5-Minute Interview with Alex St?ckl, Wingman Ventures
Dr. Dorothy Kelso
Managing Director, SuperReturn | Board Chair | Emerging Manager Champion
In this series of 5-minute interviews, I shine the spotlight on up-and-coming fund managers in private markets across the globe. All geographies. All strategies. All sectors.
Here's my conversation with Alex St?ckl, Founding Partner at Wingman Ventures.
Quick facts about Wingman Ventures:
Q: What is Wingman Ventures’ investment strategy?
A: We back standout founder teams based in Switzerland at the earliest stage of their journey building tech companies with the potential to become global market leaders.
Q: What is the size of the opportunity for for tech in Switzerland?
A: The Swiss venture capital market grew from CHF 800m in 2017 to more than CHF 3bn in 2022, making it one of Europe’s fastest-growing venture markets and, according to Dealrom, the fifth largest market in Europe in 2023H1.
With nine tech unicorns and 9 million inhabitants, Switzerland, according to Statista data, is Europe’s country with the highest per capita ratio of billion-dollar tech outcomes.
Q: What’s driving Switzerland’s tech achievements?
A: Switzerland is host to two of the world’s leading technical universities – ETH Zurich and EPFL in Lausanne – both of which are amongst the most active and attractive academic institutions globally for entrepreneurial spinout activity.
However, due to its status as a non-EU market, Switzerland has long been overlooked by European VC firms and we decided to fill the gap in funding and globally competitive support by starting Wingman Ventures in 2019. We’ve, in the meantime, invested in 48 Swiss tech startups as first investors and brought co-investors like Sequoia, Earlybird, HV Capital, La Famiglia, Senovo, OpenOcean and Seedcamp to invest in our portfolio companies.
Q: How do you source deals?
A: We see 99%+ of local dealflow in Switzerland by being involved in all entrepreneurial programs and support activities in the country, having the majority of successful entrepreneurs locally on board as LPs in our fund and by running our student-run venture fund program “Campus Fund” at the three most relevant Swiss universities.
Q: Tell us a bit more about your Campus Fund
A: Every year, our Campus Fund (www.campusfund.ch) allows 15-25 students – 50/50 gender split – at Switzerland's three leading universities to learn about venture capital during a 1-year program filled with mentorship, masterclasses and the ability to execute own micro-investments in entrepreneurial projects on their campus.
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Q: What hands-on expertise do you have?
A: Our team is full of entrepreneurial spirit and experience. My co-founders Pascal and Lukas successfully built their own tech startups from Switzerland with GetYourGuide and eat.ch, respectively. Emily was CFO of two growth-stage startups and led M&A activities at a media corporation. Antonia built her startup in Berlin, Careship, for almost a decade, backed by some of Europe’s leading venture firms. Edouard was the program director at MassChallenge. Gabriel founded two tech firms during his law degree and guided growth-stage tech firms to their IPOs for one of Switzerland’s leading law firms. And I learned the ropes of venture capital working for Creathor Ventures after building a food tech startup in Zurich and some years in strategy consulting.
Q: How do you see your business scaling?
A: We’re a team of eight in Zurich, with some additional support in Luxembourg and an outsourced compliance team in Switzerland.
We don’t necessarily intend to scale the business – we have decided to maintain our focus on Switzerland in the mid-to long-term, and we will maintain our pre-seed strategy, raising a fund every four years. We are considering raising additional growth-stage funds to participate in standout companies of the portfolio of our early-stage funds, but this is something we’ll evaluate after finalizing the fundraising process of our second fund.
Q: What is the secret sauce of your success?
A: I would honestly say that there is no secret sauce. We’re using a proven model – first-money investors with an entrepreneurial background (think LocalGlobe, Seedcamp in the UK) – in an underfunded ecosystem that is destined to play a key role in European tech in the coming decade. Why? Because Switzerland is home to leading deep-tech innovation while hosting one of the world’s most stable economies and political ecosystems.
Q: What valuable lesson have you learnt that helps drive your approach?
A: As a team, we’ve scaled companies to more than 100 employees multiple times as founders and C-level managers. We’ve raised seed, Series A and Series B rounds; we’ve failed to raise rounds and had to restructure and shut companies down. We’ve dealt with teams breaking up and new investors joining and leaving the board. Essentially, we’ve seen it all in the shoes of the entrepreneur, which gives us loads of empathy and the ability to stay cool in difficult situations and make educated decisions.
Q: What advice would you like to share with our readers?
A: Focus on something and become really good at it – no matter if privately or professionally – It will make you more authentic, and you’ll never have to pitch; you’ll just speak about what you’re passionate about.
#privatequity #venturecapital #innovation #entrepreneurship #startups #investing #technology #B2Bsoftware #deeptech #Switzerland
Partner @Founderful
1 年Thank you, Dorothy, for giving emerging venture capital managers like us at Wingman Ventures a platform to speak about our work! This is so valuable, especially for the rapidly growing European venture capital industry. ??