Before the first episode there was a very interesting short report with and about Peter Schüpbach in 10 vor 10: See here the video (in German).
My quick feedback after the first episode of SF Start up:
#1: The first episode was cool, but way too short. 35 minutes for 19 pitches plus meta information resulted in an average coverage of about 30 seconds per project. Some had >1 minute, some had <10 seconds or even none (?).
#2: The upside of #1 is that there is a huge focus on the website coverage of the top 100. From an overall point of view this seems to be quite fair: No one got extensively covered, everyone will have to check out the websites for further information.
#3: Some cool projects I saw: The oldest participant Urs Studer, Christian Vögeli with Dybuster (dyslexia curing software), the youngest participant Pascal Stoop (after his presentation he got 30k CHF funding from the jury right away).
Looking forward to the next episodes. I let you know as soon as the podcasts will be online.
Some other thoughts:
After watching TV I spent the evening explaining my dad and a friend of his all about blogging and Web 2.0 without actually being able to use those terms (they don’t know nothing about the web so I had to use real simple language — it was an excellent exercise and I learned a lot). We talked about the social web and how sharing stuff could be both risk and opportunity. They said they don’t understand why someone would like to share stuff. For them, those things are private and none of anyones business. I explained that you have to use those tools carefully and wisely and talked about everything I shared so far had a hugely positive ROI for me. ROI not directly in terms of money, but in contacts, fun, and of course business opportunites (i.e. indirect money). I explained that you always have to spread the word when you’re selling something. The Web is just a tool that allows you to do that on a much larger scale. Instead of selling stuff on a flea market with 1000 potential customers it could be more profitable to sell it over eBay with millions of potential customers. But the tools are still just tools: You have to use them, and you have to work hard. The Web is no licence to make money for doing nothing. The Web is a tool like every other tool: you have to use it in order to create value. Anyway: It was a very interesting conversation and its hard to put all my learnings in words. I just wanted to document this conversation and share this experience with you :-).