Builders
A day with a founder: rituals, places, tools
A composite portrait drawn from our conversations with founders we accompany between Lausanne, Geneva and Zurich. No recipe, but a day as it is really lived when you carry a project.
This portrait is not of one person. It is composed from several founders we accompany, with their consent and without any of them being recognisable. The places and rituals are real. The details that would identify a project have been removed.
6:40 am. Before the screens
The day begins without a phone. Thirty minutes walking along the lake or, for one of them, twenty lengths in the still-empty municipal pool. The ritual is nothing spiritual: it is the only moment when one thinks about the project without anyone asking for an answer. The week’s difficult decisions are often taken there, before being formalised later in the morning.
8:30 am. The fifteen-minute check-in
One team check-in per day, standing, fifteen minutes, never more. Three questions: what is blocking, what has been delivered, what changes the timeline. Everything else goes in writing. Almost all the founders we follow have abolished status meetings: they consume the project’s scarcest resource, the attention of those delivering it.
10 am. The office is not always the office
The morning is spent where the project moves forward: at the formulation partner’s laboratory, in the prototyper’s workshop, with the distributor who will open the first country. The office, often shared, serves the afternoon. These founders’ places have one thing in common: you see the product there, not only slides. A prototype on the table changes the quality of a conversation.
2 pm. Three tools, not thirty
- A living framing document: the need, the scope, the milestones, the decisions taken and their date. Reread every week, never rewritten from scratch.
- A one-page dashboard: cash, timeline, three product indicators. If a fourth indicator appears, another one disappears.
- A notebook, on paper. For conversations with partners and experts: what is said there is not always meant to be shared in a collaborative tool.
6 pm. The last-call rule
The last call of the day is reserved for someone who has nothing to sell and nothing to ask: a peer, a former partner, a mentor. Twenty minutes to say out loud what is worrying. Almost all the founders who last have this safeguard. Those who have lost it realise too late.
“The project moves forward where you can see it. Not in tools, not in meetings: on the table, in the hands of those who will sell it.”
This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence and reviewed under Aegryn editorial responsibility. In accordance with Article 50 of the EU AI Act, we assume editorial responsibility for this content.
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