The short version:

• For a decade, growth meant headcount. AI is breaking that link: leverage per operator is becoming the real metric.

• A lot of venture capital never financed product — it financed coordination. That’s the layer AI compresses first.

• Lean doesn’t mean cheaper, and it doesn’t mean fewer good people. It means different people, and a cost structure that moves from organizational complexity to infrastructure complexity.

• From the investor’s seat (): capital shifts from “burn optimization” to “timeline optimization,” rounds concentrate, and the power law refuses to die.

Part One — The View From Inside the Company

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about AI — but not through the usual “AI is replacing jobs” lens.

The more interesting shift, from where I sit inside an early-stage startup, is happening somewhere else entirely: inside the structure of startups themselves. And, as a consequence, inside venture capital too. Because if AI changes how companies are built operationally, it inevitably changes how they get funded, how teams scale, and how ownership evolves over time.

For a decade, scaling a startup meant hiring

For the last ten years, scaling followed a predictable formula: raise capital → hire people → increase execution capacity. More engineers, more SDRs, more ops, more support, more management layers. Growth and headcount were inseparable, because execution itself required coordination at every level of the organization. As startups grew, complexity grew alongside them — more meetings, more alignment, more reporting, more overhead.

That’s exactly where AI quietly starts to get interesting.

AI doesn’t replace operators. It increases leverage per operator

Today one strong operator can execute across research, documentation, workflow automation, market analysis, customer support, internal reporting, prototyping — and increasingly engineering. Not perfectly, not autonomously, but well enough that the amount of organizational structure required to reach real traction is starting to change.

This isn’t theoretical. Sequoia has pointed to AI-native startups generating more than $1M in revenue per employee while building “self-improving companies” that use AI internally across legal, recruiting, sales, and operations. Historically, startups burned capital early because scaling execution meant scaling headcount — people for ops, support, onboarding, implementation, reporting, coordination. AI-native companies are beginning to compress many of those layers at once, and that changes the economics of building from the ground up.

Lean doesn’t mean fewer good people. It means different people

AI-native startups increasingly operate like infrastructure companies internally. The goal is no longer only building the product — it’s building the systems that multiply execution capacity across the whole company. Less coordination for its own sake, more systems thinking. Less manual workflow management, more orchestration. Less middle management, more technical infrastructure.

That raises the bar for early operators rather than lowering it: exceptional engineers, workflow architects, and infrastructure-minded builders who can operate in ambiguity.

Lean doesn’t mean cheap, either

AI reduces organizational complexity but adds technical complexity. Inference, compute, orchestration, evaluation systems, data infrastructure, automation reliability — these are becoming core operational layers. And unlike traditional SaaS, many AI products carry variable costs that scale directly with usage. The cost structure shifts; it doesn’t disappear.

So early-stage startups now have to scale two things at once: organizational scalability and infrastructure scalability. Increasingly, the second one matters more.

The human layer still compounds

Startups may become simultaneously smaller in headcount and more powerful in execution. But the qualities that compound most in zero-to-one are still deeply human: judgment, trust, adaptability, conviction, ownership mindset, and the ability to keep executing when momentum temporarily disappears. AI accelerates execution. It doesn’t replace the decisions you make with incomplete information.

So maybe the real shift is this: the next generation of winners won’t be defined by who hires fastest, but by who creates the most leverage per operator. AI may not remove the operator journey — it may simply make the best operators more visible.

That’s the change I feel from inside the company. But the more I sit with it, the more I suspect the bigger earthquake is on the other side of the table — in how this capital efficiency reshapes the people writing the checks.

So I asked someone who’s sat there.

Part Two — The View From the Other Side of the Table

by (Thank you for the collab 🚀😊)—

Venture capital was built around an assumption: that growth requires proportional organizational expansion. More growth → more hiring → more burn → more fundraising. If AI lets a startup hit Series A metrics with a third of the team, that chain starts to break. So the real question for investors is: what changes when capital no longer mainly buys time to hire and coordinate?

What is venture capital actually for now? If coordination is partly automated, what does an AI-native founder actually spend a round on?

