the people building technology in and around Zürich - hosted by Justinas Mišeikis.

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▶ Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/X6pt5X9Z0-M

🔗 VentureLab: venturelab.swiss • Venture Kick: venturekick.ch

🔗 Guest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raffaelkellner/

In this episode of TechDrive Zurich, I’m taking a drive with deep tech executive and venture partner, Dr. Robert MacKenzie (Ellipsis Ventures, former C-level at ANYbotics, Hocoma, Labster).We dive into what it actually takes to get robotics out of the lab and into the real world. We discuss the transition from flashy demos to achieving "boring reliability", the 99.999% dependability required for industrial scaling. Robert shares insights from his experience scaling ANYbotics into a global player, and breaks down what investors are truly looking for in the next generation of AI and robotics startups.As always on TechDrive, we explore these complex topics while navigating the streets, blending high-level strategy with real-world execution.Three things stuck with me:

1. In deep tech, "if you build it, they will come" is rarely true. Robert's warning is premature commercialization. Chasing revenue with a product that isn't finished. His fix is to stop treating real-world deployments as expensive guesswork ("osmosis," as he calls it, basically put an expensive robot out there and hope you learn something) and turn them into a tight, conscious learning loop that feeds straight back into the product. Build the value first and the adoption follows.

2. The robotics correction is coming. It's a planning signal, not a reason to panic. He's predicting a corrective dip in early 2027 as the hype meets reality and investment cools. His practical advice to Zürich robotics founders was blunt: if you want to raise, raise in 2026. He's not anti-humanoid, but they "do amazing movements with zero understanding of the movements they're doing." The near future is a mixed fleet of specialized robots, not one humanoid doing everything.

3. Founders, especially researchers, shouldn't lose their superpower. Scientists are masters of the learning loop: form a hypothesis, don't know the answer, find a way. But once a spin-off finds one solution that works in the lab, the loop often stops, and they fall in love with it. Keep that loop running in the real world and it's a game-changer. His related, honest note: don't default to CEO/CTO because the title is romantic, but take the role that's best for the company. Sometimes that means letting someone else drive.Subscribe for more in-car conversations with the leaders shaping the future of tech, AI and robotics!

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He started his career teaching trains to catch their own failures before they happened. Now he does the same for founders.

Nikos Kaliorakis, president of J Floor, joins TechDrive for a drive through Zurich. We get into leaving Greece, the jump from fixing machines to backing people, and why he's set on keeping young builders in Zurich instead of losing them to London or San Francisco.

Plus what J Floor actually is, and what it refuses to be: no coworking space, no accelerator, no equity, no fees. Just founders helping founders.

No stage, no script. Just an honest conversation in a moving car.

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Tech chat with Nelija Mišeikienė