HSLU Start-up Study Tour 2019

Again this year, I guided students from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts through London’s startup community.

Also this year I again had the pleasure of guiding students from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts through the London startup community. This time with 40 instead of 20 students 😯🎉 But I had strong support from Noemie.

After Noemie and I had got ourselves in the mood for London over the weekend before at the colourful Caribbean Hackney Carnival, things really got going on day one: at the lovely Fora Coworking I was able not only to share my learnings from entrepreneurship and my experiences in London, but also explain the exciting development of London’s startup ecosystem. Jazz from Technation UK backed this up with figures and his own studies:

13 of the 34 European unicorns come from the UK
2.1 million jobs come from the Digital Tech Economy
and generate £184 billion for the UK economy

Graham from Startupvan then amusingly summed up his top 5 learnings from 3,000 startup interviews. Hui from Zebee then took our students’ fear of launching their own startup away. With her young travel startup, she made many mistakes and learned a lot from them. Learning by doing: that is still simply the best education.

Fintech unicorns - no longer startups, but startup-minded

The visit to the super unicorn TransferWise was particularly interesting. From the outset, there was a clear business model, revenue and an infrastructure that cannot be copied quickly. In my view, it is the best positioned fintech startup in Europe and deserves its 3.5b valuation.

Sustainability, Work and Life

After that we went to Randy Rampersand’s Most Ethical Pub. Everything you drink and eat here supports a good cause. Then we went to London Fields to my home base and favourite co-working space work.life. The name says it all.

Co-founder Paul Dutnall introduced us to the topics of work, co-working and life. Another young startup on site, which develops and sells merchandising for YouTube stars, gave us an insight into how it got started. We ended the evening quietly at Tibits. Their start in London was not easy at first either, but it was worth it.

From tattoo stars to tech stars

And that was only day one ;-). Over the following two days, for example, we visited Maxime from Sang Bleu. The man from Romandy now works on projects with Kanye West or Hublot. He started as a graphic designer and tattoo artist in London and step by step laid the foundations for his magazines, tattoo studios and design agencies. His statement: “without the environment London offers, he would not have made it as far as he has.” The Swiss embassy, the various startup pitches at Techstars and the visit to Swiss entrepreneur Christoph Burgdorfer at “this place” were certainly the highlights of the following days.

On Friday afternoon, the students then pitched their own startup ideas, which they had been preparing over the previous days. And to finish, of course, it was off to the pub!