ETH Entrepreneur Club Blog

Thomas Schulz is the CEO of CareerFairy . After a mathematics curriculum (bachelor and masters) at ETH Zürich, he worked for 3 years in finance. Having decided to change orientations, he co-founded CareerFairy with Maximilian Voss 4 months ago. As a student curious about what really awaits for you at a company you would like to apply for, or as a firm looking to attract young talents, you might have heard of the startup.  In November, he agreed to answer a couple of questions we had for him... Which problem are you trying to solve? Maximilian and I both had tech backgrounds and went to a lot of career fairs. But when we tried to meet people and ask them questions, the most common answer we got was "Please check our website." And we thought 'How about we change things?’  First, we wanted to actually see the people that we would potentially be working with when we applied for a job, and have them openly explain what their work involved. Second, we wished to mak...

Another year, another fuckup , we sometimes think. But what a night we had on May 16th 2019! At Theatre 11, 1500 people gathered to hear about the unfortunate experiences of some amazing story-tellers. Admitting to failures in our lives can be a rather difficult exercise. It is difficult to confess that we made a bad choice, and sometimes even harder to admit that this bad decision led to bearings that got completely out of hands. One of our speakers, Edith Schmid , CEO of Kenzen AG (company which makes wearable laboratories in the form of electronic patches), had to face this situation when her company agreed to become a Swiss branch of a group held by entirely American investors. With a slim connection to these foreign investors, the decision was risky; but risk is something that you often only realize when you are already in front of a complication. And so, with the unfortunate loss of the sole human contact to these foreign investors, Edith Schmid realized that the two branches...

Every business starts with a great idea, but not every great idea turns into a business. We met with Mohammed Khouni, cofounder of Unicorn Labs, to talk about his approach on helping young entrepreneurs build a first prototype for their business. “We always wish to see more ideas coming up.” Mohammed explained during our interview in his working space, the Rocket Hub.  “Especially those ideas which otherwise would have failed in their early stage or would have just been abandoned due to the lack of a prototype.”  Having an idea is one thing, but actually executing and validating it by building a functioning prototype is way more challenging. However, it is an essential first step for young entrepreneurs in order to demonstrate desired functionalities to potential clients, gain the necessary interest of investors or just get a better understanding of the product itself. Without a prototype the startup cannot test their idea and pursue it in the long run.  Now, how d...

Did you know that about 500 000 tons of food are wasted every year in Switzerland, three quarters of which are still entirely fit to eat? According to the Federal Office for Environment (Bundesamt für Umwelt BAFU) this accounts for 14% of the entire Swiss food output. With food shortages and proper waste management being some of the most important issues of our time, a wastefulness of this scale is unacceptable, especially for a progressive country such as Switzerland.  We met with Naomi MacKenzie, former EHL student and one of the cofounders of KITRO, to discuss her approach on reducing food waste with sophisticated AI technology and learn more about her startup story. What is KITRO? KITRO is an automated food waste management system for restaurants and canteens. It works by placing a camera unit above, and a weight sensor below your trash can and thereby allowing you to precisely monitor how much food is being wasted. A machine learning algorithm then recognizes the...

About us We are the Marketing Team of the ETH Entrepreneur Club consisting of students at ETH Zurich and University of Zurich. After spending some time at uni and getting used to the workload and the monotony of our day to day life, it became clear to us that our education is not just about getting a degree in the end. There is so much more learning potential beyond the lecture slides of our professors and the exercise sets we spent our time with. The skillset and experiences we gained are only applicable to a certain extend in real life and no one ever taught us how to become successful in today’s world. Furthermore, despite hearing from many thriving ETH spinoffs and startups we hardly understood what it takes to actually become entrepreneurial ourselves. The thought of starting a company has always been very fascinating to us, which is why we joined the ETH Entrepreneur Club as a first step into that direction. Our mission As part of the marketing committee we a...