Suisse : capitale mondiale de la deeptech

Max, saison 3 de La Savane en collaboration avec Mirabaud. On est extrêmement contents de commencer ce ce partenariat avec eux euh pour plusieurs raisons qu'on va un peu voir maintenant, euh mais une d'entre elles était euh cet accès à des entrepreneurs incroyables euh parce qu'ils nous ouvrent un réseau vraiment de de de personnes et on est on est vraiment euh impatients et excités de commencer ce partenariat. Ouais, on voit avec Mirabaud qu'ils ont vraiment ce qu'on appelle du skin in the game, mais c'est quelque chose qu'on qu'on admire. On le voit via deux choses qui sont inspirantes. La la première, c'est que le leur partenaire euh investissent leur propre argent dans euh les mêmes opportunités d'investissement qu'ils proposent à leurs clients, et ça c'est assez rare. Et on voit aussi qu'ils soutiennent vraiment l'écosystème entrepreneurial et start-up suisse via leur stratégie d'investissement. Ils le font depuis un moment. Euh c'est une boîte qui a 200 ans. Euh ça fait 200 ans qu'ils soutiennent des générations d'entrepreneurs. Et euh et quand on a discuté avec eux, ce qu'on trouvait vraiment cool justement, c'est cette vision long terme qu'ils ont d'accompagner et de faire de développer le marché suisse. Et ce développement euh passe par euh soutenir l'écosystème, soutenir les fondateurs, soutenir les start-ups, la tech, et cetera. Et ça c'est super excitant. Ouais, et on voit qu'ils sont vraiment impliqués euh au niveau personnel dans leur stratégie d'investissement et ils ouvrent vraiment cet accès à l'investissement euh dans les start-ups et la tech suisses, euh qu'on a pas vu vraiment ailleurs, ce qui fait que cet engagement et et cette envie de vraiment soutenir cet écosystème-là, c'est ce qui en fait un si bon partenaire pour nous. Il y a le soutien des entrepreneurs, puis il y a aussi l'envie de de pousser la Suisse comme un leader euh sur le marché de l'innovation en Europe. Euh et ça justement, si on parle de tech, c'est extrêmement important parce qu'on doit se repositionner là-dessus et il y a vraiment une place à prendre et la Suisse est bien placée pour l'avoir. Et euh et et ils sont vraiment en train de pousser ça et c'est extrêmement intéressant pour nous en tout cas de travailler avec eux à ce niveau-là. Ouais. Donc merci beaucoup à Mirabaud pour leur soutien pour cette saison et merci aussi à vous qui nous écoutez. C'est grâce à vous qu'on peut continuer cette belle aventure avec cette saison 3. On a beaucoup de chance de s'asseoir avec des entrepreneurs incroyables qui nous partagent un peu leur vie et leur parcours. Si vous aimez autant que nous passer ces moments avec eux, n'hésitez pas à vous abonner ou à liker ces vidéos. À nous, ça nous aide énormément. Donc merci beaucoup pour votre soutien. the association with risk? I mean, we we when we talk about the US or or some more tech-savvy markets, they're much more into uh investing early in high high-risk tech uh that's going to pay off in several years. Uh Switzerland culturally is a bit different, obviously. We're more uh you know, more prudent in the investments that we make. It's more difficult culturally to invest in new things that we don't know if they're going to work or not. Do you think that also needs to change for this to become better or is it independent of the success of of Switzerland really becoming this deep tech uh hub? That's a good question. I I don't have as firm of an answer as I had to the to the previous ones because I think this is much more shaded. Um I I do believe that this narrative of the Swiss don't take risk is I I don't I don't think that's correct. I don't think it's fair, and I think overgeneralization is always a bit difficult. Um I've met countless successful entrepreneurs, entrepreneur families, um institutions that have a long track record of investing in venture capital here in Switzerland, but they've invested in US venture capital. And that's because performance historically has been in US venture capital. And um you need to take a step back. How did venture capital as an industry start? Started in Silicon Valley. Silicon because of the material computer chips are made of. It was used to finance what no one wanted to finance. High-tech innovation that was out of the research context looking to commercialize. So you have a capex risk, you have a technology risk, and you don't have a clear growth of revenue. So that's something that banks didn't want to finance, that corporations didn't want to finance. And so a new breed of crazies came together that said, well, there's a lot of opportunity if we own a stake of those businesses then. And that's how venture capital started. Computer infrastructure was developed based on that, internet infrastructure was developed based on that. And suddenly we're around 2000. And in 2000 big step change happened in our world, which is the internet became publicly available. And as a consequence, venture capital changed because the biggest drivers of financial returns in entrepreneurship was not anymore high-tech innovation being commercialized, but it was business school graduates that had great ideas of what you could do with that internet. It's pure business model innovation. And in business model innovation, you need a large domestic market that you can quickly address. You need cheap labor that you can quickly hire in order to grow a business. There is a lot of headcount needed in order to build up sales, customer support, um and the entire organization around that. E-commerce, social media, shallow software for digitization of processes and corporations in the 2000s, 2010s, that's what was driving value globally in venture capital. But around 2015 we reached a point where within these industries every vertical was taken, every niche was occupied. suitcase.com, uh petfood.ch. You found a flat-sharing website for cities and one for beach resorts. And it was impossible for venture capitalists to still systematically generate returns with these type of innovations. And so slowly, as anywhere in our economy, in our world, the pendulum swung back into tech. And the founder of the most promising companies were not anymore Harvard Business School graduates or University of St. Gallen master students, but it was again the engineers. And it started with AI, it started with robotics, semiconductor. And so what that means is that for a good 20 years Switzerland was completely irrelevant to venture capital because it's a small domestic market fragmented in three or if you ask some four languages, that is isolated from the rest of Europe. It is high labor uh in expensive, it has high labor cost. So it's just not made for these business models. And as a consequence, there was no one investing here. And so if you're a wealthy individual or a family office in Switzerland, there was simply nothing to invest in. And we have to not educate that investing in startups is smart. Most know that. But we have to educate that returns can now be generated here as well, not only in the US, not only in China, not only in India, those large domestic markets where for a long time a lot of these returns have been generated. And I think that's the mission that we're on is to showcase venture capital has changed again. Switzerland is now an extremely relevant place, and with that returns can be generated here. But do you think we need to change our investors needs to change their mindset? But do you think entrepreneurs need in Switzerland also need to change their mindset? Because I feel like you said, I think it's maybe it's a it's a shortcut and it's wrong and but when we look at it from the outside, we we feel like US founders are sort of rewarded for, you know, exaggeration, say, oh, we're going to change the world, we're going to do that, it's going to be amazing. And on our side, we're like, oh, you know, we're just going to try to build this smart and stable company. Do you think that's a maybe it's a good thing and we shouldn't change? Do you think it's not the case and maybe I'm totally wrong with what I'm saying? Do you think it's changing and we need to go into more realizing that we have that potential? Do you think that's still something in terms of also education, you know, of