Venture Leaders Technology 2026: Roadshow takeaways from Philip Sieber-Gasser, team captain & Besso co-founder

In mid-April, the Venture Leaders Technology 2026 team travelled to San Francisco for a week of investor meetings and conversations across Silicon Valley. We spoke with Team Captain and Besso Co-Founder Philip Sieber-Gasser about what stood out and what only becomes clear once you're in the room.

Closing the gap between Switzerland and Silicon Valley
I came into the week with a simple idea: Switzerland is to global trade what Silicon Valley is to venture capital. Both became indispensable by positioning themselves at the intersection of what matters. But neither is fully legible from the outside.

Silicon Valley investors don’t immediately see what Switzerland has built over centuries. Swiss founders don’t immediately see how this place operates beneath the surface. That gap is real. And it goes both ways.


Knowing vs. Feeling
I knew what investors would focus on before walking in: team, vision, scale. But sitting across from people who operate like that every day is different. The first feedback I got: "You need to brag more." In Europe, you understate. Here, if you don’t clearly claim your space, it works against you.

The team's question is immediate and direct. And the vision needs to be huge; if it can’t return the fund multiple times over, the conversation is hard to justify. None of this was new. But there is a difference between knowing it and feeling it.


What actually matters isn't always on the agenda
Some of the most valuable parts of the week weren’t planned. We spent two hours at Plug and Play Tech Center with Saeed Amidi, an early host to Google and now backing 1,000+ companies. The meeting came together at the last minute.

What stood out wasn’t the track record, but how present he was, curious, giving direct feedback, making introductions on the spot. The same with his GP: sharp questions, concrete follow-ups after every pitch.


Learning as a group
At one point, one of the founders in our group lost her voice completely. So the rest of us stepped in and supported her in pitching her company. The first time was awkward. By the third, it actually worked.

It removed any emotional attachment to the pitch and made it very clear, very quickly, what mattered and what didn’t. Nobody planned it. It just happened. And it turned into one of the most useful exercises of the week.


Direct feedback
I pitched in glass offices, corporate campuses, and co-working spaces, and in a living room in Palo Alto, at the Swisscom house that’s now closing. Not a co-working space. Not a glass office building. A house on a quiet street, with VCs sitting on the sofa waiting for your pitch. Only in Silicon Valley.

The sharpest feedback came from Benjamin Narasin at Tenacity Venture Capital, sitting at a dining table, getting to the core of each pitch within minutes. Not the obvious points. The assumptions underneath, the ones you’ve quietly built your entire strategy around without realizing it.


What’s actually defensible
In a world where AI improves daily, technical advantages get compressed. What was defensible last year becomes table stakes. The models catch up. This came up in a session with Gabor Cselle.

What remains is domain knowledge and proprietary data. At Besso, we have both, but building that depth takes time, while startups run on speed. Speed and depth pull in opposite directions.

After 10+ pitches, one shift helped cut through: “the TurboTax of tariffs.” It made everything clear immediately and moved the conversation to what actually matters.

Leaving space works
One practical takeaway: don’t over-plan your time in Silicon Valley. In Switzerland, showing up somewhere with a half-empty agenda is called being unprepared. In Silicon Valley, it can be a deliberate design choice. Start with a few key meetings, then leave space. The rest fills itself through introductions. The culture runs on connection, and people actively make those connections happen.

Grateful to the investors and advisors for their time, to the founders for the honesty and conversations, and to Venturelab and the sponsors for making it happen!


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