Andreas Goeldi has been a Partner and part of the b2venture Fund Team since 2019 and is an avid technologist, serial entrepreneur, and investor with over 25 years’ experience. From an early age Andreas was interested in computers and got his first part-time job as a programmer in high school. “I used COBOL and Fortran to program production planning systems at a local industrial company – true old-school IT,” Andreas said. 

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He founded his first startup in the 1990s while still at university, a digital consultancy that got acquired a few years later. The company built several pioneering websites in German-speaking Europe during the early days of the Web. Andreas first was the CTO of the company, then became CEO in 2002 and led the company through a tough turnaround after the dot-com bubble burst. “Surviving the dot-com bust was quite a roller coaster ride, but we took advantage of the crisis and managed to become the market leader.”

After 2004, he went on to found several other successful companies in online media, social media analytics, and video marketing. The St. Gallen native also spent twelve years in the Boston area, first as a Sloan Fellow at MIT and then as an entrepreneur starting in 2007. His two US-based startups were early users of machine learning and cloud infrastructure.  

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He says entrepreneurs need to be just as decisive in tough times as they must be when everything is going well. “It’s essential for entrepreneurs to be willing to confront reality in all aspects – regarding the state of your business, your talent base, your financial situation and the needs of your customers. Delusional thinking is what kills most startups.”

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Andreas began angel investing more than twenty years ago, supporting a spin-off from ETH Zürich and participated in a host of other angel rounds afterwards. He is particularly passionate about fostering entrepreneurship at the university level and bringing a culture of risk-taking to commercialize cutting-edge technologies, which was one of his central motivations behind developing b2venture’s startup resources.

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“We have great institutions doing world-class research, but we don’t have an appetite for risk. At MIT and Harvard, the best minds are thinking about founding companies, and in Europe too many are thinking about joining a bank or becoming a consultant.”

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Andreas’ passion for entrepreneurship is also a family affair - his wife is a prominent entrepreneur in Switzerland and both are committed to sharing the duties of parenthood and balancing the demands equitably.

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“It really depends on what stage of life you’re in - but it’s very important not to let yourself get consumed by work and create some hierarchies about what’s essential and what’s merely important.”