START - The Power Of Time

Will there be technology companies worth over? EUR 1 trillion in Europe in 2050?

Can we truly imagine tech companies in Europe worth over a trillion Euros? I think this is an important mental exercise to make in gauging what our long-term ambitions should be.

We humans always tend to overestimate what we can achieve in the short term over the course of a day or a week, and at the same time, underestimate what can really be achieved in the long term? over decades. Organisations can grow exponentially, whereas our immediate experience teaches us? to think linearly.

Last week, the START Summit tech conference took place in St.Gallen, Switzerland, so let me use the START organisation, which is a student-run initiative at the University of St. Gallen that fosters entrepreneurship, as an example for our mental experiment. If we begin in the present, then go back 27 years into the past to 1996, and then consider what the organisation - and especially its ecosystem - might look like in 2050, 27 years into the future from now, then we get a much different perspective about what our ambitions should be.

2023 as a starting point

Here some facts and highlights from the START Summit last week: More than 6,000 participants from all over Europe and beyond came to St.Gallen. I am sure thousands of new projects, initiatives and companies will be formed in its wake. Thank you Max Keller , with the entire START Global Team for the hard work and congratulations for putting on such a successful conference!

Also a special thanks to Daniel Gutenberg and Young Sohn for sharing your experience with the START community. Dani has a stunning intuition to identify outlier companies like MobileEye, when still just two person operations - yet this intuition has been trained with lots of reading and thinking of how the world will look like in one or two decades. Young is one of the very rare people on earth that has had three incredibly successful careers as corporate manager (president of Samsung Electronics), entrepreneur (CEO of inphi) AND investor (seed investor in Zoom and many others). Thank you for your inspiring words and thoughts - your presence at the conference was an incredible transfer of knowledge and value to the next generation. Also a thank you to all the other world class speakers of the 2023 Summit such as Silicon Valley legends Andy Bechtolsheim and Esther Wojcicki or European pioneers such as Verena Pausder and Felix Haas who had a part running START as students themselves years ago.

How did we get here?

1996 - The START of START

In 1996 at the St. Gallen Symposium , Heinrich Liechtenstein and Peter Kraemer spoke about entrepreneurship and inspired Bettina Hein , President of the Student Body, and Florian Lipp, President of AIESEC, to found START as a new student initiative at the University of St.Gallen (HSG).

The very first "Forum on Entrepreneurship" was quite introspective - with 100 HSG students and about 30 entrepreneurs and experts participating, plus Massimo Lattmann as one of only two (!) Swiss VCs that existed at the time.

From the second year on, the conference took place at Chateau Wolfsberg with 100 students from HSG and ETH Zurich as well as 100 investors and entrepreneurs. Far away from everyday life, the format was filled with inspiration, learning and exchange that took place over the course of two days. In 1998, Ivo Cathomen wrote a one-page article about START in the NZZ, and the charisma of START benefited from the dot.com boom, so that more and more entrepreneurs flew in by helicopter, and in January 2000, the European startup scene gathered - including this gentleman:

After the boom years came the bust. And START almost went bust as well. b2venture at that time was founded by a group of friends, three of us having been with START until 2000. It will be an interesting exercise to see all of the companies that grew out of START and how participants have further developed. What would have happened if Oliver Samwer and his brothers had not sold alando after 100 days? I am convinced they would have built a European equivalent to Amazon. Maybe even bigger. And with that I have provided part of the answer to my initial question about the European potential. Yet the European startup ecosystem wouldn't be there today if Oli hadn't invested himself as angel and VC and built up massive entrepreneurial talent through all of his endeavors, from a (alando) to z (zalando) and the entire European ecosystem owes him a debt of gratitude.

START and the European entrepreneurial ecosystem in 2050

Accelerating change will test the human species over the next 27 years. Climate change is said to be irreversible, and if we are able to halt the worst consequences, it will also be through the use of new and emergent technologies. AI is a different story. At our first b2venture Think Tank in 2016, we thought a lot about the implications of AI and some of our conclusions were devastating, just as Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others were having similar thoughts and launched OpenAI as an open source project for this very reason to serve humanity. This will be one of the key challenges for both the tech ecosystem and other stakeholders in society, to ensure that emergent technologies such as AI are aligned with humanity.?

Let us assume that in the next 27 years we in Europe will have a regulatory framework that is based on the values of freedom and the responsibility of the citizen that goes with it. Let us also assume that we are all proud to be Europeans and that we as a society and polity through our various governments? are building the future together. It is within this framework that START can evolve:

• In 2050, the START Summit will feature a number of keynote speakers who, thanks to the START Fellowship programme, have built powerful technology companies with a strong foothold in both the Global South and Europe.?
• Three START Fellow Alumni have now built companies worth between €1 billion and €10 billion and created well over 100,000 jobs between them.
• START is the organisation that stands for the idea of generations of entrepreneurs working together. Children, teenagers, students, young entrepreneurs and adults from all phases of life learn from and with each other.?
• Our ambition should be nothing less than this: Just as Davos is where the managers?meet to talk, St.Gallen is where the builders meet to do.

Dear friends and colleagues - today is the day we START the power of time. Individually and as a community. Thank you, all mentors in and around the HSG who have and do support all of this!