the next generation of entrepreneurs? We have that opportunity now, we actually can do it. There is something, you know, it's always give the analogy of you want to become a football player in Switzerland, it's pretty hard because you don't have that many you have good football players, but you you not you don't have, you know, top 1%. You you say you want to be a tennis player, you got, okay, you're from Switzerland, sort of makes sense, you know, because you have that sort of. And we're going to have these kind of people in Switzerland, you know, these entrepreneurs that are becoming rockstars and and they're known for what they've done and changing the world and so on. So do you think we're going into that direction? Do we have to? Do we need to to change that mentality or not necessarily? I personally don't like asking someone to change their mentality, neither investors nor founders. I think it is so multifaceted and throwing entrepreneurship into one bucket is just plain wrong because it all depends on what you look to achieve with whom. And if entrepreneurship means for someone that they want to be their own boss, they want to be independent, they want to maybe have the chance to earn more than a salary, then you don't need to have a big ambition, you don't need to overpitch, and you definitely don't need to work with a venture capitalist like me. You probably try to fund that yourself. Maybe you ask friends and family to help and you build a business organically, steadily. You just mentioned to me before that you had a guest on this podcast and built something in the food and and fruit and vegetable space. And I mean, that is surely a very successful entrepreneurial story, but it's a different one than the ones that I'm looking towards. And so I think this segmentation of who exactly are we talking about is extremely important to not fall into a narrative of the Swiss are too conservative or oh we need to change our mindset or you know, also this villainification of the Americans. I I used to think that Americans overpitch and I used to remember in juries of startup competitions here um some of the older members saying you need to be a bit more like the Americans. And I learned now that they don't overpitch, they just believe they can achieve more. And confidence is something that comes with success. And that's why when you asked me what is missing, I said it's time because everything else is coming together. The number of founders, the big tech firms moving into Zurich, companies like Nvidia, like OpenAI, that are increasing their R&D efforts within Switzerland. We have more and more international students at the universities that are very hungry, that team up with some of the local talent. Um we have more funding, we have more top-tier funding. You mentioned some of the VC firms that come in and invest in our portfolio later on. And but these things take time. But what I see is that with every year that we're doing this, the ambition level increases. And that's quite simple because if you're a founder that worked for three years at Nvidia before, then you think of the world differently than if you're a founder that comes out of your bachelor studies at the University of Applied Sciences. Because if you've been at Nvidia, you've seen the success and the magnitude that such firm can have. You've heard internally what kind of success stories have come out of this firm and you carry that confidence into what you're aiming to do. And I think there's this cheesy statement is if you um shoot And and I think there's something to that is if if you're a young entrepreneur anywhere in the world that works on something that is globally relevant. It is up to you how high you aim. Of course, it needs to be rationally backable. I always use the example that we we only invest in B2B companies with Founderful because Switzerland is clearly not the right place to build a global B2C success story. But then on I po for for $10 billion and I said they're destroying my narrative. There will be the outliers, there will be the surprises, but just systematically what is Switzerland good at? Who are you and what qualifies you to stand out? And if that aligns, then why should you not aim to build something that is global, that is, you know, far bigger than people believe it is possible? And I don't think it's a question about pitching. It's more a question about hunger and ambition and readiness to to work hard towards an opportunity. And right now this has evolved drastically compared to when I started in venture here in in the ecosystem. I I find the the narrative that you had earlier super interesting in that regards. I mean, Switzerland obviously has always been known for watches and pharma and and things like that. But ETH and EPFL are not new. I mean, they've been around for a long time. They've always been very good at deep research, but they've sort of just not been on the map or I mean, they've been on the map as universities always in the top 10, you know, whatever. Um but you mentioned that the the engineers before were sort of overlooked and we were in the age of maybe digital marketing as we were in the 2010s and so on. Is this the age of the engineer? Like are we moving into this sort of new era of now the the the positioning that EPFL and ETH have had for the last 50 years like is converging to basically today and all the work they've put in is is now making these potential future success stories? 100%. 100% is as simple as that. You take the top 10 most valuable companies in the world and you check what is on their roadmap. What are they working on? They're working on the future of compute. They're working on AI ML implementations. They're working on robotics. They're working on automation, automation of machines, automation of manufacturing. They're working on the future of biology, of healthcare. Google acquiring DeepMind. Those are the topics that ETH and EPFL over the last decade have built a muscle that is second to none globally with the best professors, the most research papers, the most advanced labs and PhD programs. And that has now fully overlapped. Will that make it impossible for us normal business people to create really good companies? Not at all. Not at all. There is opportunity everywhere at all times. Um I I think that is back to what I meant before, right? You need to segment the world. Sometimes I use football as an analogy, but it's unfair because in football you use performance. So I would say what we do at Founderful is we play Champions League within the startup world because we want to work with the top 1% entrepreneurs that want to build companies that are global success stories. The unfair bit is that it insinuates that the others are not doing a great job, that are playing, you know, Super League or they're playing in a regional league. They are still, they're athletes, they're showing up to training every day, but they have a different priority. You know, maybe they do it part-time because that's um that's that's how they want to live their life or they're just really happy that they get the chance to play first league football and that's cool. Uh I met a founder in and that's how I got to the football analogy. I met a founder in in Zurich um extraordinary story and could be one for your podcast as well is I will not name him and the firm but I can give a direction. It's a coffee machine manufacturer uh bootstrapped spun out of ETH and um they're they have very impressive revenue numbers um and I told him I said you're doing this now for 10 years. It's you've built very impressive company with I think 60 employees. Uh you own it fully. You've never taken any financing. Um but what you do is amazing. The product is remarkable. It's beautiful, works really well, people love it. This should have a global market. Why don't you take funding? Like shouldn't we it's it's outside of what we would usually do, but shouldn't we drum together a few successful entrepreneurs and we we we put some money into your business so that you can accelerate, that you can enter the US, that you can build a global firm out of it. And he said, Alex, do you like football? And I said, yeah, I'm I'm a I'm a geek. I I love I know. I know, I know. I can I can