We are getting better each year at bringing startups to Lift. In 2010 we are creating an integrated offer, with tickets + space to demo products and services to the audience + a chance to hit the big stage alongside Neil Rimer of Index Ventures fame, all this for 1′250chf.

I hope those of you who have startups in the region will enjoy this offer. For international entrepreneurs, get in touch with the team we will try to find a solution to give you some advantages too.

I did an interview for Why Geneva yesterday, and was asked what my opinion was on the current situation of innovation in Switzerland. I think that:

• The world finally realizes how innovation functions, and that good ideas can happen anywhere.
• Switzerland, with a high quality of life, a creative and educated workforce, access to capital and veteran entrepreneur, this country has all that is needed to produce successful ventures under this new paradigm
• As I wrote earlier, there is a new found dynamism, that I explain by another change: being your own boss is now safer than working for a big corporation. If business slows, you can wake up at 5 instead of 7 and try to make things better. If you work for a large bank, there is maybe one of your 80′000 coworkers at the other side of the planet doing something that will kill the company, and you can not do much about it.

Funny thing is that I just got an email from Dominik Grolimund who merged his project Wuala with LaCie. I think this is only the start, large companies will integrate more international projects in their operations, not only start-ups from the silicon valley.  And we have some gems like Poken or FontSelf that will, one of these days, also make the news.

Congrats to Dominik and his team!

A-lister Hugh Macleod - who became such a rock star since his Lift06 talk that he doesn’t answer my emails anymore :D - is preparing another brilliant piece of thinking in his next book “Ignore everybody“. Hugh talks about something many entrepreneurs have experienced, the sorry/uncomprehending/dis-motivating/negative feedback you get when you present your breakthrough idea to someone who doesn’t understand it:

1. “Good ideas have lonely childhoods”. When I say, “Ignore Everybody”, I don’t mean, “Ignore all people, at all times, forever”. No, other people’s feedback plays a very important role. Of course it does. It’s more like, the better the idea, the more “out there” it initially will seem to other people, even people you like and respect. So there’ll be a time in the beginning when you have to press on, alone, without one tenth the support you probably need. This is normal. This is to be expected. Ten years later, drawing my “cartoons on the back of business cards” seems a no-brainer, in terms of what it has brought me, both emotionally and to my career. But I can also clearly remember when I first started drawing them, the default reaction was “people scratching their heads”. Sure, a few people thought they were kinda interesting and whatnot, but even with my closest friends, they seemed a complete, non-commercial exercise in futility for the New York world I was currently living in. Happily, time proved otherwise.

2. “GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE POWER BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS, THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED.” The older I get, the truer this sentence seems to be. Especially in industries that are more relationship-driven, than idea-driven.

Link

Rock on!

I have been a long time advocate of European entrepreneurship. But spending twenty weeks in dynamic Asia in the past year taught me a few things, among them the fact that our market is probably counter productively soft…

I was a mentor at SeedCamp two weeks ago. Contrary to what I thought SeedCamp is not a conference. It is an investment fund leveraging the wisdom of the (filtered) crowds, putting young entrepreneurs through an intense one week process that ends with the best ones receiving a seed investment.

I sat down - alongside fellow mentors Brad Gillespie and Prashant Agarwal - with young entrepreneurs, discussing their project, advising them on how to make the best of their ideas and talent. The 25 teams that attended the event were selected from a pool of 250+ proposals, it was the cream of the crop.

And of course there was the one team who had visibly no chance for success. A non-exiting product, barely a feature, no brand or potential. What do you do in that case? I discussed with Brad afterward and we agreed - a bit because we couldn’t find a better solution - that encouraging them was the best way to go. Entrepreneurs are precious people, their confidence is fragile, they need to be pushed and should be able to rebound from failure.

But are we really helping an entrepreneur by encouraging him to pursue a project that has a big chance to fail? Probably not. Most of the web start ups that are launched these days have no chance to succeed. And not telling them is one of the problems we have here in the Europe.

Our market is not cruel enough.

I see several reasons for that. First, we are much softer and diplomatic in Europe. We are not used to have people telling us what they really think. The Americans are used to extreme freedom of expression. In Europe (and it might be an heritage of greater diversity) we put a lot of efforts into softening what we say. That might not be true in southern France or Italy, but in the east and north that’s very obvious.

Another factor is the fact we don’t have enough projects in our ecosystem. It makes each of them extremely valuable. Bad projects are always better than no projects, at least in the eyes of all the governmental agencies promoting innovation and entrepreneurship.

