Assertion Supported
Dübendorfer: Switzerland has produced 58 unicorns in the last 12 years
“Unicorns, the companies that had a billion dollar valuation or more in the last 12 years, we found 58 of them, where we have a public proof that they reached a one billion valuation.”
Opinion
Dübendorfer: The Swiss stock exchange is poorly suited for tech startups
“Switzerland has a stock exchange, but it's not really well suited for startups, right? And if you don't have enough revenues, don't have enough valuation, then no way to even have a chance.”
Opinion
Dübendorfer: Switzerland has Europe's most diverse startup ecosystem
“So if you go for the most diverse ecosystem it's definitely Switzerland.”
Opinion
Dübendorfer: Switzerland lacks the cost structure for cheap, mass-market B2C startups
“What you're really bad at, I would say it's doing things at scale at the masses, B to C, just cheap. And go big. Don't have the right cost structure here.”
Assertion Supported
Dübendorfer: Swiss startups must source most growth funding from abroad
“There are almost no growth stage funds here. So most of the gross money the Swiss types need to get from abroad.”
Disclosure
Dübendorfer: SICTIC angels backed up to 70% of Swiss tech deals
“We as an angel club for the verticals of FinTech and IST, we contribute a very large number of rounds in some years, 70% of all deals in tech startups was from us.”
Insight
Dübendorfer: Opportunistic behavior will fail in Switzerland due to societal rejection
“If you are very opportunistic here, you're going to fail very badly because society doesn't accept it. If you start to do things which is against people in society, they will not trust you anymore, and if nobody trusts you, you're going to be dropping out of s…”
Disclosure
Dübendorfer: Portfolio company Beekeeper merged with LumApps for $1.1 billion
“Just recently had an exit with one of the propoli companies of Sigtig, where I also was involved in, they were called Beekeeper, and they merged together with LumApps, and at the end of the merger, they had a valuation of 1.1 billion dollars.”
Opinion
Dübendorfer: Switzerland cannot compete against tech giants in generic AI models
“Now, I don't think that Switzerland has a very good position to compete with generic AI, like just basically being the better spell checker or a better predictive text producer.”
Assertion Supported
Dübendorfer: European and Swiss startup exits are almost exclusively M&A and PE
“Europe and also Switzerland is not very well known to do IPOs with startups. Pretty much all deals are either with buyout funds or private equity or M&A deals.”
Assertion Partly supported
Dübendorfer: Top co-founded startup generates $70M revenue serving OpenAI and Uber
“Currently not, no, they're still all there, and the biggest one has 300 employees makes seventy million revenues with a SaaS model, and serves the likes of OpenAI, and Uber, and Nasdaq, and UPS in brand management”
Assertion Supported
Dübendorfer: 85% of Swiss startup venture funding comes from abroad
“But nowadays when we look at the startup landscape, 85% of the funding for the venturing comes from abroad.”
Assertion Supported
Dübendorfer: Swiss Alps supercomputer has 1.3M cores, making it Europe's largest
“Alps Initiative, where we have the biggest super computing in AI in Europe with 1.3 million cores.”
Disclosure
Dübendorfer: 40 angel investments yielded two total losses and up to 33x returns
“I think out of fourth, you had two complete losses, and, ah, another 10 exits, which, ah, produced more than a half of them, up to 33 times the investment.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Dübendorfer: Swiss tech investing was shunned for a decade post-dot-com bubble
“And when we did that back in 2014, basically nobody was thinking about even investing in that vertical in Switzerland because nobody had a fintech and nobody had an ICT company. And people still remembered the internet bubble from the 2000 where some internet …”
