You joined Verve Ventures in 2014 . What has changed since the early days?
When I started we were just a handful of people and our office was on the top floor of an old house. Verve Ventures has grown a lot since then, but we were able to keep the friendly and open team spirit we had back then. Now we have a much better understanding of what we want to build because, in these years, we have learned how the investment team works and what they need to do a good job.

What do you think of the startups Verve Ventures has financed?
It’s very interesting to see what they achieved. I remember that one of them, Ecorobotix, got to the point when they’ve got international media coverage, they were even featured in Romanian newspapers. It made me proud to know that we helped this startup to get there.

For someone who just browses the Verve Ventures website, it just looks like, well, a website. Is there more to that?
Our main users are the investors that are registered with us. And the beauty of what the IT team does is that it makes life easy for investors. They don’t see how much work went into our platform, they can just click on a button to show interest for a case and with another click, the contracts they need to invest are automatically generated.

Verve Ventures makes investments in startups possible for sums as small as CHF 10’000. This is disruptive, but it also creates a lot of paperwork. How important is IT for Verve Ventures?
The investment volumes we have on our platform now would be impossible without the level of automation we’ve achieved. We have about 1000 investment tickets per year now, that means 1000 contracts. When we started, the investment managers filled them out manually, which led to errors. This would be unthinkable now.

What else did IT build for the platform?
For investors, we’ve built a hub where they can oversee their startup portfolio and its evolution, as well as tax information. And for internal use, we provide a centralized workplace which gathers all the data we’ve collected about all the companies, when and how we interacted with them, and make this data accessible to anyone in our company.

And what is next?
In the next few months, our investors will be able to sign contracts online, without the need to print them out and send them to us. This is very useful if an investor is traveling. And maybe it makes us the first fully digital venture capital investment platform worldwide.

How do you decide what IT builds next?
At the point where we are now because we really want to scale our business, we have to choose our battles. We can’t just try something today and something else tomorrow. Now, our main purpose is to make the investment team more efficient. And we have a pretty good understanding of their needs and how to make their tools faster and more reliable. The new version of the deal board which gathers all the data on startups and helps the investment team identify the best opportunities will be rolled out soon. What we’re building is the future of venture capital.

How well aware is the rest of the company about what IT does?
We need to engage with our colleagues because their feedback is important, and with our lean approach we want to push things fast. We show in our weekly meeting what we’re doing but we don’t want to show stuff that is in a very early stage. Usually, we don’t speak when we don’t have anything to say.

Knowing you, that sounds like a good description of yourself too. Other people in the office talk a lot more than you.
Developers are usually rather quiet, focused and precise. In that respect, I’m a typical developer. We also try to overachieve, so we can be proud of what we did.

How did you get interested in programming?
I started to program when I was 7 years old on an old Spectrum computer and was working on games when I was 9. In High School I was already making money coding, selling projects to small companies. And in university, I started to work in larger companies.

What’s the difference between working in a multinational and a startup like Verve Ventures?
You work much more in a startup (laughs). Apart from that, I think people in small companies are more motivated and take more responsibility. Because you know that if you don’t do your job well, everybody will suffer. It’s impossible to hide like in big companies where you can just say you’re working on something nobody understands.

What do you like most about your current position?
It’s not only coding but also product development to a large extent. I can think about how a product should function and look like, I can influence the user experience and the purpose of the product. Even if I love coding and will code in the future, it’s very interesting to explore other parts of the spectrum of software engineering.

How does your day look like?
I start early because I like to leave early, we have a flexible work policy. We do a daily IT huddle and discuss what we did yesterday and what we’ll work on today. Other than that, we have no unnecessary meetings even if we like to debate and challenge solutions. We’re all in the same room, so we can have informal discussions.

Verve Ventures offices are right next to Google. One of your developers already got hired by them. Is it hard to find good programmers in Zurich?
It’s very hard, bordering on impossible, for different reasons. First, because we use the programming language Scala, which is popular, but also high in demand. Then you have not only Google but also Apple and Facebook in Zurich and a lot of banks which pay very high salaries. One thing that works in our favor is that is has become more common to work for startups. If you believe in an idea, if you can influence what you’re building, your work is more rewarding, not financially, but emotionally.

What do you look for in potential new hires?
They should have a natural willingness to learn. Many useful things I learned doing stuff at home. And I want to see an entrepreneurial mindset, somebody who takes ownership and asks questions, not just somebody who needs instructions to move a button 5 pixels to the left.

And what is the good thing about working in your team?
We’re a small but growing company where one can shape products from the beginning and choose the technology. We’re not lazy but we keep a relaxed pace because I believe that if you come with a clear mind and joy to work in the morning, you’re productive. If you’re stressed, this creates errors and low-quality code and that’s not sustainable. We’re considering remote work because the number of software engineers that want to see the world and work from all over the place as long as there is WiFi is growing. And if somebody wants to create a startup at some point in the future, there probably is no better place to learn about raising money than Verve Ventures, right in the middle of the startup world.