Capital has always been a tool for growth — expanding market share, increasing revenue, and ultimately improving profitability. The expectation is straightforward: capital drives outcomes, outcomes drive valuation, and investors generate returns.

Historically, a significant part of venture underwriting focused on capital efficiency: how much money a company needed to achieve a given milestone. Metrics such as cash burn and runway were central to fundraising discussions.

AI is changing that equation. As software development, operations, and decision-making become more efficient, every dollar goes further. The conversation is shifting away from burn optimization toward speed of execution. Today, capital is increasingly being deployed not to reduce costs, but to help companies accomplish more in less time. In many cases, time — not cash burn — has become the primary constraint.

Round sizes and cadence: do “seed” and “Series A” still mean the same thing? If founders can go further before raising, are we heading toward smaller, later, or fewer rounds?

What we’ve observed throughout 2025 is a much stronger concentration of capital. Venture capital has always followed a power-law distribution, where a small number of companies generate the majority of returns. But the funding landscape is becoming even more concentrated.

Rather than a broad “spray and pray” approach, investors are increasingly deploying larger checks into a smaller set of conviction-backed companies, often at earlier stages. At the same time, angels, syndicates, and family offices have become significantly more active, filling much of the financing gap at the pre-seed and seed stages.

As a result, traditional early-stage VC participation has evolved. Many institutional funds are entering later or concentrating their capital into fewer opportunities, while smaller early-stage rounds are increasingly being serviced by alternative sources of capital.

Ownership and dilution: who blinks? Capital-efficient founders stay concentrated longer — does that collide with funds that need ownership targets to make the math work?

Neither side necessarily has to blink.

The venture ecosystem is adapting to a new reality in which founders can build meaningful businesses with less upfront capital. As a result, investor expectations around ownership are evolving as well. While ownership targets remain important, they are no longer the sole determinant of whether a fund participates in a company.

Strong businesses will continue to command favorable terms, and investors are increasingly willing to be flexible when they believe the opportunity justifies it.

The fund-math problem: how do large funds deploy? VC returns depend on owning enough of the winners. If the best companies need less money, how do large funds put capital to work?

While AI companies often appear capital-efficient in their early stages, the economics change as they scale.

Many AI businesses are built on usage-based infrastructure (pay per use), where compute costs increase alongside customer growth. As a result, the amount of capital required to launch a company may be lower than ever, but the capital required to scale it can still be substantial.

This may lead to a shift in capital allocation across the venture lifecycle. Rather than large amounts of money being deployed at inception, we could see more capital concentrated in later-stage rounds, where companies need financing to support infrastructure, compute, and growth at scale.

What do investors diligence differently? When five people hit $1M per employee, how do you separate durable leverage from a thin wrapper any incumbent can copy?

This remains one of the biggest challenges for investors today, and I don’t think the industry has fully solved it yet.

There is still a meaningful knowledge gap on the investment side when it comes to evaluating AI-native businesses and understanding the depth of their technical differentiation. Many investors are learning in real time.

Over the next few years, I expect this gap to narrow as more operators, engineers, and technical founders move into investing. People who have built and worked with these technologies firsthand will be better positioned to assess what constitutes a defensible advantage versus a superficial layer that can be replicated.

Until then, the industry is still in a learning phase.

The contrarian take: does AI reshape startups more than VC? Maybe money still flows the same way and power laws still rule. Where do you actually land?

I largely agree with that view.

Venture capital, at its core, is still a branch of finance. While data, models, and frameworks matter, investing has always involved a degree of judgment, intuition, and conviction about the future.

AI will undoubtedly change how startups are built and how investors evaluate opportunities. Venture firms will continue updating their theses and adapting to new market realities. But the fundamental objective remains unchanged: identifying exceptional companies and generating outsized returns.

I also don’t believe AI fundamentally breaks the power-law nature of venture capital. The starting line may be more accessible today — founders can build faster and with fewer resources — but the finish line remains just as competitive. The distribution of outcomes is still likely to be heavily concentrated among a small number of winners, which means the underlying dynamics of venture returns may prove more resilient than many expect.

