San Francisco – July 22, 2026

By Benjamin Leutwyler, Startup Program Manager, Swissnex in San Francisco

When people ask what I do, I usually tell them I’m a Swiss Startup Sommelier. Like a sommelier who helps people discover exceptional wines, I identify promising science-based startups from Switzerland and guide them as they explore whether they can scale in the United States. Each year, I help over thirty Swiss-based founders navigate Silicon Valley.

Why Silicon Valley? Because in the startup world, the Valley is the Champions League of innovation, a concentration of capital, talent, and ambition. The Bay Area AI startups alone raised a record $150 billion in 2025, compared with roughly $3 billion raised by all startups in Switzerland that same year.

Imagine you’re a startup founder in Switzerland. You’ve built a successful company, made the Swiss Forbes list, and returned to your alma mater to speak about taking calculated risks. But now you’re thinking bigger. You want to take your company global, and that means taking on the Bay Area. How do you succeed in the world’s most competitive startup ecosystem? It’s a question I hear almost every day from founders at every stage, from first-time entrepreneurs to scaling companies, who want to expand across the Atlantic.

There are already thousands of articles promising to explain “how to crack Silicon Valley” or “how to become the next Steve Jobs.” This isn’t one of them. Instead, I want to share what I’ve observed from accompanying Swiss entrepreneurs through Silicon Valley every year: the hurdles they encounter, the assumptions that don’t survive first contact with the market, and the tools worth packing before making the journey.

The Swiss economy built its success on financial services, political stability, and openness to international trade. Silicon Valley built its $1.5 trillion economy on vision, risk, and technologies most of us did not know we needed. That difference in origin shapes how capital flows, how decisions get made and how people size each other up in a first meeting. I want to focus on three patterns every Swiss founder should understand before they land at SFO.

The Mindset

As a newcomer, you are stepping into a tight-knit community of founders, investors, and operators who have spent decades building the ecosystem. Peter Thiel wrote an early check into Facebook. Reid Hoffman built LinkedIn, then reinvested his experience and capital into the next generation of startups. One misconception I see repeatedly is that founders who are well known at home assume that recognition travels with them. It doesn’t. I once worked with a founder who cold-emailed Sequoia and Khosla Ventures, expecting meetings simply because of the strength of the technology. Nothing happened. Months later, after attending events, building relationships, and using my warm introductions as multipliers, they finally got their 25 minutes with Sequoia.

There is a saying in the Valley: your network is your net worth. Accelerator programs can open the first door, but your reputation, your vision, and your relationships are what keep opening the next ones. In Silicon Valley, it is taken for granted that your product, positioning, and even your business model will evolve. VCs are backing the founder as much as the innovation. Give people a reason to believe in your ability to build and lead a company that solves a meaningful problem, not just in the technology itself. I encourage Swiss founders to be just as confident in themselves as CEOs as they are in their technology.

The Vision

Once you’ve adopted the mindset of a Silicon Valley founder, the next step is to build a Silicon Valley vision. Eric Ries captures it well in his 2011 book The Lean Startup: “The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build — the thing customers want and will pay for — as quickly as possible.” Most Swiss founders arrive with the opposite challenge. They already have something exceptional to build. What they need to prove is why it matters now.

I saw this firsthand with a Swiss founder developing a drug discovery platform based on active biomaterials that allows scientists to rapidly study aging and disease. The original 20-slide pitch deck was a masterclass in science but spoke little about the market opportunity. During their time in Silicon Valley, he reframed the story around one of the region’s fastest-growing investment themes: longevity. Instead of leading with the platform, he led with the opportunity to accelerate the discovery of therapies that extend healthy aging. His 20-slide scientific presentation became a concise 10-slide investment story that spoke the language of Silicon Valley.

The new investment story started with the problem, the market, and the market opportunity before diving into the technology. Investors want to know not only what you’ve built, but why now, why this team, and why this could become a category-defining company.

The Execution

Now that you have the mindset and the vision, it’s time to make your execution in the US market–ready. Your Swiss instinct for stability and risk aversion can work against you. Those instincts are invaluable when building scientific credibility, navigating regulation, and engineering technology. But they can become a liability in moments that demand speed.

I once worked with a startup that entered the US market only to discover two well-funded competitors developing nearly identical technology. In Silicon Valley, that’s not unusual, in fact, it’s often a sign that you’re pursuing an attractive market. But when the innovation is comparable, execution becomes the differentiator.

Execution means replying to investor and customer inquiries within hours, not days. It means following up after a meeting the same day, shipping product updates every week instead of every quarter, hiring before your competitors do, and pivoting quickly when the market gives you new information. The Valley rewards teams that are responsive and act quickly.

So before you board your flight to San Francisco, ask yourself one question: How much further can your mindset, your vision, and your execution go? Be proud of what you’ve built, but don’t be afraid to pivot, it’s a sign of progress. Treat every conversation as an opportunity to earn trust; in Silicon Valley, reputations travel fast. And while Swiss humility is a strength, pair it with conviction and speed.

The good news is that I’ve seen Swiss founders make this transition time and again. They don’t succeed by becoming Silicon Valley founders. They succeed by combining Swiss excellence with Silicon Valley ambition.

Don’t be a stranger. Let me know what you’ve learned as a Swiss founder who has imported Swiss excellence to the Bay Area.