tell you the the players where they're from and which team they play in and and all of these things. I I I love soaking up that knowledge. I don't know why it's inefficient and really not needed, but I can and I have a Panini sticker book with my son with my five-year-old and I enjoyed probably a bit more than him, but it's fantastic. So he tells me, I say yes, he says, okay, then listen up. Do you know SC Freiburg? The team in Germany? I say, yeah, everyone knows them right now. Freiburg is close to the to the Swiss border in in Southern Germany and it's one of the few team that never really took a lot of sponsorship, doesn't have any, you know, big financiers owning any part of the team, is really self-funded by the club and they're very down to earth there. They have this um this history of really being focused on on football and not much beyond and that makes them very likable. But oddly enough, they were very successful over the last two decades. They were always in the top six, seven in the German league, but they never really make it to the top. And he says to me, he says, you're Bayern Munich, but I'm SC Freiburg. I don't need to win every match and I don't need to qualify for the Champions League. I love what I'm doing and this is enough for me. I don't need more than that. And it stuck with me because just because you're a founder and you're starting a business, you don't need to aim to build a multi-billion dollar business that IPOs one day. You don't need to. And that's why I don't like this polarization or this generalization of like entrepreneurs in Switzerland need to be more ambitious or they need to pitch louder because it is really down to who are you, what are you doing and what do you want to achieve with it. And if you want to build a real estate business for Romandie, then you don't need to pitch louder. Then then you're probably pitching just right. But what is true is that if you want to build um the global market leader for robotics in logistics, then we need to be a bit louder because the expectation of the world is that this one comes from the US or it comes from London. It's not that it comes from Zurich or from Lausanne. And so here we're working on the attention with the reports we release, with the co-investors we bring into Switzerland um and with sessions like the one today just to speak about our work and to showcase there are these few entrepreneurial stories in Switzerland that can actually become global market leaders and that can define technology in the next decades, not only for Zurich or or Lausanne or Geneva, but globally. And uh those we want to back and those we want to support. There are already companies like that, you know? Uh it's not just a thing in the future. They are already huge success, Swiss success that made it globally. Do you think Switzerland has a marketing problem where, you know, we we create amazing things but like we're really bad at sharing it with the world and and letting them know what we've built in some ways? I love that. I love that, Alex. That's fantastic. Let me rephrase it. We have a marketing problem, but not to let the world know what we're building, but to let our people know what we're building. I've spoken to a GP at a US venture capital firm based in San Francisco and I pitched to him how I think Zurich is going to be one of the biggest hubs for robotics in the coming decade. And he said, you don't have to pitch that to me. Everyone in San Francisco knows that. Like our robotics firms, they're opening offices in Zurich so they can hire some of the ETH engineers. And I was like, you know ETH? He says, yes, of course I know ETH. I can go out on the street now and I can ask 100 people on the streets of Geneva can say, is Switzerland a tech nation? And I promise you at least two-thirds would say no. As you said, watches, pharma, banks. And that's not even true. If you look at our GDP, the largest share comes from manufacturing. It comes from precision manufacturing, from microelectronics, um hidden champions that a lot of people don't know about. And yes, watchmaking is then part of the precision manufacturing, but it's a smaller share of the GDP. And what we don't do well is celebrate local success. Can I ask you, um what do you think is the most valuable Swiss tech startup? Right now. I would bet that it's something in the the med space that's probably building some sort of super tiny uh part of a complex machine or something. That's what I imagine, but I don't know the name of the actual company. Well, I can bet that I don't know the name of the company. So, Geneva based company uh is called SonarSource. Uh it's Well, I do I do know the name, but spin out out of CERN. Um it Yeah. was founded by three gentlemen. That's number one. Uh it's valued at $4.5 billion. Um it's financed 100% by US venture capital firms. Wow. But the company still sits here. It's headquartered in Geneva. Employs a few hundred people here and um Olivier Godin, one of the founders who stepped down as the CEO and spends now a lot more time in the ecosystem, is trying to help us to to bring more support, more attention to to founders in Switzerland. But that's the problem. The problem is that this doesn't show up in our newspapers. And that's because there's an inherent skepticism at something that grows too fast. And I think that's maybe where we can like, you know, pick a little on on culture in Switzerland. Something that's very quickly successful is is always being looked at as, oh, wait a second. Let's wait and see uh before we uh Let's see if it really is successful. But at the same time, I hear that, you know, the Geneva ecosystem has contributed a few hundred million um in the last financing round of Anthropic. I mean, that's mind-blowing. So, Anthropic also is also not clear that it works. Quite the opposite. I mean, it's a very risky bet at these valuations. I have no qualification to tell you where that's going to go. But um that is also a risky bet. There's just one that has been such a narrative. Everyone knows this. And what we don't do is we don't give a stage to the successes we have locally. We have a Lausanne based company called Nexthink. They've been acquired for $3 billion in cash last year by a US private equity firm. It's the biggest exit Switzerland has ever had. No one Probably even you guys running an entrepreneurial tech podcast have not heard about it because no one is speaking about it. Because our mainstream media is not giving attention or not giving stage to this. And I think I think that's something we could change and we're also trying to change. Do you think it also relates to the facts We spoke about this with uh with Adam Said who also invests in in tech and um the idea of there there's a lot of startups being created, but at a certain point, usually after Series A, they tend to leave Switzerland uh because it becomes too complex to to to become a global company, you know, based here, whether it's in Zurich, Lausanne, or Geneva or anywhere else. Um is is that a problem? Do you think we should do more and, you know, put more effort into keeping the companies within the Swiss borders? We had this discussion with him and he didn't feel like that was really an issue. I was like, I felt more why are we not trying to keep them? Yeah. I mean, there's different perspectives, obviously. Like my professional perspective running a venture capital firm is that a founder should be where they're most likely succeeding. Right. Then my perspective as a resident in Switzerland is that it's a shame if they leave because obviously a lot of the economic value is departing from our country, a lot of the jobs. Um and then there's the perspective of a small isolated ecosystem that we've seen succeed like Israel where they said, look, it just has to be the case because uh you can only become a global leader if you enter either the the American or the Chinese market. And in order to do that, you need to be there. Uh and our kind of holy code amongst each other is if you leave, you don't forget. So, uh if you're a Swiss entrepreneur and you build in London like Yoann Puginier with checkout.com, you still you still try to support your local ecosystem and maybe one day you come back and maybe you invest