Swisspreneur Show

Timestamps: 10:10 - The Gymhopper story 22:00 - Stepping down from the CEO role 25:47 - How Silvan met Christian Hirsig 30:28 - Juggling two jobs plus Swisspreneur 36:52 - Where the Swiss ecosystem is headed About Silvan Krähenbühl: Silvan Krähenbühl is the host and managing director at Swisspreneur and current CEO at Rentouch, a Swiss enterprise software company developing products geared towards e-collaboration, and best known for the PIplanning app. He holds a BA in Business Administration from the University of St Gallen. After his bachelors at HSG, Silvan created Gymhopper, a B2B SaaS startup which gives individual gyms the network of a big chain, together with his co-founder Louis, whom he had met at HSG’s Young Entrepreneurs Club. This partnership turned out to be an unfortunate one, since Louis and Silvan did not have shared values. But this realization would come later – in the meantime, Gymhopper hired its CTO, João Sobral, in Lisbon, and grew within the span of 6 months to be the biggest gym network in Switzerland.  Investors then wanted them to expand and become the biggest network in all of Europe, but the Gymhopper team soon realized that their business model was Swiss-specific and would not work in other countries, because abroad there is often a legal preference for monthly gym memberships (in contrast to the Swiss annual membership model). Their expansion to Denmark and Austria was therefore not very fruitful. They tried to counteract this through a corporate fitness model, which not only brought in more revenue but also attracted the attention of the Austrian company myclubs, who wished to expand their corporate fitness offering in Switzerland.  Gymhopper was acquired by myclubs in 2018 and Silvan stepped down from the CEO role, switching to a part-time Head Of Business Development position at myclubs. It was also in 2018 that Silvan joined Swisspreneur. One of the startup coaches that he’d met while building Gymhopper was Christian Hirsig, a serial entrepreneur and former Swisspreneur host, who invited Silvan to take over from him as host. Silvan was at first quite hesitant about being on camera and taking on such a large role, but was eventually convinced by Chris and nowadays feels very thankful for having made this decision. From 2018 to 2022, Silvan and his team grew Swisspreneur from a show with 16 published episodes to the biggest Apple Podcasts business podcast in Switzerland, with its own coaching service, masterclasses and syndicate. Silvan credits the success of Swisspreneur to his amazing team. In 2020 Silvan started working at Rentouch as Enterprise Account Director. In 2021 he left his position at myclubs and started working full time for Rentouch, and in 2022 he became the new Rentouch CEO. Ansuya Ahwalia, founder of Anamii and host of this episode, will be joining Silvan in the host team, occasionally interviewing guests.  Memorable Quotes: "Most founders are actually unhappy. As companies grow, they can get bogged down by the workload and feel like they’re being stretched too thin." "There’s a big momentum developing in the Swiss ecosystem right now. The big US VCs are starting to invest here." Recommended Resources:  Oura Ring The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz If you'd like to listen to Silvan's interview with Chris Hirsig, check out episode 17.

Timestamps: 7:02 - Building a startup in 2008 14:08 - Selling to several different industries 18:06 - Growth to SME level 20:25 - The cultural fit 32:38 - The Sparks IPO Academy About Manuel Aschwanden: Manuel Aschwanden is the co-founder and CEO at Optotune, a company which develops optical components that allow customers around the globe to innovate. Prior to Optotune, Manuel has gained experience in engineering at Avalon and ABB, and he holds an MSc in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Nanotechnology from ETH Zurich. Founded in 2008, Optotune started out with their core technology of focus tunable lenses, which was inspired by the working principle of the human eye. Laser speckle reducers, 2D mirrors, tunable prisms and beam shifters have been more recent additions to their product lines. The fact that they created their company right at the height of the 2008 financial crisis turned out to be an advantage rather than a disadvantage, because a fair number of talented people at the time found themselves out of a job. Nowadays Optotune serves several industries, from space tech all the way to consumer applications. They recently participated in the SIX Sparks IPO training program and are planning on going public sometime soon. In Manuel’s view, going public means profitability becomes all the more imperative, and also that creativity is sometimes sacrificed due to pressure from public opinion. Nonetheless, an IPO would bring enough advantages to outweigh these downsides. Memorable Quotes: "I believe that to be successful in Europe, you need to have unique engineering." If would like to listen to the previous episode of this SIX Swiss Exchange bonus series, check out our conversation with Michele Bomio. 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: 5:04 - Adela’s role model mom 14:18 - Creating a spin-off business 18:55 - Spin-off trade-offs 24:35 - Setting up your headquarters in Switzerland 35:40 - Growing and innovating About Adela Wiener: Adela Wiener is the co-founder & CEO at Aurachain, a simple and intuitive low-code platform that allows rapid creation of digital applications. She previously worked as a business development manager at the Romanian software company AGYS AG, and holds a PhD in Theory of Systems from Universitatea Politehnica din București. Aurachain was created back in 2009 and has since switched from a customer solutions provider to a B2B SaaS company, which naturally means that nowadays most of the team’s time and knowledge goes into the product, and not client projects. Currently, Aurachain is an horizontal low-code platform suitable for all sorts of industries, but which focuses on financial services companies as a go-to-market strategy. Low code gives companies quick time to value by allowing them to rapidly deploy apps without the need for code, which reduces technical depth and therefore also the company’s dependency on the developer talent pool. Shorter implementation cycles also mean increased agility. Usually low code platforms are either extremely user-friendly, but not very customizable, so that they are only suitable for simple apps, or not user-friendly but very customizable, so that they can be used to build complex apps but only by people with previous low code knowledge or people willing to invest the time needed to learn. Aurachain prides itself on being “the best of both worlds”: both user-friendly and capable of building highly complex apps. Memorable Quotes: "Low-code development means a team can create something like 11 apps in less than 3 months." 