Closing — Two Takes, One Question

From inside the company, the shift looks like leverage per operator: smaller teams, bigger output, ownership over coordination.

From the investor’s seat, VCs will evolve. The conversation moves from “cash burn optimization” to “timeline optimization.” Traditional institutional seed doesn’t disappear — it gives way to angels, syndicates, and family offices, while bigger checks concentrate later. And the power law keeps doing what it does.

Either way, the decade ahead may reward concentration — of ownership, of leverage, of conviction — more than scale for its own sake.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Does AI reduce the capital a startup needs to raise?

It reduces the capital needed to start. AI compresses many of the early operational layers — ops, support, onboarding, reporting, coordination — that startups used to fund with headcount. But scaling can still be capital-intensive, because usage-based infrastructure and compute costs grow with the customer base. The amount needed at inception falls; the amount needed to scale often doesn’t.

What is an AI-native startup?

An AI-native startup builds AI into both its product and its internal operations from day one, rather than bolting it on later. Internally it behaves more like an infrastructure company: it invests in systems and orchestration that multiply execution capacity across the whole team, instead of adding headcount for every new function.

Will AI replace venture capital?

No. Venture capital is, at its core, a branch of finance built on judgment, conviction, and the power law — a few winners returning the fund. AI changes how startups are built and how investors run diligence, but it doesn’t change the underlying objective: finding exceptional companies and generating outsized returns.

Why is venture funding becoming more concentrated?

Because capital efficiency lets a smaller set of companies show strong metrics earlier, investors are deploying larger checks into fewer, higher-conviction bets. Angels, syndicates, and family offices increasingly fill the pre-seed and seed gap, while institutional funds enter later or concentrate capital where conviction is highest.

What does “leverage per operator” mean?

It’s the output a single strong operator can produce when AI handles research, documentation, automation, analysis, support, and prototyping. The thesis: the next generation of winners won’t be defined by who hires fastest, but by who creates the most leverage per person.

Are AI startups cheaper to build but more expensive to scale?

Often, yes. AI reduces organizational complexity but adds technical complexity — inference, compute, orchestration, evaluation, data infrastructure. Many AI products carry variable costs that rise directly with usage, so the cost structure shifts toward infrastructure rather than disappearing.

What is the power law in venture capital?

The power law is the pattern where a small number of investments generate the vast majority of a fund’s returns. AI may make the starting line more accessible, but the finish line stays competitive — so outcomes are still expected to concentrate among a few big winners.

A few things you might have missed on Vestingnotes:

See you next week 🕶️

… and don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn Jona & Sayanee 😎

Cheers,
Jona & Sayanee

The short version

If you only read one part of this issue, read this:

1. Prioritization is the multiplier. A first hire’s scarcest resource isn’t time — it’s attention. Choosing what not to do compounds more than doing more.

2. Trust is built in the boring moments, not the big wins — the follow-up sent on time, the promise kept when no one is watching.

3. Documentation is memory the team can rely on when individuals can’t. Writing it down feels slow; re-explaining it ten times is slower.

4. Saying no protects what matters. Every yes silently competes with the work that actually moves the company forward.

5. Resilience is a practice, not a trait. It’s showing up the next day, through the stretches where progress is invisible — which is exactly where compounding happens.

The thread connecting all five: most meaningful progress is invisible while it’s happening.

In the first part of this series, I wrote about communication, distribution, enterprise customers, founder pressure, and relationships. Those lessons arrived early and were easy to see. This second set took longer to surface — and in many ways shaped the experience more.

Lesson 6: Prioritization Is the Hidden Multiplier

A startup rarely struggles because it lacks ideas. It struggles because everything feels urgent at once.

New customers. Product issues. Partnerships. Internal processes. Each one demands attention. Each one feels like it can’t wait.

But effort spent on the wrong priority still feels like work. It just doesn’t compound.

Over 17 months I learned a simple filter: does this compound, or just consume? Work that compounds builds something that keeps paying off. Work that only consumes burns the same attention without leaving anything behind.