in the ecosystem. And so I think there's there's different perspectives depending on on what your what your agenda is, what your objective is. Um I'm I'm on my way to hopefully becoming a Swiss citizen and uh with that heart in my chest, I um I I want them to stay here. I've also seen a trend that they stay here. You know, Sonar is an example, headquartered here. Nexthink, headquartered in Lausanne. Scandit, headquartered in Zurich still. We have more and more success stories that remain with their legal headquarters, but also with the largest share of their employees within Switzerland. And the fact that they managed gives a new generation of founders confidence. And we're back to confidence again, right? The ability to think big, the ability to believe that you can actually do it. We have more and more of that. So, if you ask me about the trend, I'm with Adam. I don't think it's a big problem and I'm hopeful that more and more will build from here. When you look at what happens right now geopolitically, also what happens generally politically to some of our surrounding countries, to some of the larger countries in the world, the quality of life here stands out more than it ever has. It's not anymore, ah, it's peaceful and there's mountains close by, but it's much more you're in a place that is safe, sound, reliable, and that you want to raise a family, have your career, run your business. And um I think in the next decade that's going to amplify. To give just sort of a It's not really a summary, but an overview of what you've built and where you're going now because I think it's a nice recap of everything we've just discussed is I think when you started Founderful, there was something called like doomsday prophecy or something, you know, like you know the three things. You know where I'm going with this. People told you three things basically, but it was like one, you know, the Swiss market is too small for whatever you're building. Um you won't you'll never raise more than 60 million. And uh number three was, you know, your company won't attract any European um investors for follow-ups. And you prove all of three all of these three doomsday prophecy wrong. So, it's it's a nice sort of, you know, you can't do this because of this, this, and that. Well, look, we've done it. You can add a fourth one, we'll, you know, debunk it. We can we can add them, we'll debunk it. I think it's a nice um it's a nice way of showing also where you guys are going and uh and what you've been building for the ecosystem as well. Do you think that's enough to sort of prove the world wrong? Or do you think you're still going to have people You're always going to have people that say you won't do it, you won't do it. But do you think that's enough to say, okay, look, now we on the right trajectory and sort of people listen? Or do you still think you're going to have to sort of row and row again for a few years until you actually hit, you know, those numbers in 8 to 10 years? It's lovely and I appreciate that you bring it up and I appreciate that you found this because it was a nice moment of reflection to hear this now. And I I must say it feels good. It feels good because it's um I think generally in entrepreneurship, no matter if that's to build your own firm or like in our case to build a VC firm, it is always hard because you're quite lonely and you have more rejection than you have confirmation and you need to learn to live with that. Um I'm someone that thrives a lot on harmony and confirmation as a person. And so the times when you fundraise and people tell you that they don't believe in what you do and that they think you're wrong and they they're not easy for me personally. Um so it feels good to see that, you know, we were on the right track and that we had the right data points that made us believe in what we were pitching. I don't feel like joy that others were wrong. That's um no, quite the opposite. I it makes me a bit sad that it takes so much to to to convince. Um it obviously gets easier with every additional data point. But um we still row more and faster and more energetically than ever before because that wave that is building up that it feels like it's breaking maybe right now or anytime in the next 12 month. Um I think it's worth more than just us and our story and our funds. I think we can really build economically relevant businesses for this country. And in a wider sense, we can make sure that they are built in a place that is reliable, that is stable, and that is run by sane people with a system that prevents insane people from running it. And so I feel good about it. I feel like what we're doing is meaningful and I don't need to convince people that they're wrong or that we're right. I deep inside believe that this is needed and that this is going to be successful. You just talked about, you know, believing in people, people believing in what you do. You most of the time are you and, you know, the Founderful uh company, you are the first believer in a lot of people. That goes with responsibilities. What are those, you know? Because sometimes you're like, okay, I I trust you. I, you know, let let's go and and build this. How do you live with that? You know, is it is it, you know, a challenge? Is it how do you how do you see that? Yeah, it it is a challenge and it's maybe one of the things I underestimated when we started, especially at the scale that we're at now. I I work with about 15 founder teams and um the the responsibility part of it is to walk the talk. And our talk is that we're founder friendly, that we're supportive, that we're constructive, that we're the kind of sparing partner you want as your invisible co-founder, if you will. And um that is an easy low-touch job if things go well. If everything goes in the right direction and you show up from time to time, you maybe give a little bit of guidance on questions where there's not full clarity and you're a supportive cheerleader. You try to help with the confidence bit, with the yes, you can do that, you guys are on track. This is like don't don't don't doubt yourself, keep going. But um it takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and also personal energy when it doesn't go so well. When there's founder conflict, when there's maybe a pivot required because you realize that your assumptions of what your business could look like that they don't hold true. And that's difficult because that's also contrary to our business model. Because in venture capital, it's a few of the companies that you select that will drive the returns of your firm. It's a few big outliers and a lot of the others, they will not return a lot of the money. That's just statistically proven. Which means that we should, once we invested, look for signals of who is doing particularly well and then invest a lot of our time to help those. But most of the time, the ones that take most time and they take most energy are the ones that are not doing so well. And what we decided is that we we do two things. One, we show up. We show up as promised. And two, we're transparent and upfront with our founders. So we tell them, we say, look, like if you're breaking apart as a founder team, if you don't have traction, it's going to be difficult to raise the next round. We can try, but it's going to be hard. And you need to decide what you want as entrepreneurs at this point. Do you want to keep trying? Do you want to change something and try again? Do you want to see if you can sell the business? Can we help you with introductions to M&A advisors, to investment banks to explore if there could be a strategic buyer? Or do you want to plain just stop and call it a day? You know, we've tried. And this constructive kind openness, it's it's quite radical. So I mean, to sit in front of someone and say, look, it's not going well, shouldn't we question if we're doing this? That is, that's very direct. But I think that's that's what what is needed in this situation. That's what that's what an entrepreneur needs as a partner, as an investor. And um so so this is what we try and um I think so far it works. It's I just had a I just signed a term sheet with an entrepreneur in Lausanne and there was a very competitive situation at lots and