How did you become a writer?
I have always loved reading and writing. Concentrating on a text, I feel an incredible flow. Words and sentences align themselves in the right order, sometimes effortlessly, sometimes only if I marshall them by force. Hours pass unnoticed until I emerge from this dreamlike state. Writing gives you a clear understanding of the topic at hand, because you need to establish logical and temporal structure between things. Being able to write for a living is a dream come true and also the result of good fortune. While studying law, I started to work for a small publisher focused on private equity. This became the base for my path into financial journalism.

How did you get from there to NZZ, the most prestigious newspaper in Switzerland?
The publisher was acquired by NZZ one day and I became responsible for a weekly digital newsletter aimed at an investor audience. Later, that project became a casualty of the merger integration. At that moment there wasn’t a free job position to keep me on as an employee, so they asked me to continue working for the newspaper as a freelancer.

They fired you first and then said you could be freelance?
It was one of the best decisions anyone else has ever made for me. I wouldn’t have dared to take that risk myself. But it worked out very well. Investment topics were my mainstay, and I interviewed hundreds of investment professionals on at least as many topics. But as a freelancer, I also often got to travel to fancy places instead of sitting in meetings. I climbed down a mine shaft in Colombia, drove on a frozen Finnish lake together with a rally driver and learned a bit of the Klingon language, all for work.

How did your evolution as a writer go, from your legal studies to full-time journalist and weekly newspaper articles? Did your writing develop a lot, or are you more of a natural talent?
Writing is best learned by exercising it on the job. I had the luck to be coached by experienced people who reviewed my texts, gave me honest feedback and told me how to improve my style, which was perhaps a bit rigid coming out of law school. Clear and direct feedback is painful, especially at the beginning when you haven’t found your voice yet. I doubted more than once if I had even one ounce of talent when a text I wrote was torn apart. But this is how you learn and progress. Nothing is worse than a half-hearted review that tells you all is fine when the text is still weak. Luckily, even now at Verve Ventures, my colleagues enjoy splattering red ink over my texts. I’m thankful for their cruelty, because it improves my writing.

What was the kind of criticism they threw at you in the beginning of your career as a journalist?
When you learn about new topics, you fall in love with details. But your audience doesn’t want a summary of dozens of things you just discovered. They want to be guided through a story without distraction. It hurts to leave out trivia. I was often told: “Kill your darlings”. I had a post-it note on my screen that read: “Nobody has to read your bullshit” for a while. It helped. Sometimes I had to thrash what I thought was a finished article because I approached the topic the wrong way. In this case you need to start afresh with a clear understanding of what to tell and what to leave out. It makes you feel like a bricklayer that built up a wall just to be told that the house should stand in another place. But in the end, it is only the published text, the result that counts.

If somebody came to you today and asked you how they can become a better writer, what would you tell them?
Read a lot of really good writing. Read a lot of mediocre writing, too. Pay attention to why some articles are a pleasure to read and why others make you stumble. As an author, you have to guide your readers. Assume that they’re intelligent, but don’t assume that they know everything. Use strong and appropriate words, not the most complicated ones you know. Do not assume that you will ever be able to just sit down and conjure up a flawless text. Writing is rewriting, cutting, rearranging. Put in the effort required to make reading the text effortless. Avoid pomp and bullshit, and aspire to a style that is simple and direct.

Is there still a future for newspapers?
There is a future for journalism. We live in the information age, and journalism has an important mission that still attracts talent. Many published articles are worth paying for. But the era of printed newspaper will be over soon.

You decided to leave the newspaper industry and came to work for Verve Ventures, calling yourself a “startup journalist” now. What does that mean?
It’s the most succinct way of describing what I’m doing. My work is quite diverse: I write the investment profiles that describe the startups on the platform. They inform in a succinct way what problem a startup is solving. Since we’re talking about high-tech startups here, technology has a prominent place. But as an investor, most importantly, you should get a good feeling of what kind of risk you’re taking when investing in a given startup. Then, I also go out and interview the founders of startups, their clients or other interesting people involved in innovation. These interviews and articles give the startups visibility and thereby also promote what they do, but they are also meant to raise critical questions. Our readers are intelligent people that have no patience to read polished press releases. They want to know what challenges a startup faces, what didn’t work in the past and what issues it will face tomorrow.

