Startup Nights 2026 is comming up on 5-6 Nov. in Switzerland

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 :)

this is a joke I may sound salty, but the only innovations I see coming from Europe are plastic bottle recycling and fining American companies for GDPR violations.