A Matter of Scale

In Parts 1 and 2 of our series, we followed Thomas Dübendorfer from a student fund at ETH Zurich to SICTIC, Switzerland’s largest angel investor network, and into the boardrooms of three companies that reveal how he actually operates. In Part 3, the scout turns his lens outward – onto the Swiss startup ecosystem itself. After fifteen years of investing and more than forty companies in his portfolio, Dübendorfer has mapped this terrain more thoroughly than most. He knows where the strengths are. He also knows where the gaps still haven’t closed.

The Network You Can’t Google

One of the things that frustrates Dübendorfer most about Switzerland’s position in the global startup landscape is how invisible it remains to the people who should be paying attention. International investors routinely underestimate the country’s deal flow – not because it isn’t there, but because the data infrastructure that would make it visible doesn’t work the way it does elsewhere.

“The main thing I think they get wrong is that they assume there aren’t enough startups here worth investing in, because the statistics are still partially blank,” he says. “PitchBook has almost no deals around the early stage, and even for the scale-ups, they don’t count all our unicorns. A lot of statistics in the big databases are partial or incomplete. If you only look at those, you’re not going to find a lot in Switzerland.”

The problem goes deeper than databases. Swiss VCs, particularly the smaller ones, don’t publish. They don’t write blog posts about their portfolios. They don’t broadcast their deal activity. The ecosystem runs on personal networks and trust – which works well for the people already inside it, and barely at all for those who aren’t.

“Switzerland is a network of people, so you need to know the right people to get access to the interesting stuff,” Dübendorfer says. “It’s not like other countries where it’s more professionalized or more accessible. In other countries you have lots of VCs, also at the early stage, who do publications and timely feed the international startup databases. Most of our VCs don’t publish anything publicly unless they have to. So you don’t really know who’s doing what, how startup valuations evolve, how big the exits were, and that makes it very inaccessible if you don’t have connections to the right people.”

There is something almost paradoxical about it: one of Europe’s densest innovation ecosystems, fed by two world-class technical universities and a culture of precision engineering, remains nearly invisible to outsiders because the people running it are too discreet to talk about it. SICTIC’s open model was always, in part, an answer to this problem. So are efforts like the Swiss Deep Tech Report, which try to give international investors the entry point that the ecosystem itself doesn’t naturally provide and the Swiss unicorn map, published by SICTIC.

Engineering the Sales Talent

If the visibility gap is the external problem, the talent gap is the internal one. Dübendorfer is genuinely enthusiastic about the quality of founders he sees in Switzerland – but his enthusiasm comes with a specific caveat.

“What I see with the founders here is that they have done a lot of preparatory work before they start to incorporate,” he says. “It’s not just that they have an idea and put a pitch deck together. Typically they’ve already done some research, sometimes years of research that was state-funded, and then they have a lot of IP. I see a lot of intellectual property in many of the startups which I don’t see at many other places.”

The commitment is real, too. Swiss founders don’t quit easily. “For them it’s not just to do it for two years and give up if it doesn’t work,” Dübendorfer says. “For them it’s the next decade. I’ve rarely seen a startup founder after two or three years just giving up. They would rather try to pivot or do another small round or downsize a little instead of just letting it drop. This conviction and commitment is quite strong. And loyalty is also strong – people are loyal to the people they work with. They don’t want to disappoint. It’s not anonymous. You can’t just drop the ball and run away. You’re still in the same network.”

Where things get harder is above the technical layer. The engineers are world-class. The commercial talent to scale a company internationally – chief revenue officers, growth marketers, experienced sales leaders – is thin on the ground.

“If you really want to scale the business, or if you need marketing experts, or chief revenue officers – these talents don’t really exist here,” Dübendorfer says. “Or if they do, they have ten jobs they can pick from and they might not want to work for you if you don’t give them a really nice compensation package.”

His answer is pragmatic: don’t let your headquarters define your talent pool. At Frontify, the company hired C-level talent from Norway – someone they never would have found locally. Employer of record organizations make it straightforward to hire people anywhere. But the precondition is that the company has to be set up for it from the start.

