At Face Value

The Very First Cheque

When you ask investors at what point in their careers they wrote their first cheque, most will probably tell you a long story about their entrepreneurial or financial journey: How they founded and scaled their first company, went to a big corporate after the sale, worked their way into VC. Thomas Dübendorfer, president of SICTIC, Switzerland’s largest angel investor club, wrote cheques before most of his investor peers even graduated university.

The Guru in the Room

The student fund was project money, nothing more. There were no shares, no cap tables, no returns. “We had too much money sitting in the student association and we thought, OK, let’s do something cool with it,” Dübendorfer recalls. “So we started financing innovation projects run by the students. I ended up managing this little fund, and it turned into some really good ideas. It doesn’t help a student association to have hundreds of thousands in the bank account. They should do something for the students, right?”

After finishing his bachelor’s at ETH, he paused his studies for a year to work in industry – a detour that turned out to be formative. “That year was quite good for me because I finally understood the difference between IT in academia and IT in reality,” he says. “It also laid the foundation for me to go into cybersecurity for my PhD later.” He came back to ETH with a sharper sense of what he wanted to study, completed his master’s, then took a research position at Hewlett-Packard’s labs in Silicon Valley, working on applied security problems. He returned to Switzerland to complete a PhD in cybersecurity at ETH Zurich, and in 2006 joined Google Zurich, where he would spend seven years – as a software engineer and tech lead running teams of engineers on fraud prevention and security for Google’s advertising systems.

It was, by most measures, a career any computer scientist in Switzerland would have been happy to retire on. Dübendorfer wasn’t. “If you do something for five years, you often end up being the only guru in the room,” he says. “I always felt I wanted somebody else to teach me something new. Not just stay wherever I was – always move forward, acquire new skills, get into new networks. The first one or two years in a new setting with new people is always tough, but for me that’s a challenge and I like challenges. And worst case? I go back to doing the stuff I already know how to do. It’s not a huge risk.”

The entrepreneurial work started while he was still at Google. As his first angel investment, he co-founded Spontacts, a free ad-sponsored community app for organizing group activities and getting to know new people, which sold to Germany’s Scout24 Group within eighteen months. The exit wasn’t what mattered to him. What mattered was that the process of building a company – finding co-founders, hiring engineers, figuring out a market – was where his restlessness finally had somewhere to go.

Job Juggling

What happened next was less a plan than a chain reaction. In 2013, he joined a small group of four exited startup founders to help scout for Swiss startup investment opportunities. In their first year, a hundred business plans landed on the table. Two looked worth building – and Dübendorfer didn’t just want to invest. He wanted to be in the room, operational, as Chief Information Security Officer and board member in one and as advisor to the founder in the other. They incorporated both. Then a third opportunity arrived: a fintech startup that needed a CTO. He said yes to that one, too.

“I’d assumed two of them would die within a year or two, but all of them survived,” he remembers and laughs. “Suddenly I was working three jobs at the same time, and it became pretty clear that wasn’t going to be sustainable once they all started to grow.” He found successors for the operational roles. “I decided I’d rather be strategically involved, in the board. And at the same time I started to finance other startups – not just incorporating them and financing them, but helping them as an angel to find product-market fit faster.”

The Journey is the Destination

Nine co-founded startups in total, three sold, two that closed, and the rest still running. The largest, Frontify, now employs more than 300 people. His portfolio as an angel stretches across more than 40 direct investments, with over 15 exits to date. “Ten of them were good for me and five of them were not good in terms of return on investment,” he says. “But that’s the game, right?”

Talking about his own companies, you notice that, for him, each one was more of a journey than a destination. He doesn’t dwell on exit valuations or milestones. He lingers on the people: the co-founders he scouted into existence, the CTOs he mentored through their first hiring rounds, the professors who sent him their PhD students, the founders who are now close enough to call when something breaks. “It was really a journey that wasn’t exactly planned,” he says. “It was just good timing and good opportunities and a lot of cool people around me.”

The scouting was always the point; the companies were what the scouting produced.

Your Money, Your Instinct

With that track record, the obvious next step would have been to raise a fund. Dübendorfer went the other direction. He invests his own money through his own Datartis Ventures and has no interest in managing other people’s capital. The distinction matters to him.

“It’s very different when you invest your own money versus taking somebody else’s and trying to generate financial returns,” he says. “With angel investors, you feel that personal commitment. These are people who want to help others make their dreams come true – not just by giving money, but by opening their business network and really thinking alongside the entrepreneur. And because it’s your own money, you don’t need to write long investment memos or justify why you picked this case and not the other. You do it when it feels right and when you can add more than just money.”