Saying yes to one thing is quietly saying no to many others.

One example made the filter concrete. When we were deciding what to build next, the honest question wasn’t “what would customers like?” — it was “what saves the company the most time?” A feature that removed a recurring manual step internally frees up hours every week, week after week. That compounds. A nice-to-have that looks good in a demo but changes nothing operationally doesn’t.

The same logic applied to where I spent attention with customers. Some accounts needed real support and would grow with it — that’s where focus had outsized impact. Others were already extremely happy; investing more there felt productive, but the marginal impact was close to zero. Prioritization meant being honest about that, and putting attention where it would actually move something rather than where it felt comfortable.

Lesson 7: Trust Is Built in the Boring Moments

People assume trust is built during the big wins — the closed deal, the successful launch, the impressive demo.

In reality, trust is built in the unremarkable moments in between. The follow-up sent when promised. The detail remembered without a reminder. The commitment kept when no one is checking.

Reliability, repeated consistently, becomes reputation. And reputation is one of the few assets that follows you everywhere.

The clearest example for me was support response time. Nothing dramatic — just answering customers quickly and consistently. Over time they learned that when they wrote, we replied. Not eventually. Not after three follow-ups. They came to expect it.

That expectation is the asset. A customer who knows you’ll respond is a customer who trusts you with the next problem too, and the one after that. Boring, repeated reliability quietly became one of our strongest relationships with customers.

Lesson 8: Documentation Is a Gift to Your Future Self

In the early days, everything lives inside people’s heads. It works — until it doesn’t.

Until the team grows. Until the same question gets asked for the tenth time. Until something important depends on a detail only one person remembers.

Writing things down feels slow in the moment. It rarely feels urgent. But documentation is how a company scales without re-explaining itself constantly.

Process isn’t bureaucracy. It’s memory the organization can rely on when individuals can’t.

The real cost shows up at handover. When knowledge lives only in one person’s head, every transition — a new teammate, a different owner, someone out for a week — creates friction. Things slow down. The same context has to be rebuilt from scratch.

Capturing internal knowledge well, in the best way you can, isn’t busywork. It’s what lets the company move people, responsibilities, and customers around without losing speed each time. The goal isn’t more documents — it’s removing the handover friction that quietly slows the whole company down.

Lesson 9: Saying No Protects What Matters

Growth creates a strange temptation: to chase everything. Every customer. Every feature request. Every opportunity that appears.

It feels productive. It often isn’t.

A startup’s scarcest resource isn’t capital — it’s attention. Every distraction quietly competes with the work that actually moves the company forward.

Learning to say no — clearly, respectfully, without guilt — turns out to be one of the most strategic skills you can develop.

If every customer request gets a yes, you slowly lose the thread. Each individual yes feels reasonable. Together, they pull the product in a dozen directions, away from the long-term view of what you’re trying to become.

Say yes to everything and you risk becoming what other people want you to be, rather than what you set out to build. Feedback is precious — it’s some of the most valuable signal a startup gets. But feedback doesn’t always define the long run. Knowing the difference is the skill.

Lesson 10: Resilience Is a Practice, Not a Trait

Some weeks, very little works. Deals stall. Bugs appear. Plans shift. Momentum disappears.

It’s easy to imagine resilient people simply don’t feel these moments. That’s not it.

Resilience isn’t the absence of difficulty. It’s showing up the next day anyway. It’s continuing to execute through the stretches where progress is invisible.

And it’s precisely in those stretches that compounding does its quiet work.

There were genuinely hard weeks — stretches where several problems converged at once, personal and professional, and none of them seemed to have an exit. In those moments, balance isn’t really a thing; you’re just in it.

What changed for me wasn’t that the hard weeks stopped. It’s that I got better at recovering from them. A stretch that once would have lingered now takes me days, not weeks, to reset — and I’ve learned to switch off and back on far more deliberately than before. Resilience, it turns out, isn’t toughness. It’s a recovery skill you build by going through it.

The Real Lesson, Revisited

In Part 1, I wrote that the most important lesson after 17 months was compounding.

