Today morning I visited Wuala for coffee. The company, which is well-known for its online storage service and which was acquired by LaCie early this year, has reason to celebrate. The first reason (and presumably the more important one) is the fact that more than 100 million files are now stored with Wuala technology in the “cloud”. In addition to that, they relocated to new offices downtown Zurich.

Congratulations, Wuala, on 100 million files and on a new office!

We also moved offices this week. Luckily, we only moved one floor downstairs (this is our incubator). Still, it is always a disruptive moment for the team – packing, throwing things away and seeing the place you’ve spent so many hours totally empty; at the same time it is exciting to move in at the new place, with more or less a clean desk. Besides this and the view from your window not much changes for a web start-up. Your computer is still the same. Everything should be running the same way. Moving offices is a good moment to move on and to implement new processes, new structures and new habits. This is just psychology, this is how we act.

Wuala is doing really good, as far as I can assess. It was a nice coffee break this morning. Thanks for having me and I hope you enjoyed the Grittibänz. Have fun working in this spacious, great office. We’re staying tuned what interesting products you’ve got in your pipeline!

Pictures by Wuala, click here for more

The Europas are the TechCrunch Europe Awards for technology companies. TechCrunch is one of the most famous tech and start-up blogs and therefore a great platform to present your own company. Being nominated for the Europas is even a bigger achievement.

The Awards Night will be held on July 9th in London. 400 start-ups from Europe and EMEA were voted on by users and 19 experts. Among the 400 entrants, there were several Swiss startups, namely Amazee, Doodle, NewsCred, RouteRank, Poken, Wuala, Zattoo and Kooaba as well as the Swiss Venture Fund Index Ventures and three start-ups with Swiss co-founders, precisely Amiando, Busuu, Kyte.

I was very happy to see now some many of these companies still in the running after the vote. They are represented in 6 out of 14 categories. Being among the top five and therefore nominated for the Europas is a fantastic accomplishment. Congratulations!

Here are the nominees: Read full story »

Starting a venture is like having a baby: it gets very frightening as soon as you realize that you’ve taken over responsibility for something you’ve never had before. Will I be a good father? What if the baby gets sick? How do I know that it’s sick? How do you do this? Do that? Am I gonna kill it like the hamster I had? … omg, will I be a good father?

If you’re asking these questions as a father-to-be, I suppose it’s too late to pull back. As an entrepreneur-to-be your live is still a bit more maneuverable. Last Friday, I had the pleasure to speak in front of a group of exchange students about entrepreneurship and our company Cassiber. Nextech Venture, a venture fund in early-stage healthcare, and Télésonique, a Swiss telecommunication operator, presented as well. During the Q&A sessions and the subsequent panel discussion, the students’ questions remembered me of the time when we started.

I’ve put together a list of useful links and advices you might find interesting.

Read full story »

We’ve had this discussion several times at different occasions. GigaOM recently asked the same question in one of his blog posts. Instead of asking, which city in Europe could possibly become as important as San Francisco for technology and entrepreneurship, I think the question is more IF it’s possible at all (in Europe). You’ll find a lot of start-ups in Berlin, London, Paris, Zurich, Tallinn, et cetera. However, no market is big enough to allow such a concentration of entrepreneurs as there is in SF. Each country will have its small start-up clusters. The bigger the country the bigger its cluster will be. But is there a potential for a handful of large specialized clusters in Europe? Read full story »