lots of investors that wanted to lead their first round and um I I threw my hat in the ring because I really wanted to work with the guy and with his co-founders and on the topic and um and he told me, he said, look, the valuation that you offer is um is around half of what we're hoping for and it's below what others have offered us. And I said, that's a shame, but that's as far as I can go. Because we have our fund strategy and I have a responsibility towards my colleagues of how we invest this fund. And that's that's as good as I can do. But I can spend some time showing you, you know, how we work and what you get from us that maybe you don't get from others. And and so we spend some time together and then at the end of it, he came back and he said, I decided to work with you. And he created a document um around 10 pages of why he chose Founderful. And um he sent that to the angel investors that invested alongside us so that they would see why he would go for deal with us maybe rather than others or bigger brands from abroad at a high valuation. And one of the things he highlighted is that he had reference calls with founders in our portfolio, with founders that failed, with founders that were not doing so well and with founders that were doing well. And he said, all of them said the same thing. He said, they walk the talk, they're honestly supportive, they show up for us and they're 100% honest, vulnerable, constructive, trying to help us succeed. And I think that's the key and that is not so hard. It's not so hard if you care. But I think a lot of people are more opportunistic than intrinsically driven. And I think that's what is the secret to success of Founderful is that we we all really care. We want to build great businesses with founders and we want to help them have better odds at succeeding than if they were without us. I think at this point it's it's very interesting to maybe understand a bit of the model of Founderful. You've obviously gone into it and explained uh you know what you do and how you do it. But often, so you mentioned that you want to be the lead, right, of the of the first rounds. I think that's a very important point and maybe you can explain a little bit what that what that entails and what it means. And also you often invest in pre-seed or or seed companies. So this is very early, right? Sometimes there's no team, there's not even a product, like it's just basically an idea. Um and so how do you select those companies at that stage, right? There's no traction, there's nothing yet really going on. I mean, there's a guy with a great idea and and you know a good PhD and a good thesis. Um and so how how does that basically work overall in the way you manage this? Yes, absolutely happy to. Thanks Max. So I mean, step back. Founderful is an independent venture capital firm. We're based in Zurich. We exist since 2019. We're investing dedicated into the Swiss tech ecosystem. Our investment strategy is to invest at pre-seed stage, which is more simplified, the first ever financing round of an entrepreneurial project. We usually take the role as a lead investor, which is a technicality in venture capital. That means that we are the first and the one contributing the largest amount of that financing round. As a consequence, we typically sit on the board of the company and we are the close sparing partner to the founder team at that earliest stage. We do that because we saw that that was missing in Switzerland. There was a lot of business angel activity, but there was no institutional investment vehicle for this very early stage to help accelerate. We um focus primarily on technical founder teams that very often come out of the technical university or research labs of the country. And that usually de-risks that very early stage quite a bit. Because while you're right, it's typically a founder team of two to three individuals. They've taken the conscious decision to start a business. They have a vision of where they want to take it and they usually have a foundation, technical foundation that allows them to believe in that vision and that gives them a path towards that. But most of the time they've researched for a few years at the university. Typically they've researched in the direction of what they're now looking to commercialize. And so I often compare that to a startup that has three or four years of public funding before they go and say, now we're going to launch the private funding track. Um it's when we when we leave the lab, we have enough validation as engineers that what we're looking to do actually works technically. And now yes, it needs to be productized. We need to find our initial customer profile, who is this that we're selling this to, with which business model. So there's a lot of ifs and whens and and question marks to to answer. But there is some substance in the qualification of the individuals and in the type of innovation that they bring with themselves. How do we select them? We we've we've built quite a good muscle of doing this as a team. A lot of us are former founders, a lot of us have been business angels or have worked internationally in venture capital. It's a lot of learnings of interacting with founders to hear what is their thinking, what do they look to achieve, um how how confident are they around that, what motivates them, what drives them. So there's a lot of soft factors. But if you want to simplify it, we look at two things. One, who are the individuals behind that? Do they stand out? Are they extraordinarily qualified, smart, eloquent, driven, energetic? How do they complement each other? Do we like them? Because honestly, there's hundreds of startups to invest in. We want to make sure that we invest in people that we get along with, that we can work with well together. So there's even a very subjective component around the team. Is there a fit? And the second one is, are they working on something with a global ambition that somewhat realistically gives them the chance to build a global business out of Switzerland? And that's where we then often end up in these deep tech spaces, the robotics and autonomous systems and semiconductor, quantum computer, tech bio, because that's where the Swiss universities are very strong. And then you have the combination of these two, the stellar team of great individuals that are really driven, want to achieve something out of the ordinary. And they do that on a topic with a technology that has global relevance, where it's not entirely unlikely that the big winner globally is going to come from here. So maybe I'm going to oversimplify, so please excuse me and correct me, but your thesis is, you know, let's find the best PhDs, researchers that have, you know, some an idea of of a business that come from ETH or EPFL, uh, and that maybe have worked, maybe it's even better if they did, they have worked, you know, you were talking about that before, two, three years at Nvidia because they have a different view of, you know, what's possible. They've been too close in close proximity with ambition, with what we can do, with a different mindset and so on. Is that sort of your target, the best sort of founders that you're looking for? Is that correct? It is correct with a little abstraction layer. So around two-thirds of the founders we back come straight out of university, and around one-third of the founders that we back are either repeat founders or people that come out of a professional context, for example, having worked at Nvidia. Um, Nvidia and people coming from Nvidia don't necessarily need to be the founders. It's often also first employees. Um, and it's not limited to Nvidia. It's also Google, it's Microsoft, it's Disney Research, it's IBM Research. It's a lot of the big global tech firms where people come and they've seen what global success looks like and they see the magnitude of what a business can have. They often join as early employees. But what you're 100% right with is what we try to do is every year to find the 10 best, most ambitious founder teams in Switzerland, and around two-thirds of them so happen to come out of this university context. And I would say around a third are people that are either doing this for a second time or that have been part