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: 3:04 - Building a startup in 1990 13:01 - Joining Securecell 22:38 - The SPARKS Academy 30:09 - Clinical trials 31:16 - Medtech market trends About Michele Bomio: Michele Bomio is an investor and board member at Securecell, a high tech life sciences company focusing on biotech & medtech. After having built his first venture, SAM, in the 90s (an ETH spin-off delivering predictive modeling to the food industry), Michele was an external CEO at companies like Navyboot and Orell Füssli Thalia. He holds a degree in Food Science and Biotechnology from ETH Zurich. At Securecell, he helps the team in their mission of developing innovative solutions in bioprocess technology for Biotech and BioPharma development digitalization and automation. Securecell is developing Seraccess, an innovative technology for the fully automated, high-frequency automatic on-line collection, processing, and analysis of minute quantities of blood for the monitoring and control of critical blood parameters. This is aimed at diabetes type 1 and 2 patients. They are close to having their first interactions with the FDA and beginning clinical trials. Securecell recently participated in the SIX IPO Academy, aimed at preparing high-potential scale-ups for going public. Michele says going public has the advantage of forcing you to be disciplined and think about your organizational structure at every level, though it also has the downside that every risk taken must be accounted for, since everyone will have an opinion on the direction your company is taking. Memorable Quotes: "If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to be a salesperson first." 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: 1:40 - Having too many interests 11:11 - Testing an idea for a year 17:45 - Focusing on which problem to solve and how 19:30 - Building trust in the cybersecurity space 27:55 - What it takes to be an entrepreneur About Sandra Tobler: Sandra Tobler is the co-founder and CEO at Futurae Technologies, a startup providing future-proof, end user-centric authentication. She previously worked at IBM and the Switzerland Global Enterprise and holds an MA in International Affairs from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Futurae solutions enable seamless 2FA with fallbacks, compliant transaction confirmations, secure helpdesk authentication, and anything in between. They also help companies meet risk and compliance requirements, fraud monitoring, security analytics, and much more. The company was created in 2016, back in the early days of cloud options, when the cloud was still regarded as “evil”. Their product was actually the first that the majority of their customers deployed in the cloud. This meant Futurae had to become an expert in building trust, and they did so not only by having an extremely talented team overall, but specifically a really strong support team (and not just a killer sales team). Memorable Quotes: "Over 93% of all information technology startups are still around after 5 years. That’s a super high number." 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: 13:46 - Being an external CEO 17:48 - Surviving in a saturated market 24:50 - Acquiring users and partners 33:14 - Going public on the Swiss stock exchange 38:17 - Choosing a direct listing About Jan Luescher: Jan Luescher is the CEO at ASMALLWORLD, an exclusive travel & lifestyle community. He previously worked as a Principal at Bain & Company and holds a MA in Strategy and International Management from HSG. ASMALLWORLD was founded in 2004 by a wealthy Swedish couple, and started out as an invitation-only club for their friends. Changes in ownership over the years altered some aspects of the product, but in spite of this, and despite the product’s success, the team could not find a successful way of monetizing it, so investment began to wane. Jan Luescher stepped in as an external CEO back in 2016 and has been steering the ship ever since. It isn’t ideal for ASMALLWORLD to grow a lot in terms of membership numbers, since exclusivity is part of the package deal (for which users annually pay CHF 100), so they’ve chosen to do so through creating a booking service on their website, in partnership with a number of luxury hotels. Their goal is to ultimately be able to offer a fremium model (especially also considering that, even among those with disposable income, willingness to pay for a social media service is quite low), but for that they need to offer services to their users, so that the revenue coming from this will help support the non-paying users. They’re also aiming to improve the technical aspects of their social media functionality and their booking service. ASMALLWORLD has bought a 10% stake in Global Hotel Alliance, a loyalty program for independent hotels, which has in turn bought 3% of ASMALLWORLD. The goal is to offer Global Hotel Alliance members a free ASMALLWORLD membership as part of the status benefits. Memorable Quotes: "The risk of entrepreneurship always seemed scary to me. It took me a while to take on the ASMALLWORLD project." "When ASMALLWORLD was publicly listed, the financial press in Switzerland thought the world was going to end." 