As a Swiss founder, it's great to randomly see this popping up on HN :)

Switzerland has everything to produce successful startups: top universities and talent, stable and sovereign infrastructure and government, capital, and liberal tax and company laws.

However, the reality is different:

As if starting a company isn't hard enough, Swiss (and I guess EU) culture doesn't really recognize entrepreneurship as a valuable career path. You hear a lot of "Are you sure about taking that much risk?" and when you fail you get a "I told you so".

You would think there's plenty of capital here, but unfortunately not in VC. It's getting better, but many Swiss early-stage investors still ask for a detailed 5-year business plan and four due diligence calls for a 5k ticket in your round.

In SF, everyone helps each other out with their network, intros, and so on. In Switzerland, most startups and scaleups still operate in closed gardens and ecosystems are rare or slowly developing, which makes building a network really hard.

Events like these hopefully help to change this :)

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alfanick 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is it easy? To be a self-employed, aka a "founder" I need to have (provable) 3 paying customers in Switzerland. Not easy.

	▲	sschueller an hour ago \| parent [-]
		That is because the specific model of classifying a worker as a "self-employed contractor" when they work exclusively for a single company is not legal. Aka the gig-economy model used in other countries. The governments view is that if you have fewer than 3 companies you are dependent on them and they should bare the AHV etc requirements. However if for example you have 2 very large contracts there may be exceptions. Easiest (not cheapest) is always to create a GmbH or AG which also mitigates a lot of risk you would have as a sole-proprietor.

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elysianfields an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I've had the same experience. The answer is to bootstrap, its a viable option especially nowadays.