Campus - 20.03.2026 - 12:00
Fortunately, I don't have any problems with ageing yet. My motivation for Maximon was the realisation that ageing is a disease that can be cured. And most people don't want to grow old if it comes with physical limitations. So there is a great need here for which there may be solutions. My personal goal is to live to be 120 years old in the best of health.
I was particularly influenced by my parents' example: they weren't entrepreneurs, but they took on responsibility and leadership everywhere. Their great confidence – according to the motto “Just give it a try” – gave me the necessary lightness for my later, often ambitious projects. At the age of 14, I was already travelling through Eastern Europe and up to the North Cape on Interrail, and at 19, I went to Russia for the first time. Those were quite adventurous trips even back then. This curiosity about the unknown, this almost irrepressible desire to learn new things, still drives me today; repetition is anathema to me.
Good question... I think that, to this day, I have simply been successful in trying to realise my desires as soon as I see an opportunity to do so. I don't wait around – the right moment never comes. Sometimes this can lead to a certain amount of instability. On the other hand, it also allows you to experience a great deal.
One of my most important lessons was that you don't necessarily have to be the first or extremely innovative. Today, I often recommend that founders even become copycats of existing ideas in growing markets, as this is a much easier path to success. I also learned how important scalability is. I sold the company when I graduated because I realised that it could never really grow big as a pure project business. Another decisive moment was learning how to seize opportunities: I simply convinced my internship boss at Novartis to become my first customer, which immediately gave me a key client.
After graduating, I actually wanted to use the money from the exit to travel the world. But I had a girlfriend who hadn't finished her studies yet, so I postponed this plan for a while. I wanted to make good use of the time until she graduated and applied to the Boston Consulting Group. When I was offered a job there, I was naturally honoured, and even though my girlfriend and I had broken up and I could have gone on my world trip right away, I thought a little BCG would be pretty cool.
I simply wanted to prevent the two-year trip around the world from becoming a pure ego trip. Since my godfather already supported SOS Children's Villages, I asked them and ended up selling my travel kilometres online for a good cause. Was I specifically looking for “meaning”? Actually, I wanted to just go with the flow during the trip and not make any new plans. But then, in Alaska, I encountered climate change in a very concrete form in the form of melting permafrost, in which a truck had sunk, whose driver I then gave a lift in my car. I was already familiar with the problem of climate change from my studies, but at the time it hadn't really affected me much. But on my trip, it kept cropping up in very concrete ways: water problems in Bolivia, methane gas escaping from thawed permafrost in Russia, or the melting glaciers in our own country. It became clear to me that to really make a difference, you have to act as an entrepreneur. You can make a much bigger impact if you solve a global problem not just through donations, but through a profitable business model. With my company SUSI Partners, founded in 2009, I wanted to solve the problem of the lack of capital for climate projects: we brought institutional capital to wind farms, solar projects and large decentralised energy storage facilities.
After seven years at Susi Partners, I was simply looking for a new intellectual challenge. Just building on the success of SUSI felt like repetition to me – and as I said, I can't stand repetition. The real turning point was my visit to Singularity University in the USA in 2016. There, I suddenly realised how rapidly exponential technologies are transforming entire markets. I saw the fate of companies like Kodak and Nokia, which had missed the boat, and wanted to understand how to position myself correctly as an entrepreneur. With the Singularity Group, founded in 2017, we then invested specifically in technology leaders across all industries who apply innovations profitably. It was similar with crypto: I wanted to understand Bitcoin, but at the time I found the market to be like the “Wild West” – without professional structures for institutional investors. So we built that bridge with the Crypto Finance Group.
The most important question for me is always: Does an innovation solve a really big problem? Longevity, for example, is not a short-term hype because it solves the fundamental problem that no one really wants to spend their last years in a frail body. I remain pragmatic: I only invest if there are already real use cases. Space taxis to Mars would of course also be a fascinating vision, but as long as the physical problems have not been solved and there is no market, it is still too far away for me as an entrepreneur and investor.
But isn't it too late to enter an industry when there are already first providers who are already ahead of the game?
No, it's easier. If you're the very first, it's difficult. With longevity, we were almost a little early. We got into it in 2020, when no one knew what it was except a few crazy people. And if you first have to explain what it's all about, business partners have a much higher hurdle to work with you, invest in you, and so on. You first have to explain to them what kind of industry it actually is and what you want to do there.
