EP #326 - Frank Floessel: Prioritizing Company Values

15 snips

Jun 21, 2023

Frank Floessel, a serial entrepreneur, investor, and coach, discusses the importance of company values and shares his biggest entrepreneurial lessons. He also talks about the evolution of the Swiss entrepreneurship ecosystem and the challenges of managing team turnover. Floessel highlights the significance of connecting students with part-time job opportunities and the process of pivoting in business. He emphasizes balancing personal and professional relationships and provides insights into investment limits and exciting areas of investment. Lastly, he expresses excitement for the future and shares his recent news of becoming the head of entrepreneurship at ETH Zurich.

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Introduction

00:00 • 4min

Managing Team Turnover and Swiss Entrepreneurship Ecosystem

03:31 • 4min

Addressing the Gap: Connecting Students with Part-Time Job Opportunities

07:12 • 3min

Pivoting in Business

10:16 • 17min

Balancing Personal and Professional Relationships

27:02 • 17min

Investment Limits and Exciting Areas of Investment

44:18 • 2min

Excitement for the Future

46:18 • 9min

Wrap-up and Shoutouts to ETS Juniors

55:01 • 2min

Timestamps:

4:46 - The evolution of the Swiss ecosystem

11:08 - Building a resilient company

31:41 - Work/life balance

32:40 - Frank’s 3 biggest entrepreneurial lessons

41:30 - Becoming an investor and the logical next steps

As a serial entrepreneur, investor, and coach, Frank Floessel has had a rich and wide-ranging career, starting from his university days at ETH Zurich, where he received a Master's in electrical engineering and co-founded and was the first president of ETH Juniors, which has been helping university graduates and students with part-time project work. He extended this idea and founded a second venture, Tempobrain AG, an HR company for InhouseOutsourcing and Salesforces in retail. He is an alum of MIT's Birthing of Giants leadership course. Now he has taken a step back from being an associate Partner at the Austrian VC company Venionaire Capital to return to his Alma Mater as the Head of ETH Entrepreneurship.

His focus on the importance of company values is a huge part of his ethos. It is how he has coached other CEOs to run their companies in similar ways, especially by giving insight into mistakes he made during his career that were huge lessons, as well as sharing other things he is proud to have implemented, like hierarchical dynamics. Values are core to having employees who enjoy working at your company, feel you are transparent, and think you live up to your word. These are essential lessons he wants to share with other CEOs, and he also encourages them to maintain a healthy work/life balance, which he admits can be challenging to do in the early stages of your career.

Now that his focus has shifted to his new role at ETH as Head of Entrepreneurship, he can contribute to helping foster the next generation of entrepreneurs.

“I think entrepreneurship is kind of magic: you have an idea, you make a business plan, and in the end somebody is willing to give you money for that.”

“Two of the key lessons of entrepreneurship are that failure is not an option, and that timing is really important.”

Resource:

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