Last but not least, a slower market means a slower feedback. If you can launch your product in three months you will quickly know if you have potential or not. With fragmented markets, multiple languages and heavier administrative burden, European start-ups need more time to reach their clients, and bad projects get the news later, after they have spent many resources.

This has a number of consequences.

The first is that good projects have less resources available. Less space at the incubator, less seed investment, less access to mentors. And less media attention. It’s easier to cover the latest non-innovative-but-web2.0-certified blog platform launched by a local company, less to talk about a more complicated but revolutionary project like Fairtilizer.

Another factor is that failure is more painful. When you have invested three years of your life in a project and need to close it down, it is much more difficult than when you have been working for a couple of months. Failure has deeper consequences, on the ego, the finances, the network. It is less accepted because more visible and hurtful.

Then there are consequences on the ecosystem itself, with bad projects giving a negative image of entrepreneurship, creating the perception that working in a small company is less safe than working in a big one (something that recent events have shown is probably not true ;)

At this point, with our resources getting more rare, it might be important to reconsider our attitude on this, and become more courageous when assessing projects.

I am off to London to attend SeedCamp where I am a “mentor” for the entrepreneurs. Seems I got marked as working for Google by mistake, it should be a lot of fun to see how many guys have “sell to GOOG” as their exit strategy ;)

For reference, Sequoia Capital’s vision on what successful startups should have:

Clarity of Purpose
Summarize the company’s business on the back of a business card.

Large Markets
Address existing markets poised for rapid growth or change. A market on the path to a $1B potential allows for error and time for real margins to develop.

Rich Customers
Target customers who will move fast and pay a premium for a unique offering.

Focus
Customers will only buy a simple product with a singular value proposition.

Pain Killers
Pick the one thing that is of burning importance to the customer then delight them with a compelling solution.

Think Differently
Constantly challenge conventional wisdom. Take the contrarian route. Create novel solutions. Outwit the competition.

Team DNA
A company’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. All team members are the smartest or most clever in their domain. “A” level founders attract an “A” level team.

Agility
Stealth and speed will usually help beat-out large companies.

Frugality
Focus spending on what’s critical. Spend only on the priorities and maximize profitability.

Inferno
Start with only a little money. It forces discipline and focus. A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great engineers requires very little firepower.

Link

Yossi Vardi is a legendary Israeli entrepreneur well known for, among other thing, selling ICQ to AOL in 1998. He is part of our events alliance and one of these guys who consistently challenges your seriousness during during meetings as he never stops cracking jokes. This quote from a Business Week interview is particularly brilliant:

BW: When you go to invest in entrepreneurs and new ideas, what do you look for?

Yossi Vardi: let me start by telling you what I don’t look for. I don’t look at business plans. After 38 years I’ve found that 100% of business plans say that their idea is very good. I think they are useless. I found the more I liked the idea the bigger my losses were. I don’t like demonstrations because the young guys showing me are so enthusiastic they think it is the greatest thing in the world—at least in their life, and if you don’t fake an orgasm, they go away very disappointed.

Link (thx Monique for the pointer)

Then jump on the occasion to present it at LIFT08! For the first time we will hold a venture night, and with the whole LIFT community in the room, some of the world’s best media outlets and people like Pierre Chappaz or Robert Scoble in the jury, your projects could really get a kick in the r*** à la cocomment (story here).

It’s easy, it’s simple, it’s free, and it even gets you a pass for LIFT08 if your project is selected. Propose your startup now!

In the future of the web, the majority of value is in innovation and the quality of execution, not in the funding resources a company can provide… giving employees a healthy share, and a majority share in the case of spinouts they are primarily responsible for is not only not a bad idea, it’s the BEST idea.

Link (via Ouriel)

The cost of starting up is so low that funding matters less than before. Ideas and execution are key in a world were rolling out a money making application can take 3 months.

Vous êtes au sein d’une haute école et souhaitez démarrer une entreprise high-tech en Suisse? venture kick vous permet de réaliser votre vision et finance les premiers pas de votre aventure grâce � une contribution d’amorçage pouvant aller jusqu‘� CHF 130’000 � fonds perdu! Vous bénéficiez en plus d’un support professionnel dès le démarrage du projet. Votre sortie des starting blocks sera donc des plus optimales!

Link

Superbe initiative, au del� du douteux “� fonds perdu” qui semble sous-entendre un truc du genre “postulez même si vous êtes nuls” ;)