"Die Höhle der Löwen Schweiz": "Lions" Lukas Speiser and Patrick Mollet in conversation

We meet the two "lions" Lukas Speiser and Patrick Mollet for a conversation in Zurich - informal atmosphere, very "startup-like". You can tell that "founder's blood" flows in their veins and they are happy to make their experience - and part of their successfully earned money - available to other ambitious company founders.

Patrick Mollet is not only co-owner of Great Place to Work, but also works as a consultant, start-up coach and investor. He sold the recruiting start-up BuddyBroker from the business network XING in April 2016. This he supported until the end of 2017 in the areas of account management and marketing in sales. Back in 2004, Patrick Mollet founded StudiMedia, an agency specializing in university marketing and employer branding, with his student friends. From 1997-2003, he studied business administration and law at the University of Bern and subsequently completed his doctorate at the ETH Lausanne.

Lukas Speiser is co-founder and CEO of Amorana. He is passionate about sports and enjoys experiencing international cultures. As a child he lived one year in Japan and as a teenager three years in the USA. Even before studying finance at the University of Zurich, he built up and sold one of the largest Swiss promotion agencies. After graduating in Finance, Lukas Speiser started in Investment Banking, serving institutional clients in equity, derivatives and bond trading. After four years in banking he started his own business and founded Amorana together with Alan Frei.

Mr. Mollet, Mr. Speiser, what are your expectations as investors going into "Höhle der Löwen Schweiz"?
Patrick Mollet: I was asked to appear on the show at short notice and spontaneously accepted. I joined with the expectation of getting to know cool business cases and exciting founder personalities - and of course with the hope of being able to invest in one or the other startup.
Lukas Speiser: Through my friendship with Roland Brack, I know to some extent what to expect in the show. I hope that this season will again feature exciting cases that we can hopefully accompany successfully.

What does a startup have to bring to the table to make it interesting for you as an investor?
Patrick Mollet: There are some widely recognized things that should be fulfilled: A "product / market fit", i.e. covering a real customer need, and a good team. After all, investors primarily invest in people. The first product idea alone is rarely a success. You need a team that is able to make one or two pivots. For me personally, it's also about supporting products that make sense and - this may sound pathetic - make the world or society a better place. Simply earning a lot of money quickly is not the focus here.
Lukas Speiser: I can only emphasize that. What is important for me: Passion in the founders! They have to be willing to work intensively to solve a real problem. Without passion, they would give up very quickly. Entrepreneurship is exhausting; there are many hurdles waiting, and if you are not then ready to continue with focus, then success will fail to materialize.

This passion, this enthusiasm: does it also have to be present in you as an investor, or is it much more about the prospect of profit?
Lukas Speiser: A little of both. But primarily, we want to contribute to the further development of the startup ecosystem in Switzerland. I was lucky that we had great investors on board at Amorana, who supported us in the best possible way. I would like to pass on this experience to other startups, i.e. help them with know-how and an investment.

When you talk here about the Swiss startup ecosystem that needs to be developed further: I conclude that there is still a lot of room for improvement. Where most of all?
Lukas Speiser: There is therefore still a lot of room for improvement because the Swiss startup culture is still much younger than in other countries. That's why this positive cycle - people found something, have success and then make an exit, become investors - is not yet so well formed.

What would it take in Switzerland for things to move forward more quickly in this regard? More shows à la "Höhle der Löwen Schweiz"?
Patrick Mollet: I simply notice that, compared to other countries, there is not yet such a big startup culture. Founding a company, launching a product, doesn't have the same status in this country. People look at you critically, and there is a fear of failure because you are then stigmatized. It's different in the U.S., for example: If you haven't failed at least once there, you're not a real entrepreneur! In Switzerland, when you fail, people are quick to say, "I told you so - you should never have started in the first place. In Switzerland, there is also the fact that we have a lot of good companies, big companies that pay good wages. Of course, many people are in a comfort zone and have a lot to lose: You're around 40, you have a family - and even if you had a good business idea, the well-paid job is still closer...

Where would the pain threshold for possible failure be for you today?
Lukas Speiser: The willingness to suffer is already very high, otherwise you shouldn't start a company in the first place. I had already founded a startup before my studies and was then able to sell it. After graduating, I initially went into the finance industry, so I wasn't in the startup world. But after my banking job, I consciously wanted to go back there and then founded Amorana together with Alan Frei. Of course, I knew at the time that the road would be tough. But I didn't expect it to be so difficult right away. In short, you have to be prepared to suffer.

What were the biggest difficulties?
Lukas Speiser: The biggest difficulty was finding good people. Today, we are lucky to have a great team. As a startup, you can't pay high salaries, but you still need top-qualified employees. And those usually already have a well-paid job... That means it's difficult to get people excited about a startup.

What was it like for you, Mr. Mollet?
Patrick Mollet: My path was somewhat different. I started my own business while I was still a student, so I never had a well-paid bank job to fall back on. I therefore knew right from the start that you have to suffer a bit and cut back on a lot as a startup founder. My first companies were all self-funded. The whole investor ecosystem didn't even exist back then, so you couldn't start a company with the idea of meeting interested investors right away. That's why there were phases during which you couldn't pay yourself a salary. When you then see your own colleagues making a career and earning more and more, every now and then you ask yourself: What am I actually doing this for? You have to be able to suffer - but that leads to the very moment when success arrives. If you're not prepared to suffer, you often give up too soon.

