In 2024, Switzerland’s media found a scapegoat for what Swiss social norms find problematic about entrepreneurship. Zurich-based Ava, maker of a fertility tracker, had failed, according to cofounder and CEO Lea von Bidder. Swiss reporters danced on Ava’s grave. The company aspired too much and risked too much. Lea, in their telling, represented everything wrong with Swiss startups.
I open with von Bidder’s story because it illustrates why Switzerland and other countries struggle to stimulate entrepreneurship despite their earnest efforts.
My introductory article on contrarian compounding, a method of entrepreneurship, argued that founders like von Bidder are on a mission to right a wrong. Like a child hunting for roly-polies, they obsessively turn over stones in search of solutions. They take this mentality into contrarian compounding, in which relentless efforts to refine and execute their solution compound into a category-leading company.
Here, I explore how culture limits and informs what policymakers can do to cultivate stone turners. The aim is to not prescribe solutions, but to identify areas that are ideal for policy experiments.
Culture is the Crux
Most governments know they can’t boost entrepreneurship by decree. While there have been successful interventions (see Josh Lerner’s 2009 book Boulevard of Broken Dreams), these seem to work best in cultures that were disposed towards entrepreneurship anyway.
A 2024 study from Wharton management professors Valentina A. Assenova and Raphael (“Raffi”) Amit speaks to this dynamic. They hypothesized that tight cultures — those that strictly enforce social norms and don’t tolerate diversity of opinion — would be less entrepreneurial than loose cultures that accept more contrarianism and deviation from norms. Controlling for numerous factors, they found that cultural tightness/looseness explains 56 percent of the variation in new company formation rates in 156 nations and 71 percent of the variation in U.S. states. That is an astounding effect.
Most places are culturally tighter than Silicon Valley, so what can policymakers do to loosen the culture? Three opportunities are important to call out.
1. Immigration
Stone turners who feel limited in their home countries often leave. According to the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants have founded or cofounded nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of the top AI companies in the U.S. In the U.K., 39 percent of the 100 fastest-growing companies have at least one foreign-born founder, yet only 14.5 percent of the U.K. population is foreign-born.
Take Elon Musk C97 W97, who moved from South Africa to the U.S. in 1992. “Because the United States is open to new ideas, it attracted people from around the world who had new ideas. So now it’s filled with people who like new ideas and who aren’t bound by history,” he once said in an interview.
To put it differently, cultural looseness compounds. Countries that actively recruit and welcome contrarian migrants stand to benefit. Portugal’s Digital Nomad Visa is a prime example. It has attracted high-earning, high-spending digital workers who go on to launch companies locally.
2. Mafias
In startup “mafias,” founders learn how to build category leaders from mentors. Members fund, advise, and support each other in creating new companies. Effectively, they form a loose subculture with norms that reward stone turning and nurture contrarian compounding.
The best example is Silicon Valley’s PayPal Mafia. Its members (including Musk) have gone on to create companies worth roughly $2.7 trillion today, as estimated by GPT-5.4. This isn’t just an American thing. Skype, Spotify, and Unit 8200, an Israeli cyber intelligence unit, have all created mafia-like networks that produce category-leading companies.
Policy could make a difference here. Deep Tech Nation, a Swiss trade group I’m affiliated with, recently announced Project Switzerland. This program will pair 10 high-potential “scale-ups” with 20 of Switzerland’s most successful entrepreneurs in a one-year mentorship program. It might have a mafia effect.
3. Ease of Starting Up
In the U.S., the filing fee for a Delaware C-corporation is less than $200, and the process takes 10 minutes. The implicit message: Everyone deserves a chance at entrepreneurship.
Meanwhile, to start a Swiss AG, you need to have CHF 100,000 (~USD $127,000) in the bank, and half of that must be paid into the company at the outset. The implicit message: Start with a lot of money, and don’t take risks with it.
Ease of starting up is about more than regulations. For instance, Sweden’s social safety encourages entrepreneurship by ensuring that founders are housed, fed, and healthy before their ventures generate any income.
Government processes and programs have cultural roots. Changing them can shift the growth trajectory of a whole culture.
Culture Isn’t Permanent
Today, billions of people live in societies where being a contrarian entrepreneur is frowned on. To have contrarian ideas about an industry is hard enough. To be a contrarian against the norms of a culture, with social repercussions, is even harder.
Lea von Bidder did both. Thankfully, she’s giving Switzerland another chance and building a new company, Expeerly. Her example will help shift the culture.
For better and worse, culture isn’t permanent. In the U.S., social mores have turned against powerful entrepreneurs in the past. With their indifference to job disruption and allergy to accountability, today’s AI titans risk a similar backlash. The third installment of this contrarian compounding series will take up that issue.
Philipp Stauffer WG04 is the cofounder and managing partner of FYRFLY Venture Partners, an enterprise deep-tech venture firm based in Silicon Valley and Switzerland. Having grown up in a family of entrepreneurs, Stauffer followed his passion for innovation early on, launching consumer products to the European markets right out of school. He has held roles at the frontier of technology innovation and technology as a founder, a leader, and an investor, working with companies such as Accenture, Salesforce, Amazon, Micron, Interpublic, and Google. He is an honorary ambassador to Switzerland and currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
