TechDrive Zurich

When Kateryna Portmann was a kid in Ukraine, she asked her parents for a robot every time they travelled. They could never find one, so she got dolls instead. She works in robotics now, as Senior Product Manager at ANYbotics, and she runs the Women in Robotics Society.Her route there was not a straight line: international business, an executive MBA, consulting, a PhD in Hong Kong she could not finish, then a startup where a language barrier pushed her towards numbers and into product management. She landed in robotics in 2019, for a reason that never shows up on a CV. Her sister has cerebral palsy and used neurorehabilitation devices, which is how she found the company that made them.The core of this conversation is what actually breaks a robot deployment. Assume the robot works perfectly. It has been simulated, tested and deployed correctly. Then people leave a ladder in the corridor, prop open the door that has to stay shut, and walk the stairs while the robot is on them. The machine is rarely the hard part. The building, the workflows and the people are.In this episode:Why the robot is usually the easy part of a deploymentNobody wants another interface, and what that means for integrationRobot ready, facility ready, organisation ready, and why all three have to line upThe gap between three robots and a hundred, and why most pilots never cross itWhy almost nobody has twenty years of mobile robotics experience, and why that helpsCompliance running behind the technology, and building safe by design anywayMoving from brownfield sites today to greenfield in three to five yearsHow to get into robotics now, and what these companies are actually hiring forServing a population that is half women with teams that are twenty to thirty percentJoin exclusive WhatsApp Group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5zYou'll get sneak peek into upcoming guests, behind the scenes and more.About the guest: Kateryna Portmann is Senior Product Manager at ANYbotics, working on robots for hazardous zones and critical infrastructure, and runs the Women in Robotics Society. She was previously at Hocoma in neurorehabilitation robotics.About the show: TechDrive Zürich is a series of candid, in-car conversations with the people building technology in and around Zürich, hosted by Justinas Mišeikis.▶ Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uvoba2PyXEQ🔗 Guest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katerynaportmann/🔗 Women in Robotics Society: https://www.linkedin.com/company/women-in-robotics-switzerland🔗 ANYbotics: https://www.anybotics.com/🔗 TechDrive Zürich: https://techdrivezurich.lovable.app/🔗 Hosted by Justinas Mišeikis: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinasmiseikis/

For the first time on TechDrive Zürich there are two guests in the car!Katka Letzing and Anna Hakobyan co-initiated Swiss {ai} Weeks, five weeks of AI events running across Switzerland from 1 September into early October, with more than 200 partners and more than 200 events behind it. We recorded two weeks before it opened.It takes about twelve months to build, and they start the week after the previous one ends.Most of the conversation is about restraint rather than acceleration. Anna explains why generating ten pages of a document in two minutes does not mean you should, and what happens when the person receiving it summarises it with AI. Katka explains why leading with AI stopped being impressive the moment everyone started doing it. Both of them describe the shift away from large frontier models toward smaller specialised ones, and the gap between organisations that pilot and organisations that scale.They are also unusually direct about themselves. Katka says she handles negotiation and diplomacy because she was trained to negotiate in war zones, then says in the next breath that the technical side is not her strength. Anna talks about taking ego out of a project you care about, and admits that asking for help is the part she still works on.And one number worth sitting with: partner organisations taught 6000 children about AI, and then those children went back to classrooms where the teachers had not had the same training.In this episode:• Why they built a movement instead of a programme• Coming in with the mindset of an experiment• From Czechoslovakia and the UN to Zürich• Why organisations backed this with no direct business return• What people keep getting wrong about Apertus• Why smaller specialised models are winning• AI consciousness, and generating less• Whether hackathons actually go anywhere⏱️ Chapters00:00 Two guests, two weeks to go01:44 It takes 12 months to build five weeks02:54 Why a movement and not a programme04:21 Come in with the mindset of an experiment05:35 Katka: Czechoslovakia, Silicon Valley, Kickstart07:46 Anna: the UN, Montreal, New York, tech10:34 What each of them brings to the team11:29 Taking ego out of the equation13:29 Getting partners on board14:32 They backed it with no direct business link15:03 Why this works in Switzerland16:18 What would make this year a success17:22 6000 kids, and the teachers who were not ready18:41 Where AI is actually heading19:42 The Apertus misunderstanding20:51 Away from the frontier models21:53 Ten pages in two minutes22:55 AI does not make you cool any more23:43 Do hackathons actually go anywhere24:47 How to take partJoin exclusive WhatsApp Group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5zYou'll get sneak peek into upcoming guests, behind the scenes and more.Swiss {ai} Weeks: https://ai-weeks.ch/Katka Letzing: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katkaletzing/Anna Hakobyan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annahakobyan/More of TechDrive Zürich: https://techdrivezurich.lovable.app/Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/mS4hiMQVwpkTechDrive Zürich is hosted by Justinas Mišeikis:https://jmiseikis.lovable.app/