To get this head start, I take advantage of today's democratisation of knowledge. Today, anyone can get all the information they want. But many people are too lazy to do so. So I listen carefully – for example, to podcasts or conferences with the world's brightest minds. If I don't know much about a new, exciting topic, I sometimes initiate a conference myself to get to know the smartest minds in the industry and thus penetrate the field.
Why not?! In fact, it's much easier when you're young and don't have a big name yet. When I arrive today as an established entrepreneur, people are often more reserved, but when it's a 19-year-old student, everyone says, “How cool, a young person wants to get things done, I'll help them!” Initiatives such as the START Summit are a prime example of this. As a student or graduate, you get an incredible amount of support from all sides. Experts in a particular industry are usually very happy to support young people's genuine thirst for knowledge. So my advice is: don't wait for your master's degree or years of professional experience – start your business as early as possible. The learning curve is steepest at this stage, and the doors are more open to you than you might think thanks to your youth bonus. What's more, the opportunity costs of failure are lowest when you're young.
I see risk as an essential part of the risk-return equation. If you want to win, you have to be prepared to navigate this area of tension. My strategy is the 80/20 rule: I usually make decisions based on 80% of the information available. Anyone who tries to calculate every detail 100% in advance will simply be too slow in the end. I like to compare it to a ski racer: to win, they have to take a high risk, but at the same time they minimise it through hard training, the right choice of equipment and a precise analysis of the course. You don't just blindly throw yourself down the slope.
For me, luck is always part of the equation, but I firmly believe in “the luck of the industrious”. The crucial question is not whether you are lucky, but when luck comes and how much time you give it. Whether you find a key customer after six months or only after four years can determine success or failure. You can't force luck, but you can speed it up by being extremely present. My advice: go to every conference, talk to everyone about your ideas and don't hide in “stealth mode”. The more people know what you're up to, the greater the chance of constructive criticism or that crucial contact.
Yes, I once really messed up when I rushed to launch a vodka brand. It was shortly after the war began in Ukraine; we wanted to set up a charity project with “Vodka Zelensky” and donate 10 Swiss francs in emergency aid for every bottle sold. It took only seven days from the idea to the market launch, but I hadn't done any research on alcohol laws or political sensitivities beforehand. The big supermarkets rejected the product because it was too political for them, and Lidl even got negative headlines because people didn't immediately understand the charitable nature of the label. That was a classic mistake: I simply wanted to help too quickly and neglected to do the necessary market research. In moments like that, you have to have the courage to call it quits in time, instead of investing even more time and money in a project that obviously isn't working.
First things first: never learn your pitch by heart! There's nothing worse than someone reciting their pitch and then getting stuck. I don't want a polished script, I want to know authentically: Why are you passionate about the idea, how will you implement it and with whom? Another mistake I often see is a lack of investor perspective. You have to understand that I don't just want my capital back, I expect a factor of 10. Ask yourselves critically: is this really a scalable investment case or just a project for self-employment? This also means thinking bigger. Swiss founders often start in the canton of Appenzell and then plan step by step for St.Gallen and the rest of Switzerland. But I want to hear how you're going to tackle the entire DACH region and then the US right away – be more aggressive in your growth plans! Finally, a word of advice about the team: don't compromise on co-founders. A 50/50 split with someone you don't know inside out is dangerous. Sometimes it's better to start up on your own and bring in strong team members later. And as I said, take advantage of your youth bonus: as young founders, you get support and doors opened much more easily today than you will later in life.
For me personally, happiness means above all the freedom to do what I want – and to do it with great people. As an entrepreneur, I have the luxury of doing things the way I think is right, which would hardly be possible in an employment relationship. Money is a means to an end: it enables projects that would not be feasible without capital. But at a certain point, it doesn't automatically make you happier in your personal life. I was no less happy on my two-year trip around the world, which cost around 130,000 Swiss francs including the vehicle, than I am today sailing around on a million-franc yacht. In fact, the trip by car was even more exciting because there were fewer organisational and technical problems to contend with.
No, because I've already done that. No repeats. But I want to cycle from northern Norway to southern France soon.
When I look back at 120, I want to be able to say that I played a role in the important issues of my time. With Susi Partners, we have done pioneering work and accelerated the energy transition with the world's first energy storage and energy efficiency funds. In the area of longevity, my goal is for 120 years of good health to be the new standard – instead of the 80 years that used to be the norm – and for my companies to have helped make these 40 additional healthy years possible.
