A day with the Swiss National Start-Up Team

Proudly wearing my new polo

This Friday, the 20 start-up projects composing the 2009 Swiss National Start-Up Team spent the day together at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. Apparently Switzerland seems to be the only country in the world to have a national start-up team, if we are to believe this swiss blog, and it is certainly an example to follow for other countries: thanks to initiatives like that, Switzerland manages to be world champion in terms of top startups per capita (28 Swiss projects in the Red Herring top 100)! In this interview on the Microsoft Startup Zone website, Beat Schillig, “Mr. Entrepreneurship” in Switzerland, speaks a bit further about the concept:

“During the last five years, we had more than 30,000 participants attend our networking events and more than 8,000 entrepreneurs in our ‘venturelab’ workshops. The ‘venturelab’ is the governmental training program of CTI, the Swiss Promotion Agency for Innovation, which is run by our organization. And out of this crowd we select 20 ‘venture leaders’ each year – we call them our ‘Swiss national startup team.’”

The day started around a breakfast in a meeting room next to VentureLab’s offices. The venture leaders were meeting each other for the first time and everyone was curious about the others’ projects: I started speaking with Friedrich, the CEO of MedDrop Technologies. What they are trying to commercialize is rather impressive: if I understood correctly, they developed a technology that allows the injection of substances in the body with minimal invasion (no needle, etc.). They work for instance with old race-horses unable to race anymore due to disfunctioning joints: they just spray some substance on the horse’s knees and the substance somehow makes its way to the bone and rebuilds the horse’s cartilage! Some horses even won races again!

After the breakfast, each member had to present his “coat of arms” which he had prepared ahead of the day. The template we had to use is below:

The way the venture leaders introduced themselves

After this small presentation we spoke through a Skype video conference to Pascal Marmier who is the consul of Swissnex in Boston (you can read his interesting profile here on the MIT Sloan School’s website) and who will kindly be welcoming us there. He described a bit further the very exciting program which awaits the venture leaders in Boston: networking with the local start-up scene, individual coaching by teachers of the Babson college, meeting with investors, etc.

It was time for food so we all headed to another part of the university in order to have a networking lunch with the attendants of the conference to which we would participate.

Before lunch we each had received a Poken, which is a small device through which you connect with new friends across social networks when and where you meet them. Cool things!  On the left you can see my Poken: I chose a Panda It is quite practical: since everyone at the conference had one and since I connected with the Poken to everyone I spoke to, I ended up having a lot of new friends on my social networks when I came back home Friday evening!

As you can check on the program of the conference, the speakers were mostly experienced actors of the start-up scene. Stéphane Doutriaux (you can watch an interview of him here), the founder of Poken, was especially interesting to listen to because he was member of the 2008 start-up team and his venture is a huge success. He explained during 40 fascinating minutes all the steps he went through to get where he is now.

Neil Rimer was also fascinating to listen to: he was historically one of the first European VCs with Index Ventures and is at the origin of fantastic success stories such as Skype and Last.fm He spoke about start-ups from a VC perspective: what he is looking for, what is the perfect team, etc. I of course was trying to mentally check if all his investment criteria were matching HouseTrip and was pretty happy with my mental result

All in all it was a great day and I feel very lucky to be offered such a chance!