of a successful startup and have seen how it's possible to be successful and then decide to start their own company. There there's sort of this um idea that there's a clear separation between someone who's done a business school and someone who's done a science school, right? If you're looking at ETH and EPFL, it's going to be engineers, it's going to be scientists. There's this caricature of, you know, what a scientist is. It's someone in a white coat in the lab and, you know, looking down at, you know, chemical stuff or whatever. It's obviously very, very oversimplified, but I'm sure there are a lot of these people who have, you know, ambition and want to become founders and create a company. Do they sometimes also have maybe the the lack of understanding of of business or what it takes to actually be a good leader or a good CEO, which we're learning more maybe in business schools or or in these types of environments? Absolutely. It's for sure um at times a challenge. It's um it's less of a challenge these days um around AI because I think a lot of the software engineers, computer scientists that are studying the topic right now, they are somewhat involved in what's happening economically and on the business side of things. But um when we look into spaces like semiconductor or chemical engineering, I have an investment for those founders. They started out, they did not know what VC stood for. And obviously that knowledge gap you need to you need to fill and that's an additional effort um and that will take additional time and maybe a little bit more practicing and routine to, you know, become very confident at pitching your firm, at understanding how to speak to investors. But it is very, very case by case. It's really it's hard to generalize on this. And I think what we've seen a lot is that the universities have come closer to the startup and venture capital environment in terms of education. And there's more initiatives in the country like Venture Lab that give courses to future entrepreneurs. Us ourselves, we've launched Founderful Campus a few years back, which is a student-led venture capital firm where we provide students at EPFL, ETH and the University of St. Gallen with the systems and the guidance to learn how to be a VC on campus, to identify entrepreneurial projects, assess them and provide them with tiny amounts of initial funding so they can maybe go, you know, rent a desk in a coworking space, buy two laptops, get a bit of cloud compute and and play around. And I think so we're we're bridging that gap between academia and and the economy and with that there's there's less of an issue that technical talent is not as equipped. And so I think media is helping a lot. I mean, podcasts like yours are giving people the chance to access this kind of content and knowledge and perspective much more easily than in the past. Let's see. I mean, it's an interesting world, right? My co-founder yesterday we were texting about an initiative that brings together University of St. Gallen, ETH Zurich and to foster more exchange between the business graduates and the scientists and the engineers and and he said, oh well, it's it's not needed anymore. No, you just give the business graduates cloud code and then And then it's done. And it's done. And we were all laughing. It was obviously a joke, but it's um it's it's a it's a sign of how volatile or fast-paced the environment is right now. And I think generalizations are never never good because a really smart economic student that, you know, is able to use AI solutions to build software or that self-taught, also knows how to code, can be a fantastic entrepreneur building a tech business. And, you know, someone for 10 years in a research position at um at EPFL on fusion reactors can be a fantastic entrepreneur because they feel that now is the right moment to take all of this research and all of this knowledge and turn it into something commercial. And if you would if you would generalize, you cut off those outliers. It's exactly those outliers that usually produce the outlier returns. And so we try to we try to not have any assumptions at Founderful. When we look at our deal flow, we don't sit there and say, robotics is interesting right now, let's look more at robotics. We look at every founder profile that we come across and we make sure that we come across 99% of them at least. We check, is there an individual that has any signals that showcase great ambition, that showcase great ability and what are they working on? Is that relevant? And then we assess them individually. It's very interesting what you say because I think we we spend in general, I mean, a lot of times talking about the, you know, what an entrepreneur needs, like the quality of an entrepreneur, what he needs to be successful, but we rarely talk about what a good investor needs, you know, how it needs to be and the quality that he needs to have. Because sure, there's a finance aspect to it, that's part of the business, but there's also a human part of it where you need to understand, especially I guess, maybe I'm wrong, but especially pre-seed and seed, you know, you have sort of a Like you said, sure, there's a connection, but there's also understanding where the people want to go. There's a sort of a psychological way to it, you know, understanding is it too early for him? Maybe he's going to be a great entrepreneur, but he needs to work for a few years because I think he needs to learn this, this and that. You know, judging but not in a bad way people, you know, there's also that. And I think we don't talk that much about this. We always talk about the entrepreneurs, but not what you need as a as an investor. So that brings me back, you know, to you is what was the shift in your mind when when you decided to go into that direction instead of, you know, becoming a repeat founder, doing something else, working at Google, whatever, you know, the the road may have been, but what was the sort of the the haha moment where you're like, ah, that's where I'm going because, you know, we can do great things in that direction? It's a very good point and I think it's the brutal difference between being an entrepreneur and being an investor is that as an entrepreneur, it's um you're you're you're naked. It's full visibility. Does the business work or not? Are you successful or not? People can judge. It's out in the open. Do they grow more employees? Is there more revenue? Did they raise more funding? Are they notable? You can't hide if it's not going well. And as a VC, you have a lot of logos on your website and, you know, no one knows how much you own these companies. Maybe you hold one share in SpaceX before the IPO, but the logos on your website. So at what time did you invest? Which valuation? Did you ever return money to your investors? There's a lot of intransparency that you can hide behind. So that's what makes our life very much easier as an industry um and which is a bit unfair to throw us in the same bucket. I I would love to give you an answer of what it needs, but I don't know yet if I'm a good VC. Because the feedback loop of a venture capital fund is 15 years. Our first fund is now six years old. And um I have some signals. We've returned some money to our LPs more earlier than the benchmark of publicly available data. Our the valuations of our companies, they sit nicely compared to how much we've invested. We have a few companies in our first fund that look like they can indeed become globally relevant businesses. So there are signals that showcase that we've done a good job so far. But it's not clear yet. I haven't proven myself, which is strange part. If you're in an industry where you've worked for 10 years and you run your own firm and from the outside it is being celebrated as a success story, but you actually you actually still sit at night in bed wondering, am I doing a good job? We're certainly doing a good job on some things, right? Like people look at us as probably now the the the best venture capital firm in Switzerland. Founders want to work with us. The founders that do work with us like working with us. We're going to raise our third fund now. The demand for the fund is incredibly high. I would have never dreamt of being