The Swiss National Start-Up Team (I am in the top right corner, second from left 
I just come back from a great 10-day trip in Boston with the other winners of the “Venture Leaders” competition which together constitute the “Swiss National Start-Up Team”.
The program, prepared by VentureLab and Swissnex Boston (the consulate of Switzerland lead by Pascal Marmier), was really what every entrepreneur can dream to have for his project. Check this: workshops with high-profile entrepreneurs, coaching sessions by teachers of the Babson College, successful start-ups visits, negotiation trainings, networking sessions with investors, pitch competitions, etc.
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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.’”
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