From today's perspective, what do you recommend to start-ups? To look for investors as quickly as possible or to rely on their own funds first?
Patrick Mollet: That depends primarily on the business case. There are cases that require a lot of capital right from the start, for example if you need to scale very quickly. For all others, it is of course nice to be able to start with your own funds and test the market before going all in.
Lukas Speiser: It makes sense to bring in investors early when capital is needed. But not only that: Investors have a lot of experience. You should draw on that, not just on their money. Collecting this know-how is worth a lot, especially in the early stages.

So that you can safely survive the first five years... Research confirms, as is well known, that the survival rate of companies increases when they are professionally accompanied. On the other hand, what "beginner's mistakes" have you made yourself and what lessons have you learned from them?
Lukas Speiser: The most important learning for us was that you absolutely have to focus. As a founder, you have many ideas. Just by pursuing one of them, you see more opportunities left and right: This could be done, and that too... This is exactly what happened to us in the beginning. We did many things in parallel, but then learned to focus on one thing. Founding a startup and making it big is hard enough. If you want to do three other things at the same time, it becomes almost impossible.
Patrick Mollet: I can confirm that. It was the same for me. I had several things going on at the same time. Even the idea for the employee recommendation tool "Eqipia" was only pursued in passing. Nothing came of it for the first year and a half. Only when we concentrated fully on it did it become a success.

But still, it shouldn't be wrong to go multi-track in the beginning to test different things?
Patrick Mollet: I'm not saying that this initial phase was fundamentally bad. But learning consists of taking the decisive step at some point and betting on one card.
Lukas Speiser: You can certainly test different things. But if you notice that one thing has potential and starts to work, then you should focus fully on it.

This is something that not only applies to startups, but that you can also recommend to established SMEs?
Lukas Speiser: I only know established companies from the perspective of an employee. But there, too, it's the case that you perform better if you're focused. And there's also the 80/20 rule at established companies.
Patrick Mollet: Particularly in today's VUCA world, it is important that companies react in a more agile manner and also give employees more trust and more freedom to try out something new. If something emerges from this that could work, however, the company must also clearly focus on it and lead the idea to success.

The prerequisite for this is probably a corresponding level of attention on the part of the management. However, it seems to be becoming "fashionable" for larger companies to adopt a "startup groove" as part of their culture. What do you think of that?
Lukas Speiser: I think this is enormously important. If you stick too strongly to just one thing and don't allow a startup mentality, then innovation is also lacking. There are well-known fatal examples, such as Kodak: They had all the patents for digital photography, but didn't believe in its future. As a result, they missed the trend completely.
Patrick Mollet: Rigid hierarchies and top-down processes are relics of the past. Our world is spinning far too fast for such structures. Large companies are therefore strongly challenged to become more agile. But ultimately, it is always a question of culture: How much do you trust your employees to be innovative themselves? Do you also allow mistakes, or is there an error culture? Too often, people are still punished immediately if they make a mistake.

Back to startups: In many business plans, it is noticeable that sales are supposed to go through the roof after five years. What was that like for you? What was the decisive moment when your company finally started to fly?
Lukas Speiser: It is still a struggle today. We still feel we have to innovate even more and develop even further, grow even more. But we noticed how, after about six years, our idea was working better and better. We had more and more data, and now we know which customers come back and why. Steady growth has now set in.

So there was no "triggering moment", e.g. when a major customer joined the company?
Lukas Speiser: Not with us, no. We are in the B2C business. We simply see more and more new customers coming in and existing customers ordering again and again. This then leads to a kind of "compounding effect.
Patrick Mollet: I was lucky enough to be able to work with a major customer right from the start. For us, the moment came after about two to three years, when the customers began to use our solution not just as an experiment, but strategically. Companies are always very cautious; they try something out without being committed. But when word gets out about who else is already using a solution, the demand comes relatively quickly.

And when things are going well, the company can be sold successfully. Both of you have already made such exits. When you part with your "baby," do you feel a kind of "parting pain"?
Patrick Mollet: In our case, we didn't want to sell at the beginning... We were looking for a strategic partner and were in the middle of another round of financing. Then we were approached by Xing, who wanted to develop a similar solution to ours. For them, it was ultimately a make-or-buy decision. We then reached a commercial agreement within a few weeks. In such a fast process, there could be no pain of parting. For us, the sale ultimately made strategic sense; it wasn't about making as much money as possible, but about finding the right path for our "baby. In addition, you don't sell the company just to be gone. We remained heavily involved, for example, by training sales staff and supporting the technical integration.
Lukas Speiser: Right from the start, we intended to eventually bring our company to an exit. We always communicated this to our investors. This meant that we also concentrated all our work on this exit. In the end, it was not a complete separation for us either; Alan Frei and I are continuing to work on Amorana in order to develop it further. Operationally, not much actually changed for us.

So away from ownership to pure management... Now it is statistically proven that reasons are absolutely in trend - the IfJ Institute for Young Enterprises even speaks of a Founder boom. If you want to encourage someone to implement a business idea with their own company: What would your message be?
Lukas Speiser: Now is a good time to start a business. Precisely because there are shows like "Die Höhle der Löwen Schweiz" (The Lion's Den Switzerland), where you have the opportunity to pitch your business idea, and also many other startup events. This didn't exist at the time we founded our companies.
Patrick Mollet: Complementary to this is also the consideration: What is the worst thing that can happen to an entrepreneur in Switzerland if he fails? At the moment, the economy is doing well, we have a real employee market with a shortage of skilled workers. So if you realize after two or three years that it's not working out with the new company, you can usually find a job again quickly and thus a secure income.

So then: Nothing ventured, nothing gained!
Lukas Speiser and Patrick Mollet: Absolutely right!

More information on "Die Höhle der Löwen Schweiz" can be found at https://www.3plus.tv/die-hoehle-der-loewen-schweiz

Here's the review of the first broadcast