approached by investors that they want to work with us. It's it's a lot of positive momentum. I think it is dedication and is intrinsic motivation. And that's also what I look for in a founder. Why are they doing this? And if it's opportunistic because hey, we can earn a lot of money with crypto right now, then that can be a good path towards returns. But for me, it's not a good path towards building something over a decade and beyond through ups and downs relentlessly, not stopping on the path. And you know, when you asked me earlier if I'm happy that now I can prove everyone wrong and if there's more people um it's not about that. It's just I believe that this will work and that this needs to exist because it is intellectually not feasible for me that there is no successful fund in an ecosystem like Switzerland that has all of the ingredients and that we don't have a whole range of big success stories. And so I think the best founders, the best entrepreneurs, they feel that. They feel that when they speak to an investor. If that's a game for them because they're an employee in a global VC firm that happens to have the task to find some also in Switzerland or if that's someone that stands in that deeply believes in this being needed and possible. And um I I think that's how founders evaluate investors. I think that's why we're successful at working with the best entrepreneurs in the country. It's because people realize that we we're in it because we care and not just because we think this is a great opportunity to now make some money with with with tech in Switzerland. Could you maybe give us a couple of examples or maybe one story? You've mentioned some of the successes successes you've had. Uh maybe just one story of a success or a company that's going really well so that we can maybe get an example there. And maybe on the other hand, maybe a company that hasn't gone so well or that's been uh you know, not as successful as you were expecting and maybe also understand why that was the case and maybe what happened there. Absolutely. Yeah. Um I think um a company that a lot of people are aware of right now is Lausanne-based Corintis. Corintis is a chip cooling technology provider that um we backed in their first financing round a few years ago. Um it was a controversial one internally and I I must say I I must take back everything at the time. They were focusing on the radar market, so large-scale radar installations because there was a lot of heat and they're often remote and they they could not scale their technology to as small as in consumer devices yet. So they said this could be an application. I think the global market of that was like $80 million or something. And my my co-founder and one of our partners um they they were quite keen and they said these founders, we need to back them and you know, this is this is going to find its way. And I was quite skeptical, I must admit. But um we we did the investment and today they're serving data centers and they're working with the largest global tech companies on building chips that have um liquid cooling inside of the chip on nanoscale. Um so that's a step change within within the semiconductor industry. And um that is a company that will certainly stand out and and leave a mark on the on the Swiss ecosystem in the coming years. Another one and that's one I had to think of when you asked about you know, founders that don't know so much about business um is a company called Depoly. Uh they're Sion-based. They're doing chemical PET plastic recycling. So it's a completely different area um but they found a way to dissolve mixed uncleaned plastic waste um into its raw material into terephthalic acid, which is the material that you then get PET pallets out of that you then can again do packaging or or polyester clothing from. Um and those guys have been quite successful. They're opening next week a commercial demonstration plant in Monte on an old BASF plot. And they've built a full-scale industrial site of of of of chemical production. I think that's a company that is going to go far. And um then uh another one that's quite under the radar, but I think really interesting in terms of what type of companies we back is a company called Flink Robotics. Um so those guys are doing robotic automation for logistics, specifically parcel sorting. Um right now they're working with a lot of postal service providers um and they've built physical reasoning models that can identify their environment, that can single out objects, that can assess how to grab objects and how to manipulate them, so how to position them differently or place them in a different place. And um they're doing fantastically well and they're not very known. So it's it's a nice one to single out because you know, maybe in a year's time when someone listens to this, we will know if they indeed are successful, but the trajectory is really really great. Um in terms of companies that have failed, I don't know if I want to if I want to speak about explicit names because I Yeah, but I think it's more about the the what happened, you know, what went wrong and what happened. But what happened, what kind of business and what happened. Yeah. And I think um two things I've realized. One is um founder relationship. Um when there's a founder breakup, when there's a founder leaving or multiple founders leaving, um that is usually a very very tough situation for a company to recover from. So that has happened two three times um in in our portfolio and some of them have then entirely given up. Some of them have found an exit, but not a celebratory one, but one that is there's just a means to an end. And and I think that's also given us a lot of learnings to spend a lot of time understanding how how well do the founders get along? How well do they know each other? What kind of a relationship do they have? What kind of a history do they have together? Um and then the other thing that has led to companies fail is um is either product market fit. Um so we've seen cases of a technology looks for its application. So we've identified a molecule that reacts to certain ingredients or substances. Maybe we can use that in gold mining or in farming as a detection for safety measures and and while you can if you have a good entrepreneur that's good at pitching, you can have a lot of fantasy around where that could go. If there's zero validation and it doesn't come from a need basis as in the chip industry needs to find new cooling mechanism. We have one. Let's see where we can sell it. But rather we found nanotubes. Let's see what we can do with them. The latter is hard because venture capital is unforgiving. You take the money and the clock is ticking. It's ticking because every time you spend money, you run out of time to validate things. And the only way you can keep existing is if you raise more money. But at more money, you want to raise at a higher valuation to not dilute. And so you need to achieve more than you have in the past. And so if you have technology that does not know yet who it could serve for what, that one one and a half year span that you have from your first financing round, that is not going to be sufficient to get you there. And so we we don't do that anymore. We tell those people that are motivated to found that sit on a situation like this, we tell them stay as you are, figure out who you're serving, for whom this is valuable, and then start raising your first round because until then it's not going to be in your interest to have that. You've talked a lot about you know, robotics, semiconductor, conductor and so on. I feel like a few years ago when I started to look into the few years, Jesus, like 10 years ago maybe, you know, this startup world was all about SaaS, was all about software. And hardware was sort of pushed aside because it was resource intensive, labor intensive and like sort of maybe again maybe it's a bias but like no one wanted to touch it. It was like oh jeez. Yeah exactly. And now I feel like it's sort of the opposite where like no one wants to do SaaS because like you said, Claude will do it. But then we need to invest in robotics. It is what happened. Like is AI what happened? Is it more It's always a more complicated story. But what's