If an investment manager hands you a startup to write about, let’s take Qnami as an example, and tells you “here’s some quantum physics, figure it out” – how do you approach a new company you’re supposed to write about?
With curiosity, of course! This has always driven me, the desire to find out how our world works. I’ve read about quantum computing before, but I hadn’t heard about quantum sensors, the business Qnami is in. So I start to read about it. One thing I love about this job is that I’m in a unique position to learn about our world of tomorrow and write about it. I see the startups when they visit us to pitch before our investment committee. Our analysts prepare detailed reports about the technology and the markets a startup is active in. My job is to condense that information and make it digestible. In Qnami’s case, I had the chance to interview Prof. Maletinsky, a world-renowned expert in the field, and Quantonation, a venture capital firm in France specializing in this topic. Being able to talk to this caliber of experts is very valuable. It might take years before you’ll read something about this topic in the mainstream media.

The majority of our startups are deep tech companies based on very complicated technological advances. How deep are you going?
Ideally, writers should understand more about a topic than what they put on the page. I can rely on the background information provided by our investment team and ask them. They’re all brilliant minds mostly with scientific backgrounds. It helps that I’m fascinated by technology. Working at Verve Ventures feels like attending a super-advanced university that mixes a wide range of topics from genetics to robotics. But I’m a generalist at heart, which fits well with Verve Ventures broad investment universe.

New technologies, building fast-growing companies, new ways of doing things – those are probably the most “sexy” parts of venture investing. But aren’t the contracts, investment terms and financial numbers what really matters?
I think most investors are well aware of how important these aspects are, but we also have a steady stream of new investors joining Verve Ventures which have no experience with startup financing. Our investment team has tons of experience in contractual and financial matters, and it’s one of the advantages of our model that you can rely on their work. But we still want to explain all these finer details in a simple way so that private investors can invest with confidence.

Is it always clear that any good startup also has a good story?
There are startups which are exciting even if their story is not very clear yet. Especially when it’s still early days, and their technology has different possible applications, I have to describe different development paths and opportunities. But one thing our portfolio companies have in common is that they try to tackle difficult and relevant problems. And good stories usually involve big challenges that allow the heroes to prove themselves.

There are definitely areas of venture capital that are very focused on storytelling. Maybe not yet so much in Switzerland, but sometimes in Berlin, certainly in Silicon Valley, with the hunt for unicorns and famous founders. There’s even straight up fraud cases like Theranos which had nothing but the most amazing stories, down to TED talks. Are you sometimes worried that the story is considered too important, that people are making investment decisions purely based on stories and not looking close enough?
The majority of the entrepreneurs I’ve met so far in Europe were quite cautious with what claims they make. They need to convince investors, of course, and want to portray themselves in the best way possible. But when it comes to the distinction of what they have actually achieved so far and what is just a rosy outlook for the future, they are quite honest, and they should be. As an investor you’re in the business of buying that future or deciding that it is too much of a leap of faith, but this decision itself should be based on elements already in place today or highly likely to manifest themselves, not on promises. A compelling story can help people convince themselves but it should never replace critical thinking.

You have not only explained the startups we invest in right now, but you’ve also interviewed investors. What are the favorite stories you’ve heard there?
We don’t have many of these interviews yet, but it’s really fascinating to learn about the development or philosophy of an investor. The European startup investment scene could use more prominent role models and more transparency. I understand why many investors have a healthy apprehension about bragging about their investment strategies, but I think this exchange can be quite helpful to everybody. Verve Ventures can play a big role in this, as we bring together so many people who could learn from each other’s successes and failures in this space.

