AT FACE VALUE

The Relay Node

Olivier Laplace, Partner at Vi Partners, still views the world through the structural lens of a software engineer. While his days of active coding are behind him, the logic of interconnected systems remains his default setting. It is therefore just a natural reflex for him to describe himself and his role as a VC investor as a ‘node in a network’.

“You usually find the best investments through material connections and a plurality of connections. Sometimes, making an investment decision takes one extremely credible person, and other times 2,3 or 4 people recommending you a company because it has potential. Early-stage investments are all about people. A pitch deck is a nice story, it proves that the founders can put their ambitions on paper. But it’s the energies, their presence that drives their intelligence and ultimately their potential.”

Counterintuitively, Laplace wouldn’t describe himself as an introvert. „I am more than content staying at home and reading a book. But what I do like is talking to smart people. And what I love even more is putting two smart people in the same room. Because genius doesn’t just add up- it multiplies.”

The Boomerang Effect

Laplace has recognized early that making these introductions is a positive sum game. Even if he doesn’t invest, you can often find yourself in a web of introductions after impressing him enough with your idea. „I’m currently exploring an investment opportunity where I was told about the founders months before they created their company. They’re still a bit shy and not ready yet for VC money. But once they are, having these connections early is a tremendous help.”


Oftentimes, these connections find their way back to Laplace in curious ways. „One time I received a pitch deck from someone who told me that he’s advising this great company and I should take a look. I just laughed and told him that it was me who introduced him to the company a year before.”

Networks don’t build themselves. They are a result of meticulous scouting, scoping, and scaling. But even the best node needs a strong cluster, and Laplace credits his ability to execute to “standing on the shoulders of giants” – his three co-Managing Partners. The firm’s strength lies in its perfectly balanced tag-teams: Arnd Kaltofen and Diego Braguglia drive the Healthcare side, while Gaetano Zanon acts as Laplace’s daily sparring partner and tandem in Technology. It is this tight-knit, four-person partnership that transforms individual insights into institutional conviction.

Chance Favors the Prepared

When asked about whether eventually getting into VC was a deliberate devision or chance, the investor smiles and says: „Chance favors the prepared, right? If you throw a lot of arrows, at some point you’ll get to the target. So I started throwing arrows where I saw the most opportunity.”

After his master’s in software engineering, Laplace started his career in banks where he developed applications for traders. „At the time in the early 2000s, banks had a massive budget for IT and software development. It was the right time and the right place to be back then.” After that, he switched from coding applications to using them and joined investment banking teams in London and Paris.

When the financial crisis hit, Laplace felt like he wanted to do something „more useful for humanity than structuring financial products”. The era of the iPhone started to dawn, so the software engineer turned entrepreneur decided to build an application that enabled a geolocalized social network.

„What I didn’t know at the time was that B2C is a much harder business case to crack than B2. B2B is already hard- but achieving monetization with a B2C startup is nearly impossible. That was a core learning for me in my entrepreneurial journey.”

Growing Pains and Pains of the Grown

It was after his startup experience and during his MBA in Lausanne that he started eyeing for a career in VC. „But I felt like it was a little bit too early based on my CV. I needed more steps, so I either wanted to lean into strategy or M&A for a tech company. I believed that this would give me the credibility and the skills to later on go into VC.” Laplace ended up joining Kudelski, which at the time was a $1 billion revenue tech business on the Swiss Stock Exchange.

„While I was there, I did acquisitions, but I also built a startup there internally. And that was another hard learning- building a startup is always painful, but when you build it within a corporate, you face politics that just slow everything down. Sure, you have the salary, less financial risk and a structure in place, but the missing agility outweighs all these factors.

That experience convinced me that large corporates and many established tech companies are just not able to innovate and do disruptive innovation anymore. They do incremental innovation very well- but they don’t do transformative innovation anymore because politics blocks them.”

The First Venture

This revelation ultimately led Laplace to his first job in the VC world. Although he couldn’t convince his employer to form a corporate VC arm, another corporate opened these doors to do exactly that. Laplace left his job at Kudelski to build up the corporate venture arm at Swiss Post. Within his five years, Swiss Post championed 14 investments and 5 profitable acquisitions, including Metaco, which was acquired by Ripple for $250 million.

„This was a very enriching experience for me. I had a lot of autonomy and got exposure to the Swiss VC ecosystem. That’s also when I first got in touch with Vi Partners which I later on joined once my job started to become not entrepreneurial enough for me anymore.“

Laplace has been a general partner at Vi Partners, the oldest VC firm in Switzerland, for 4 years now.

What runs through Laplace’s career – from engineering to banking, from entrepreneurship to venture – is not only a fascination with products, but with people. Or more precisely: with how people find each other.

Again and again, he returns to the same point. Good companies rarely emerge in isolation. They grow out of conversations, early trust, and repeated encounters; often long before there is a legal entity, a pitch deck, or a financing round.

If Part 1 is about understanding the person behind the fund, then Part 2 looks at what happens when those conversations turn into commitments – and when being a connector becomes being a partner.

Backed to the Future continues the story.