Switzerland has everything to produce successful startups: top universities and talent, stable and sovereign infrastructure and government, capital, and liberal tax and company laws.
However, the reality is different:
As if starting a company isn't hard enough, Swiss (and I guess EU) culture doesn't really recognize entrepreneurship as a valuable career path. You hear a lot of "Are you sure about taking that much risk?" and when you fail you get a "I told you so".
You would think there's plenty of capital here, but unfortunately not in VC. It's getting better, but many Swiss early-stage investors still ask for a detailed 5-year business plan and four due diligence calls for a 5k ticket in your round.
In SF, everyone helps each other out with their network, intros, and so on. In Switzerland, most startups and scaleups still operate in closed gardens and ecosystems are rare or slowly developing, which makes building a network really hard.
Events like these hopefully help to change this :)
The governments view is that if you have fewer than 3 companies you are dependent on them and they should bare the AHV etc requirements. However if for example you have 2 very large contracts there may be exceptions.
Easiest (not cheapest) is always to create a GmbH or AG which also mitigates a lot of risk you would have as a sole-proprietor.
In the UK, for example, we don’t suffer from a dearth of innovation. What actually happens is that successful companies get hoovered up by foreign, and particularly US, investors. It’s extremely frustrating.
For myself, I’m pleased to see events like this happening in other European countries.
If you're talking about current VC-backed hyper accelerators...there's probably also plenty. I think there's also a lot going on in the non-IT sectors (medicine, pharma, genetics, energy etc.)
But the bigger question is...does it really matter which country innovation comes from these days? As an end-user/customer I certainly don't care too much.
A postdoc at CERN coming up with a text format isn't quite the same as what is invented elsewhere, though.
> These days a lot of it runs on machines that run on a Linux kernel, also technically from Europe
True, although much of the development is funded by American companies, who give their work away.
Spotify, Ayden, Revolt and N8N are some examples that come to mind.
Europe has some very real work to do to stay competitive but fortunately things are slowly changing.
we score high on innovation rankings because of 1) large corporates (e.g. pharma) and 2) strong universities.
while we have deep tech spinoffs profiting from this, it is not a 1:1 correlation and the startup ecosystem (in the SV interpretation) in switzerland is extremely weak (lack of VC appetite, low risk culture, high cost of living, small domestic market with high cultural/language barriers, no startup visas for high potential foreign graduates, etc) compared to its potential
Sad that people on HN can’t make the difference between funding and startup mindset/innovation potential.