You literally wrote the book on how the Swiss don’t talk enough about what they want to do with their wealth. Is there just not enough of an open culture to talk about these topics here?
I think in Switzerland it’s often obvious enough if people are wealthy or not, as people live so closely together, so there is no need to display it. And among the truly wealthy, it is generally frowned upon to brag about money and flaunt it. They’re usually not the ones who cruise around town in expensive cars. I think it’s quite positive when people don’t have to consume ostentatiously to prove who they are, as this leaves more resources to invest in startups (laughs). But the downside of the typical Swiss attitude “you have money but you don’t talk about it” is that many people don’t talk about important issues of wealth even with their families. Wealth is connected to values, and this is what the book I wrote is about. While some families see wealth primarily as a safety net, others see it as a resource that allows them to take risks. In Switzerland, wealth preservation is a very dominant topic, and it’s also what private banks market themselves with. Now, it’s sensible to take care of your money, but you also need to make sure that you can build new fortunes. And putting your capital to work out there gives young talents the space to build new things. Startup investments aren’t that complicated anymore, and we work to make this message heard.

What are the kinds of investors you’d like to hear more from?
There is often a tendency in the media to make the already famous names even more famous and to put spotlights on those with huge fortunes. If I look at what kind of investors are investing in startups through Verve Ventures, they are often not the richest people in the country, but engineers or people otherwise close to a technical topic who are now considering startup investments as a way to find out what’s next in their space. What I also find exciting is the theme of successful founders who invest their money in other founders. That they invest their hard-earned money into the next generation of founders is a great sign of trust, and their experience is also incredibly valuable to first-time founders.

You are also a startup investor yourself and have made quite a number of investments. What are the criteria for you, what makes you trust a startup enough to give them your money?
Diversification is the principle by which I invest, and this is quite easy to achieve with the number of deals we have coming along. I’ve invested in more mature startups with a good traction as well as early ones that still have significant development risks. Since I want to capture different market dynamics, I also diversify across industries and countries. Some concepts, especially in life sciences, take more time and effort to understand than, say, a marketplace business model. But first of all, all these startups have gone through a rigorous selection process. Second, If I only invested in what I understand 100%, I’d be left with investing in a hotdog stand. And third, a startup investment for me is a way to express what problems I think need to be tackled and which spaces explored.

What’s your white whale? What are the kind of stories you’d like to tell in the future?
There are many stories that I think would be surprising as well as entertaining for our readers. For example, I would like to talk with Snoop Dogg about his investment company Casa Verde Capital, which invests in marijuana-related startups. But more close to home, we sit right at the source of a lot of innovation. I interviewed 7 professors in my first 12 months, and I want to stay close to what is going on in the labs of our brilliant universities. Going forward, I also want to write broader thematic articles about how important industries are changing, based on the knowledge of the startups we fund, our internal knowhow in the investment team, and knowledge exchange with our co-investors. I’ve already interviewed Elon Musk, I think there are other topics that deserve more attention right now.

Was that your most famous interview?
Yes, Musk now is probably the most famous person I’ve ever interviewed, but at the time he wasn’t that famous yet. I would be really happy if the people who I see now as early founders building their companies also become really famous, and I could talk to them again in a few years when they’re the titans of the industry.

Can you still spill some secrets about good interviewing?
Don’t do interviews before lunch. Hungry people can’t think. Don’t sit directly opposite to the other person. It makes the situation confrontational. A former FBI agent told me that. A really good question that makes people think is: “If the company at which you work would be a person, how would you describe that person?” I shamelessly stole this from a friend – stealing interesting questions is also a good trick. But I try not to rely on a pre-made set of questions and instead have an active conversation and follow up where it gets exciting. Never ask questions which can be answered by googling, and prepare for the interview thoroughly. The most important thing is to actually listen to what the other person has to say. If you hear yourself talking a lot doing an interview, you’re doing it wrong.