You have probably seen the videos of a robot rallying against a real table tennis player. This episode is about the five years, and the team, behind it.Join exclusive WhatsApp Group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5zYou'll get sneak peek into upcoming guests, behind the scenes and more.In this TechDrive Zürich drive, Mireille El Gheche shares a path that starts with electrical engineering in Lebanon, runs through a master's in radio communication in Paris, a PhD in optimisation, a postdoc in machine learning in Bordeaux and a stint at EPFL, and lands at Sony AI. The recruitment was unusual: nobody would tell her what the project was. They sent her two research papers, one on computer vision and one on table tennis from DeepMind, and let her connect the dots. She guessed right, joined as a team lead on reinforcement learning, and ended up leading 10 engineers and researchers on a problem that had not been solved before.The technical heart of the conversation is the gap between a system that works in simulation and a machine that has to survive the real world. Every component worked on its own. Making them work together, in real time, against a fast spinning ball, is where the five years went. Or as Mireille puts it: in the digital world you can reset and restart, but in the real world the physics does not forgive you, and if you are late by a few milliseconds the ball is already gone.In this episode:Getting recruited for a secret project with two research papers and no detailsWhy the 80/20 rule breaks down when nobody knows the solution yetResearch team and engineering team, working in parallel for five yearsThe real bottleneck: making every component work together on a real robotWhy building a robot is fundamentally different from building an AI systemHow the sim-to-real gap narrowed over five years, and why it will never fully closeWhat technical leadership actually demands: clarity, trust across disciplines, and making different voices heardGoing from individual contributor to leading 10 people, and learning to let goWhere robotics is heading, from care and industry to self-driving cars and dronesWould she be the patient for a fully autonomous surgical robot?Women in Robotics, and why whoever builds the future shapes the futureStudying engineering in Lebanon in a class that was almost 50/50About the guest: Mireille El Gheche is a robotics and machine learning researcher who led the reinforcement learning team on Sony AI's table tennis robot project, and is an active participant in the Women in Robotics community.About the show: TechDrive Zürich is a series of candid, in-car conversations with the people building technology in and around Zürich, hosted by Justinas Mišeikis.

Most offices are clean, quiet, and a little boring. Stefan Zimmer built the opposite. In this episode of TechDrive Zürich, I drive through Zürich with Stefan, employee number one at FlexOffice and the head of DARE Campus.FlexOffice started in 2018 with nothing but an idea and four laptops. Today it is the biggest serviced-office provider in Switzerland, with 11 locations and around 30,000 square meters of space. DARE Campus is Stefan's boldest bet yet: a home built on purpose for deep-tech and robotics startups, with raw concrete, no fancy double floors, and big rooms where teams can get a little wild with heavy hardware.We also get into how an office company survived a COVID home-office mandate, the day a humanoid robot ran through the campus, the one piece of office tech everyone secretly hates, and why the "far away" neighbourhood of Schlieren is actually nine minutes away by train.⏱️ Chapters00:00 Welcome01:15 From four laptops to Switzerland's biggest02:05 From 15 years in nightlife to running an office03:02 Where the name came from: Join, Explore, DARE03:52 Why the campus is all raw concrete05:07 Taking the distractions away from founders06:53 Building a community, not just renting desks08:22 How the model changed, and surviving COVID10:30 A humanoid robot running through the campus12:37 The office tech everyone secretly hates13:39 Who DARE Campus is for15:46 Is Schlieren really that far? The 9-minute playlist16:04 Events, hackathons and knowledge sharing17:28 Wrap-up💡 A few takeawaysStart small, think big: four laptops became Switzerland's largest serviced-office provider in under a decade.Build for your user, not for looks: raw concrete and big rooms beat polished floors when customers bring robots.Remove the friction: founders do their best work when someone else handles the boring stuff.A crisis can be an accelerator: when offices were "banned," FlexOffice leaned into flexibility and came back stronger.Community is the real product: people come for the space, but they stay for the people.🎁 Special offer for buildersDARE Campus has space open right now, from a single desk to hundreds of square meters of maker space. Mention "TechDrivePodcast" when you sign for a desk or a space, and your first month is completely rent-free. If you work in robotics, deep-tech, or AI and want room to get a little wild, this one is for you.Join exclusive WhatsApp Group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5zYou'll get sneak peek into upcoming guests, behind the scenes and more.🔗 ConnectGuest: Stefan Zimmer - https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefan-zimmer-flexoffice/DARE Campus: darecampus.chFlexOffice: flexoffice.chTechDrive Zürich - hosted by Justinas Mišeikis - https://techdrivezurich.lovable.app/🎧 Also available on YouTube#TechDrive #Zürich #Switzerland #robotics #deeptech #startups #FlexOffice #DARECampus #makerspace #innovation

What turns brilliant Swiss research into a company the world actually wants? This episode of TechDrive Zürich is a driving conversation with Raffael Kellner, who has spent six years at VentureLab / Venture Kick - the programs behind roughly 80% of Switzerland's innovation-based startups.Raffael shares his own path (business school → the startup scenes of Slovakia and Vienna → a failed app startup → consulting → VentureLab), then unpacks what he looks for when a scientist wants to commercialize their work. The recurring theme: mission comes first - "the key thing is to know that you want it" - and everything else can be taught.In this episode:Why a PhD is surprisingly good preparation for startup life - "you've already learned how to suffer"The mindset flip from research perfectionism to startup "good enough, and easy to scale"Why you must validate demand before you buildThe data behind the method: an ~84% success rate for completed Venture Kick projectsSwitzerland's "unfair advantage" - world-class IP and an ecosystem that's international from day oneThe blind spot: the world's growth is shifting to Asia, and why founders should learn those marketsA wow-moment from China's "dark factories," where robots - not cheap labour - build (self-driving) carsWhat Raffael would build if he started a startup today, and the values that would guide itAbout the guest: Raffael Kellner works at VentureLab / Venture Kick, supporting Switzerland's most promising deep-tech and innovation-driven startups from first idea to global markets.About the show: TechDrive Zürich is a series of candid, in-car conversations with the people building technology in and around Zürich - hosted by Justinas Mišeikis.Join exclusive WhatsApp Group: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JgGidD8SqsuFzohXvZmo5zYou'll get sneak peek into upcoming guests, behind the scenes and more.▶ Watch the video version on YouTube: https://youtu.be/X6pt5X9Z0-M🔗 VentureLab: venturelab.swiss • Venture Kick: venturekick.ch🔗 Guest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raffaelkellner/