What he looks for at the seed stage hasn’t changed much over fifteen years: a team with genuine conviction – not founders treating a startup as a side job. A product that holds value even if individual people leave. And the ambition to build something that doesn’t need a bigger team for every new customer. “I don’t want to invest into a startup where it turns out it’s just an expensive hobby of the founder,” he says. “I want to invest into a team that truly believes they can change the status quo and go full in.”

Running better, not just faster

But the deeper argument is about what angels bring beyond the cheque itself – and here Dübendorfer draws a sharp line between how angels and VCs actually operate. “Within VCs, they don’t really want to help each other. Everybody wants to get the best deal for their fund,” he says. “Whereas with angels, everybody’s basically invited to join and help. And right now there are still not enough angels in Switzerland, so you can pretty much pick and choose where you want to invest.”

VCs have networks, but they tend to connect to other VCs – the next stage, the bigger funds. Angels who still hold day jobs in industry know the market, the customers, the competition. “It’s often overlooked what you actually bring,” Dübendorfer says. “It’s not just what you know – it’s primarily your business network. Angels who have a day job in those industries know the market much better than a venture capitalist with a financial background.”

And yet capital alone doesn’t change the physics of a startup. “If you only have the money, you just run faster as a founder,” Dübendorfer says. “But you’re still partially blind, you still don’t have a real network. As an angel, you can really shape it from the very beginning. It’s like going on a journey together – you don’t exactly know where it ends up, but you already know the people who will be on the journey, and you know the core mission. You don’t need to know the future, because you shape it.”

No Secrets Behind Open Doors

In 2014, when Dübendorfer and five co-founders launched SICTIC – originally founded as “Swiss ICT Investor Club” but later renamed to just its acronym – the Swiss angel scene was operating on a very different logic. Clubs kept their deal flow behind closed doors. Almost none published what they invested in, let alone what failed. If you wanted to see who was pitching, you had to become a member first. And once you were in, you could stay indefinitely, even if you stopped writing new cheques. It was a social network of wealthy people that happened to occasionally fund startups.

“Everything was a bit secretive, and that made people hesitant to join,” Dübendorfer says. “We wanted to do things very differently.”

The SICTIC model was built on radical openness. They published their pipeline. They filmed their pitch events and put the videos online for anyone to watch. They talked publicly about where they invested and – more unusually – where things went wrong. They ran academies to train new angel investors and wrote the Swiss Angel Investor Handbook, which they gave away for free to any person that wanted it. When other clubs excluded institutional investors from their events, SICTIC invited VCs, family offices, and corporate ventures to the table.

“Other clubs said: we only work with angels, we don’t work with institutions,” Dübendorfer says. “And we said, why not? Our startups need them. If not now, they need them in the next round. We want to be best friends with the VCs and the family offices who do the next step. We do the first step and they do the second.”

The philosophy was a positive-sum game. Growing the ecosystem mattered more than defending the club. “We were never afraid of that trade-off,” Dübendorfer says. “For us it was more important to have more angels doing more deals. We even allowed members of other clubs to come to our events for free, so they could see what we had. And because we were so outspoken, suddenly everybody could learn about angel investing. It wasn’t that you needed to know the right people and get into a secretive room to see the deal flow.”

(Almost) Always at the Table

It worked faster than anyone expected. Within three years, SICTIC was larger than any existing angel club in Switzerland. Today it counts more than 500 active members, with over 1,200 investors having passed through its network over the past twelve years. In 2024, Dübendorfer received the SECA Business Angel of the Year award. According to the Swiss Venture Capital Report 2023, which reported a total of 153 early-stage funding rounds, SICTIC angel investors participated in 69% of all early-stage tech startup deals in the country.

But openness without discipline is just a mailing list; members who stop investing are encouraged to leave. “If you don’t invest, the matchmaking doesn’t work anymore,” Dübendorfer says. “You end up with paralyzed angels. They’re very nice people, but it doesn’t work.” The growth came the old-fashioned way: “Mostly word of mouth. People who have a good experience tell other people in their network. And because we started with a really good core of people that were truly entrepreneurial and also put the money where they put the words, people were very credible – and we could maintain that.”

The doors are open to anyone willing to write cheques. They are also, quietly, closed to those who aren’t.

In Part 2 of our VC in Residence series, we look at what happens when Dübendorfer’s scouting instinct meets real companies – and real crises. Three investments, and the question of when to run alongside a founder and when to let go. has backed, check out part 2 of our series: Backed to the Future.