SEF.Founder Annual Starter Event

SEF is making politics more start-up

Start-ups have specific needs. And they have to be considered in parliamentary discussions, too. SEF brought together 25 founders to agree on issues that need to be addressed in politics to reduce the constraints that founders face.

They are three organisations with one shared goal: Impact Hub Berne, ZID Berne, and SEF.Growth want to enable cooperation between the founders and the Swiss parliament. A diverse group of founders has gathered to invest time into discussing unnecessary hurdles that are holding founders back from focusing on their business idea. A survey among the participants conducted in advance showed that the most issues are labour regulations, financing difficulties, administrative barriers, or unfulfilled digitisation.

Sharing ideas for a more favorable business environment

However, the outcome of the gathering shall by no means be pointing fingers but having a handful of specific requests to communicate to politicians. By doing this, start-ups can enable politicians to stand in for them and bring about changes that turn unfavorable circumstances into favorable ones.

The founders have accomplished the task of drafting specific requests. Lukas Frösch, programme manager of SEF.Growth, is very satisfied with the output of the lively discussions. “The start-ups have formulated concrete demands for policymakers. The proposed changes are solution-oriented and would benefit the start-up ecosystem.”

To give some specific impressions of the proposals:

• Financing Topic: We suggest starting governmental funding for start-ups, not by giving money but by paying for the social expenses of start-ups in their first years of existence.
• Labour Regulations: Entrepreneurs pay into the OASI-pot. But in case of stopping the business and becoming unemployed, entrepreneurs may not benefit from the OASI. There needs to be a possibility for entrepreneurs to get a financial return on those payments or to be exempted from paying OASI.
• Administrative Barriers: We propose making the process leaner: It should be possible to add a business to the commercial register within one day for CHF 20.-.
• Digitisation: Investing in an innovative product that turns out to be illegal because of a lack of standards is very frustrating. Therefore, we request to get clear rules for building software solutions that are based on AI.

Expecting action from the politics, Fabiola Studer and Aurel Vogel joined the event and invested time and brainpower. “If you hope, you wait. If you think you do. So, we wanted to help prepare the doing part by participating in this workshop with our thinking”, they explain.

Next step: Handing in the requests into the parliamentary process

Soon the proposals will be given to the national councils Andri Silberschmidt and Judith Bellaiche. They promised in the opening speech: “We have been elected into the National Council to represent start-ups. We intend to listen closely and stand up for their needs.” Andri Silberschmidt, national council (FDP), adds: “We need political decisions to be startup-friendly. And we would love to invite a delegation of start-ups to our spring session to get in close touch with the parliament.”

Putting together a delegation of founders to invite into the federal house of parliament was the final achievement of the event before the participants went off to have lively conversations at the networking apéro.