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: 4:20 - Reading business books in engineering school 11:50 - The lean startup methodology 19:30 - The lean canvas 39:52 - The entrepreneurial renaissance 51:54 - The lean workshop About Ash Maurya: Ash Maurya is the founder and CEO at Leanstack, a leading provider of Lean Startup and Lean Business Modeling tools, content, and coaching resources. He is also the author of the book Running Lean. Prior to Leanstack, he worked at companies like telecom technologies and Sonus Networks and founded the startup Wired Reach in 2002, which enabled the creation of simple peer to web applications that blurred the boundaries between the desktop and web. He holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology. The Lean Canvas came about as a way to combat the preconceived notion of business ideas as overnight successes. It helps aspiring founders take their idea and deconstruct it to learn what needs to be tackled first and how to chronicle the process. It helps you get specific (because if you try to build a product for everyone, you end up building a product for no one) and helps you find out whether the problem you’re looking to solve is big enough. The Lean Startup Methodology can also help you figure out things like pricing. Founders tend to want to price their product in terms of solution (meaning, based on how much it costs to produce the product/solution) instead of pricing it according to the problem (figuring out how big of a pain the problem is, and how much people are willing to pay to fix it). It can also help founders find paths to customers, whether that be through paid advertising or through posting original content, or through being featured on other people’s original content, like Ash just did with Swisspreneur. Memorable Quotes: "Being too early to market is almost as bad as being too late." "When we try to build a product for everyone, we end up building a product for no one." 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: 11:20 - Giving up your salary for a startup idea 12:58 - Moving to California 23:25 - Marketing a solution with broad applications 32:19 - Tweaking your pricing 40:03 - Convincing investors to invest About Chris Bach: Chris Bach is the CSO/CCO at Netlify, a platform for building highly-performant and dynamic websites, e-commerce stores and apps. He studied film and media science at the University of Copenhagen but then pivoted to the business world, and created Netlify in 2015 together with co-founders Mathias Biilmann. By uniting an extensive ecosystem of technologies, services and APIs into one workflow, Netlify unlocks new levels of team productivity, while saving time, money and the planet. Their idea was to change the architecture of the web and provide a viable workflow for developers, since nowadays it’s known that the biggest overall challenge companies face is reducing time to market, and that the number 1 way of doing so is to invest in developer tools and workflow. They knew that Netlify would have to be venture-backed in order to have the right time-to-market and create the desired impact. Europe was much too risk averse in terms of capital, so they decided to raise funds in the US. To date they’ve taken on $212M in investment from investors such as A16Z, Kleiner Perkins, Bessemer, EQT, BOND and Menlo Ventures, and angels such as the founders of Github, Heroku, Rackspace Cloud, Slack, Yelp, Figma, and many more. Memorable Quotes: "Venture capital was much too risk-averse in Europe. What we needed was the Silicon Valley approach." "The mission is not money. The mission is building a better web." 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!

This episode was produced in cooperation with the ETH Entrepreneur Club. Timestamps: 3:20 - IoT 10 years ago 20:02 - Subscription based models and high margins 25:09 - Going international from day one 30:02 - Picking Ariel Lüdi as an investor 45:00 - Scaling your team About Samuel Mueller: Samuel Mueller is the co-founder and CEO at Scandit, the leading technology platform for mobile computer vision and augmented reality (AR) solutions for enterprises. He holds a PhD in Computer Science and Temporal Logics from ETH Zurich. Together with Christian Floerkermeier and Christof Roduner, he created Scandit in 2009. Their goal with Scandit was to create a bridge between real world objects and the digital information available about them. Barcodes were then the natural entry points, especially at a time when phone cameras were just starting to become ubiquitous. Nowadays they work with 4 key verticals: Large retail organizations Logistics organizations Big manufacturers Health organizations Scandit runs a subscription-based model which allows customers to “go as they grow”, meaning the bigger they get, the more Scandit services they can accrue. It's also a very high margin business, because a lot of the heavy lifting, the computer vision magic, is happening on the user devices, so there’s no distinct cloud need. Memorable Quotes: "As an entrepreneur, if you don’t get really good at saying ‘no’, you’re gonna get terribly distracted." "Today’s customers are really smart. If you don’t have an answer ready for them, they’re already on their way to check out the product somewhere else." If you would like to listen to our previous episode on Scandit, check out our conversation with Christof Roduner. 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: 9:25 - Netcentric’s focus 23:17 - Growing your headcount 26:45 - Choosing holacracy 38:36 - Getting acquired 49:08 - Building a wine marketplace About Elian Kool: Elian Kool is the co-founder and former CEO at Netcentric, a Zurich based company that develops CX marketing solutions. He previously worked at companies like Acommit AG, Namics and Logica Deutschland. Elian co-founded Netcentric in 2012, right around the time that Adobe Experience Cloud (the focus of their business) was first emerging. They were quite precocious, in the sense that they always competed at eye level with big consultants like Deloitte and Accenture, and very early on set up an office in Barcelona. They were also quick to take on a holacratic organizational method, in order to create a work environment that was both extremely efficient and attractive to its employees. In 2017 they were acquired by cognizant in order to grow more quickly at an international level. Memorable Quotes: "In my view it’s much better to stay focused and know what you’re good at than trying to mitigate every potential risk." 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!