A Swiss master entrepreneur

Willy Michel has built up two successful high tech Swiss companies, a feat that has won him a Master Entrepreneur award from Ernst & Young Switzerland.

It is only the second time in the eight-year history of the Swiss Entrepreneur of the Year competition that the jury has granted the distinction...

You can read my story about Willy Michel's rise from the lab to chairman of the board on the front page of swissinfo by clicking the title of this entry.

Kelkoo founder joins Index Ventures

Index Ventures announced today that Pierre Chappaz, the founder of the online shopping engine Kelkoo, is now an Entrepreneur in Residence, with the Swiss-UK fund manager.

In case Kelkoo doesn't ring a bell. It was a French dotcom acquired in 2004 by Yahoo! for about half a billion euros. It was a "deal of the year".

Chappaz is well known among French entrepreneurs and investors. He also spent about six months with Yahoo after the acquisition, so he has a lot of experience and a valuable network to bring to Index' portfolio companies, at least to the ones doing business on the Internet.

He's already on the board of at least one Index Ventures investment, Photoways, a French online photo company.

The French entrepreneur is based in Geneva now and has his own blog Kelblog where you can find is his point of view (in French) on spam, online business models, and mountain climbing.

"Pierre's experience is highly unique in Europe and we are delighted that he has chosen to join us as an Entrepreneur in Residence," said Index Ventures in its press announcement on the topic.

Top 100 Swiss startups (by Valerie Thompson)

Actelion, a biotechnology company, The Bee Company, a call center and CRM outsourcing company, and Mobilizone, a wireless gadget retailer and service provider, what do these three Swiss tech firms have in common?

Besides all being less than ten years old, they have all created employment, some 1678 jobs, if my math is correct.

This is just one nugget of information that can be found at Top 100 Swiss Start-ups.http://www.venturelab.ch/dt/top100.asp.

The list is still under construction and new entries can be added. It is being maintained by the people at «venturelab», the entrepreneur education organization funded by the Swiss CTI, a federal innovation promotion agency.

The main criteria for being "Top" is the number of jobs created, as opposed to financial performance or rate of growth. A pre-condition for entry is that these Start-ups founders took a risk to get the business off the ground. And that the firms are no older than ten years (founding year is 1995 or later).