your take on that shift that is is happening and has happened in a way? So I think there's two components to it. One is one that I touched on earlier is these waves in which our economy develops and which politics develop and also the tech sector develops. And we've been for a long time riding that wave of the internet and digitization and business model innovation within that context. And that has come to an end because simply every niche has been taken. There's been saturation of solutions of companies. Market share was difficult to grab. It became very capital inefficient to do that. And so if you're a VC firm that sits on a lot of money, you need to start looking elsewhere again. And at the same time, AI but also a lot of other research progress in different disciplines has gotten us to a point where we can now do things that for a long time have been theoretical or academic in nature in terms of automation in terms of autonomous systems like humanoid robots. They're still by the way very very far from really being out there and useful. But there is a now there is a commercial timeline towards achieving that. And that suddenly made these topics eligible again for venture capital and the time horizons of venture capital. So that's the one thing. The other thing is I think right now no one is no one knows what they're doing. I think you can go and speak to Andreessen Horowitz or you know the guys and girls at Sequoia. Probably ask Sam Altman. I don't think anyone knows where this is going because we have so much uncertainty and dependencies and we have in tech we have AI and the question of who captures the value in AI at the end? Is it the models? Or is the models a substitutable commodity? But then we have a problem because with OpenAI, with Anthropic, everything is completely overvalued then, right? If they don't really capture this. What about compute? What about the infrastructure compute data centers? Will there be a step change in the efficiency of data center or storage? Will quantum computers show up? Do we then build all of that infrastructure for nothing? The pace that we have right now is scary because I came I had lunch with a gentleman that has been investing globally in tech for more than a decade. And he said then we end up like the automotive industry and no one wants that. I said wait a second, why are you so negative about the automotive industry? I mean yes, right now they're being very critically viewed but for a long time those were the most successful companies in the world. And he said yeah, for what? For 50 or 60 years. Ford and Volkswagen and Mercedes and so on. But for 50 or 60 years. But in today's pace that's five to six years. And you don't want to build businesses that are good for five to six years and then they're completely irrelevant or commoditized. So robotic hardware, infrastructure is that valuable or not? I think today no one knows. And that's a bit scary. And we see the same with defense where due to the unfortunate situation of the conflicts that we see globally right now again, spending has increased. Spending is being put largely into innovation, into startups where I would say this is definitely not venture capital territory because who's going to buy these businesses? When a war ends, who's going to order from these businesses? What's the sustainability of it? Yet venture capital is flowing into defense as it never has before and space as well. And so there's I think we're in a time that is very confusing and I mean to everyone listening to this conversation right now, rest assured you're not alone because this is my profession and yet I am confused and overwhelmed. And I think the one thing we can rely on is that so far technology has led to a better world to a healthier world with more medical care, to a world that allows us to be more efficient, to do more, to achieve more in our life. And certainly this will continue but right now there's a lot of uncertainty for sure. I do think though that it's important to keep the optimism right and I agree with you. I think we're going in hopefully I mean at least in a good direction with technology. But what do you think Founderful looks like in 10 years if everything works out the way you want it? You mentioned this 15-year cycle, right? You've been going for six years, so in 10 years you'll be about that 15-year cycle. What does Founderful look like and what would be a success for you at that point? Yeah, I appreciate that perspective. It's 10 years from now, so we're raising our third fund now. That means in 10 years we're going to be in fund five. We invest in 40 companies per fund. That's our strategy. 10 per year over four years and then raise the next fund. So that means with five funds up and running, we're going to be at 200 Swiss tech companies in our portfolio. And my hope is that of these 200 there's a dozen or two that stand out in the sense that they generate thousand or more jobs in Switzerland that have cracked 100 million in annual revenue, that have a global trajectory of being relevant businesses within their industries. If we have achieved that then everything else follows. Then we will have funds with outlier performance and then we will have every entrepreneur in Switzerland that gets started wanting to work with us. I don't know I don't know what else I would look at as a perspective of where this could go. One of the things that is often on my mind is that it's a shame that the majority of capital into these companies flows from abroad which is not a problem for us but I think it's a shame for the Swiss economy especially for the Swiss pension system so that Swiss individuals don't benefit at all from such success stories. Maybe that's something we can change. Maybe by that time Founderful is running additional opportunity for larger investors to allocate into these portfolio companies down the road so we have more local participation in the success stories. But the key for me will be that a lot of these companies that we've backed they're still around, they're successful, they're growing and with that our strategy has been validated. It's clear that this is not a bad idea. Well, that's a good plan. Now we'll see what happens. Yeah, exactly. Now we'll see what happens. Now we'll see what happens. On another note, Alex, we have a last question for you. What makes a good life? What do you think makes a good life? What do you need to have a good life? I think about that a lot. I find it maybe it's with age or maybe it's because I'm a father in the meantime. It becomes increasingly difficult to pin that down. I think if you ask a 20-year-old like what's a good life, it's probably money and freedom. And then later down the road maybe it's time with friends, family and the ones that you love. There's in between a period where it's about success and kind of finding your calling. I think probably for me today's definition would be that I find balance and at all times the ability to be 100% myself and consciously enjoying what I'm doing. I want to be in the moment. Right now my head is only in this conversation with the two of you. I don't think about what's next. I don't think about something that maybe happened this morning. I try to be here and I try to be mindful of that and I try to enjoy it. And the key is I think to learn when that is not possible and then to optimize your life to have less of these situations. And I think that's also why entrepreneurship is exciting because it gives people the chance to do what they want to do, the way they want to do it with who they are and how they are. And that's sometimes difficult in other aspects of life, in employment or other social settings. So that's what I try but it's hard and I find it often overwhelming and it's something I think we have to keep on working relentlessly in order to somehow have an answer to it. Beautiful answer. Thank you so much, Alex. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Cet épisode de La Ravane a été créé en partenariat avec Omega Studio. Grâce à eux, nous sommes dans ce studio incroyable en plein cœur de Genève. C'est bien plus qu'un simple studio, ils offrent une expérience unique et adaptée à chaque projet. 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