ETH Entrepreneur Club:Semester „Kick Off“ recap

Summer is over and it’s time to go back to the lecture hall. But this also means that it is time for the ETH Entrepreneur Club Kick Off! This semester’s Kick Off took place in the ETH main building on the 28th of September in cooperation with venturelab. ETH Entrepreneur Club will provide us with some great content in the near future. 

Ariel Lüdi sold the Swiss unicorn startup ‘hybris software’ in 2013 to SAP.

After a warm welcome from Cristina (ETH Entrepreneur Club) and Stefan Steiner (venturelab), the evening started with a presentation by Ariel Lüdi. Mr. Lüdi started his presentation saying ‘I am not going to use Power Point or any other slides’, something you hardly hear in an ETH lecture hall interesting start. Mr. Lüdi told the audience his entire career background, including how he tossed aside his studies at ETH, and how he sold the Swiss unicorn startup ‘hybris software’ in 2013 to SAP.

During this time Mr. Lüdi was looking for new challenges and fun. Sometimes he just felt like buying a boat and going on a sailing trip, or spending a few weeks playing golf. Thanks to Mr. Lüdi’s humour and a bit of sarcasm, one could hear much laughter in the audience and in the end he received a huge applause.

In the second part of the evening Keith Gunura, founder of noonee Ag, and Claudia Plüss, co-founder of CatchEye, sheared their experiences of founding a start-up. Mr. Gunura developed a so-called ‘Chairless Chair®’, a device which you can attach to your legs so that you can sit down anywhere at any time you want. CatchEye developed a new technology which makes video calls more personal, so that you feel more like truely facing the other person.

Both speakers told the audience about their ups and downs and what they thought was the most challenging thing while creating a start-up. Both emphasised that next to a good product, one also needs to be able to create a business plan and has to handle marketing, a subject they were not familiar with in the beginning. After some interesting questions from the audience, Cristina and Stefan thanked the speakers and the evening was rounded off with a fabulous Apéro. It was a Kick Off that you previously could only dream about.

On a regular basis the ETH Entrepreneur Club provides us exciting blogs about the Startup Essentials (#vlabSE). The topic of the sixth Lecture in the Startup Essentials Workshop Series by venturelab was operation excellence. The Startup Essentials are a great format for young and ambitious entrepreneurs. Loads of success have already participants from the last semester course like Clara Beck from TapTools, Tauras Sinkevicius from WedMap or Raphael Gindrat from BestMile. The current edition started a few weeks ago. Apply here to be part of it.