This second set reinforces the same idea from a different angle.

Prioritization compounds. Trust compounds. Documentation compounds. Focus compounds. Resilience compounds.

The pattern keeps repeating because it’s true.

The first part taught me what the lessons are. The months that follow are teaching me how to actually live them — consistently, under pressure, without losing momentum.

And maybe that’s the real work of a first hire. Not just learning the lessons, but building the discipline to apply them, day after day, while everything keeps moving.

FAQ: Being the first hire at a startup

What does a startup first hire do? A startup first hire typically works across many functions — sales, operations, customer success, onboarding, partnerships, product feedback — and the role evolves as the company grows. In practice, the first hire often acts as a connector between functions that don’t yet have dedicated teams.

Is being the first employee at a startup worth it? For people who value ownership, fast learning, and rapid growth, the experience can accelerate a career significantly. The trade-off is real: more uncertainty, more ambiguity, and more responsibility than a defined role at a larger company.

What skills are most important for startup operators? Adaptability, communication, problem-solving, execution, prioritization, and relationship building. The common thread is the ability to create clarity and make progress before perfect information exists.

How is startup life different from working at a large company? Large companies generally offer defined roles, established systems, and predictable processes. Startups ask you to build the systems while executing inside a changing environment at the same time.

What is an ownership mindset in startups? Taking responsibility for outcomes rather than limiting yourself to the tasks in a job description — proactively spotting problems and helping solve them, regardless of whose “job” it technically is.

Why is execution so important in startups? Because uncertainty is high and resources are limited, startups learn primarily through action. Consistent execution generates feedback and insight that planning alone can’t produce.

A few things you might have missed on Vestingnotes:

• First Hire at a Startup: 5 Lessons From My First 17 Months at nestermind

• When Should an Early-Stage Tech Startup Introduce a CRM?

• Inside a Startup, Why this & Why now: A small reset before a new year of compounding

See you next week 🕶️

… and don’t forget to follow me on LinkedIn 😎

Cheers,
Jona

The short version

If you read nothing else, read this:

• Ideas start companies. Execution builds them. Almost everyone has the idea. Far fewer keep doing the boring work after the excitement wears off.

• Consistency beats intensity. Compounding is just the same ordinary action, repeated long enough that it stops looking ordinary.

• The breakthrough is invisible while it’s happening. From the outside it looks sudden. From the inside it’s practice number 142.

Now the 17 — one for each month I’ve spent learning this the hard way.

17 things in 17 months

1. Ideas are cheap. Execution is the rent you pay every day. Most startups have a good idea. Most founders are smart. What’s rare is doing ordinary things exceptionally well for an unreasonably long time.

2. The result is decided before the puck drops. My coach used to say the game was just the exam. Nobody remembers practice 142, the Tuesday workout, the drill run for the hundredth time — but those are where Friday night was actually won.

3. Repetition isn’t the obstacle. It’s the work. I kept waiting for dramatic breakthroughs. Instead I refined the same pitch, revisited the same assumptions, heard the same objection for the tenth time. Eventually I realized: that is the breakthrough.

4. Some doors get slammed. You make the next call anyway. One of my early cold calls: “Hi, this is Jona from nestermind — how much time do you spend updating your CRM?” The answer: “Jonathan, you know how I save time? By avoiding conversations with people like you.” Fair enough. The job isn’t to never hear that. It’s to dial again.

5. Consistency beats intensity. Motivation is a Friday-night emotion. Execution is a Tuesday-morning habit. The startup is built on Tuesdays.

6. Compounding feels like nothing while it’s compounding. That’s the trap. Every day just feels like another day of the work — until one day the curve bends and people call it luck.

7. Most growth is invisible before it’s obvious. By the time the funding round, the big customer, or the product-market-fit moment shows up, the real work was done months earlier, where nobody was watching.

8. Founders create direction. Operators create momentum. Management team points the company somewhere. The team turn that direction into motion. Without execution, even the sharpest vision stays theoretical.

