SEF.Growth Best Practice Event with UBS

Best Practice Sharing for Scaling Companies Internationally

Before going into the scale-up phase, we should seize the opportunity to learn from start-up founders who are facing the challenges that comes with rapid growth. Lars Mangelsdorf, Co-Founder and CEO of Yokoy, generouslyshared his first-hand experiences when scaling up and mastering growth.

Over 100 entrepreneurs assembled at the elegant Zurich headquarters of UBS Switzerland. Everyone was curious to learn what successful scale-ups can share about the challenges of growth. The guests were especially eager to listen to the two rapidly growing start-ups Yokoy and UniqFEED: "I am inquisitive about what Lars will say about handling company culture in a rapidly growing team," says Levent Künzi, Co-Founder and CEO of Properti during the welcome drink. Interesting to learn that the culture topic was not among the main growth challenges Lars Mangelsdorf, Co-Founder and CCO of Yokoy, would specifically mention.

5 pieces of advice from Yokoy's rapid growth experience 

1. The speed of software development was one of our biggest hurdles: We had one person developing the product, that ended up being the bottleneck in the company.
2. After raising our series A (26 million USD) and series B (80 million USD), we faced the challenge of deploying the capital efficiently: The investors pushed us a lot to grow the team to scale the company massively.
3. Nothing is more important than processes that work smoothly when the team and market traction grow drastically. Therefore, question every process with regards to its scalability.
4. As a result of the changing investor sentiment and macroeconomic challenges, the company needed to transition from growth at all costs to a more sustainable growth path. Ask yourself if you really need a much larger number of employees to reach the company’s goals.
5. Do what your business needs, not what your ego tells you to do. This includes stepping back from a role if someone else can fulfill it better than you.

President of UBS Switzerland opened the event

To the event's guests, speakers, and organizers, it was a great honor to welcome Sabine Keller-Busse, President UBS Switzerland, for the opening speech. She talked about her keen interest in meeting and exchanging with companies and start-ups. And she reassured everyone of UBS' commitment to continue to support Swiss start-ups and scale-ups. Over the past years more than 170 million growth capital was deployed to rapidly growing Swiss start-ups thanks to the SEF.Growth, the initiative that UBS founded together with SEF. Keller-Busse's presence at this event underlines the importance of the Swiss startup ecosystem for UBS. Lars Mangelsdorf from Yokoy and Olivier Fernandez from UniqFEED backed this with their experience in working together with UBS.

Lukas Frösch, Director of Entrepreneurship at Swiss Economic Forum, summarizes the evening with three points. "Regarding the event: It was great to meet in person and inspire each other; regarding the speakers: even our most successful founders are still easy-going and down-to-earth people and regarding the business: Adaptability is crucial."

Text by Alyssia Kugler