“You need to have English as the corporate language,” Dübendorfer says. “You cannot do board meetings in Swiss German and then expect people from other countries to join you in the board or at the C-level. At DeepJudge, we did everything in English from day one – also the venture capital documentation. When investors looked at our documentation for due diligence, if that had been in German or French, most likely they would not have ended up investing. It takes too long for them to translate and it’s expensive. You need to think ahead about what the next level is. And the VC game is English and international.”

Reverse Due Diligence

The conversation about talent leads naturally into a conversation about capital – specifically, the growth-stage funding gap that Dübendorfer has watched from both sides of the table. Switzerland has become strong at seed. The angel infrastructure is there, the university pipeline is there, and programs like Venture Kick provide early capital. But once a company needs ten million or more, the local options narrow fast.

“If you want to get ten million or more for growth financing, it’s very hard to get it locally,” Dübendorfer says. “Which means you need to go abroad. It’s not impossible, but it just takes more time. And sometimes it would have been great if you could stay longer with local investors before having to go international, because going abroad with your business is already quite a challenge – but going abroad with investors is a different challenge, especially if you don’t have an established network.”

For the companies that do attract international VCs, Dübendorfer has a piece of advice that he has earned the hard way: due diligence the investor as carefully as they due diligence you.

“Most VCs look amazing on their website,” he says. “They have lots of money and do everything perfectly and everybody loves them. That’s the website. That’s marketing. Reality looks different when they’re in the board. The question is: what do they actually do in the boards? Are they just getting the reports and putting pressure on the founders, or are they giving useful input? Are they opening channels to clients? Are they helping with talent and the next bigger funding round?”

His method is simple. Before taking money from a VC, ask to speak with two portfolio company founders who have worked with them for more than two years. Not the showcase success stories – the ones who hit rough patches.

“If you want to find out how a person behaves when things don’t go according to plan, you need to talk to a founder who has worked with them before,” Dübendorfer says. “I’ve seen VCs with very strange clauses in their term sheets – veto rights where the VC alone can block the next financing round or block any changes at the C-level. If the VC becomes like a super-entrepreneur who has the last word on every decision, it gets too restrictive. And VCs who are too risk-averse and want safeguards everywhere will be very hard to work with when things don’t go to plan.”

The flipside also exists. When the numbers are strong, the power dynamic shifts. At Frontify, once the growth trajectory was clear, Dübendorfer and the team stopped taking meetings with junior VC staff entirely. “At one point we said we only talk to principals, we don’t talk to analysts anymore,” he says. “And then VC were still queuing up to have a chat with us. The reason we could do that is just because they knew our growth figures were right and our customers love the product.”

Three Wishes and a Flywheel

Towards the end of the conversation, Dübendorfer is asked what he wishes for in Swiss ecosystem. He doesn’t hesitate.

“I have three wishes,” he says. “The first is that the serial founders actually stay in the ecosystem and do it again. I want to see people with three or four startups, not just one or two.”

The second wish is about storytelling. Switzerland’s startup culture is quietly productive but not great at broadcasting its achievements. “I wish people who have actually accomplished something would share that more,” Dübendorfer says. “And it’s not just about financial success – it’s also about building an amazing product. Show what you’ve accomplished. You need to be more outspoken.”

The third wish is the one that would change the system. “I want to have some unicorn exits where all the employees end up with a few million in the bank and then they all become angels,” he says. “Facebook made a thousand millionaires when they did the IPO. I would love to see more of these really large exits, so many more people can become angel investors who actually know very well what entrepreneurs need.”

It’s a flywheel argument, and Dübendorfer states it plainly: “It’s like self-fertilization if the money stays in the system and is used again.”

The logic is hard to argue with. Switzerland has the research talent, the IP pipeline, the engineering culture, and – thanks in no small part to what Dübendorfer has built with SICTIC over the past twelve years – a functioning angel infrastructure. What it doesn’t yet have, at sufficient scale, is the recycling mechanism: the exits large enough to mint a generation of operators-turned-investors who understand what founders actually need because they’ve been founders themselves.

Dübendorfer has spent a decade building the scaffolding for that moment. The scouting continues. But the ecosystem he has mapped so thoroughly now needs the fuel that only big, visible, wealth-creating exits can provide. When those come – and on current trajectory, some of them are not far off – the scout’s infrastructure will be ready.