Five years of insights and inspiration

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13.09.2018
Startupgrind Event

The Startup Grind community has three main objectives: to educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. Five years since its launch in Zurich Startup Grind has gathered more than 1500 entrepreneurs, hosted over 40 events and has reached 12 000 YouTube views of the fireside chat recordings. We asked David Butler about learnings and future plans. 

Startup Grind Zurich is celebrating its five years of existence. Through monthly events, the startup Grind community brings together different speakers from the startup ecosystem – successful local founders, innovators, educators and investors – to share lessons learned on the road to building great companies.

In Zurich, the first guest was Johannes Reck, the co-founder and CEO of GetYourGuide, a platform that enables travellers to find and book travel experiences. Reck has grown his company making it one of the most successful companies in the online travel industry. 

During the past five years, the Swiss startup scene has continued to see a significant positive development with many more succesful startups besides GetYourGuide. This is an observation that David Butler, Director of Startup Grind Zurich Chapter, has also made. He says: „The startup scene has grown substantially and become more vocal. Founders are more active and engaged in the ecosystem, the fear of failure is less than five years ago (although still much to overcome), a lot more corporate involvement, as well as support initiatives and coworking spaces.“

Key learnings
Moreover, based on his continued devotion to contribute to this development and his experience in the ecosystem, Butler shares the following key learnings to founders and aspirants: "Don't be afraid to start or to tell others your ideas. Get going, get feedback, as that will help you fine tune your product faster and better. Also, many attendees come based on the sector the speaker is working in. It doesn't matter, since the business learnings and principles will be very similar or the same, whether you are from a chocolate factory, biotech, proptech or online sex shop...yes, we've had all those and many more as guests." 

As startup Grind Zurich embarks on a new journey, Butler has bigger plans for Switzerland.

"We want to take Startup Grind on the road! Besides the monthly fireside chats in Zurich, I want to host a second event per month in other cities around Switzerland that have entrepreneurial communities.

To commemorate their five years, GetyourGuide will host Startup Grind’s celebration on 18 September in Zurich. Tobias Rein, Co-founder of GetYourGuide will share updates about how the company has grown since their first visit.

Registration to the event is now open www.startupgrind.ch.

About Startup Grind
Startup Grind is a global startup community, actively educating, inspiring, and connecting more than 1,200,000 entrepreneurs in 400 cities. The team nurture startup ecosystems in 150 countries through events, media, and partnerships with organizations like Google for Entrepreneurs.

The cornerstone of its global community are monthly events featuring successful local founders, innovators, educators and investors who share lessons learned on the road to building great companies. Founded in Silicon Valley, Startup Grind has helped millions of entrepreneurs build their businesses, connect with strategic partners, and secure funding. The Zurich chapter is run by David Butler and Silke Wolf.

 (RAN)

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