9. There's no warm-up for the first hire. I used to think you prepare, then you start. As nestermind's first hire I learned it's the opposite: you start on day one, with no warm-up — and the preparation happens while you're already on the ice.

10. Ownership is a mindset, not a cap table line. Equity is the paperwork. Ownership is taking responsibility for an outcome without waiting for someone else to fix it — especially when progress feels invisible.

11. “Not my job” doesn’t exist on the bench. In hockey nobody refuses to backcheck. You ask your teammate if they need a hand, and if you don’t know how to fix something you say “I’ll figure it out and come back with a plan.” Same in an early-stage startup. Every job is your job.

12. Talk to customers before they understand your own value. The companies that win keep having conversations when traction is thin and the market hasn’t caught up yet. You learn faster than you grow — and then you grow.

13. The unglamorous follow-up email is the moat. Nobody screenshots a follow-up. But the deal that closes is usually the one where someone simply did what they said, on time, when no one was watching.

14. You build before the market is convinced. Pre-Seed taught me this in the body, not the slides: you’re improving the product before most people understand why it matters. That gap is uncomfortable. It’s also the whole opportunity.

15. The idea will change. The ability to keep executing won’t. Products evolve. Markets evolve. Sometimes the whole business model evolves. What investors really evaluate is whether the team keeps moving while all of that shifts under their feet.

16. Resilience is a practice, not a personality trait. It isn’t about feeling motivated. It’s about continuing to execute through the stretches where the work seems to do nothing — which is exactly where the compounding lives.

17. The story nobody sees is the real story. The funding announcement, the growth chart, the success post — those are the visible outcomes. The conversations, iterations, rejected calls and quiet repetitions underneath them are where the company was actually built.

What this looks like a year and a half in

When I was younger, I thought hockey games were won on Friday nights.

Now I think my coach was right. The result was decided much earlier — in the practices nobody remembers.

Seventeen months in, I’m fairly sure the same is true for startups. The breakthrough everyone eventually notices is just hundreds of small, unremarkable actions that finally added up in public.

Most days still feel like another day of doing the work.

Those are the days that matter most.

FAQ: Being the first hire at a startup

What does a startup first hire do? A startup first hire typically works across many functions — sales, operations, customer success, onboarding, partnerships, product feedback — and the role evolves as the company grows. In practice, the first hire often acts as a connector between functions that don’t yet have dedicated teams.

Is being the first employee at a startup worth it? For people who value ownership, fast learning, and rapid growth, the experience can accelerate a career significantly. The trade-off is real: more uncertainty, more ambiguity, and more responsibility than a defined role at a larger company.

What skills are most important for startup operators? Adaptability, communication, problem-solving, execution, prioritization, and relationship building. The common thread is the ability to create clarity and make progress before perfect information exists.

How is startup life different from working at a large company? Large companies generally offer defined roles, established systems, and predictable processes. Startups ask you to build the systems while executing inside a changing environment at the same time.

What is an ownership mindset in startups? Taking responsibility for outcomes rather than limiting yourself to the tasks in a job description — proactively spotting problems and helping solve them, regardless of whose “job” it technically is.

Why is execution so important in startups? Because uncertainty is high and resources are limited, startups learn primarily through action. Consistent execution generates feedback and insight that planning alone can’t produce.

A few things you might have missed on Vestingnotes:

• First Hire at a Startup, Part 1 — 5 Lessons From My First 17 Months at nestermind

• When Should an Early-Stage Tech Startup Introduce a CRM?

• The Self-Storage Opportunity: The $60B Market Most People Overlook

See you next week 🕶️

… and don’t forget to follow me on LinkedIn 😎

Cheers,
Jona

The short version

Five lessons from 17 months as nestermind’s first hire:

1. Startup intensity only makes sense once you live it. You stop thinking in tasks and start thinking in outcomes.

2. The first-hire role isn’t a title — it’s whatever the company needs that week. Your real job is to connect the dots no specialized team exists to own yet.

3. Execution creates clarity faster than planning. You learn by shipping, not by waiting for perfect information.

4. Operations are the hidden foundation of growth. A scalable product with non-scalable processes is a mismatch — and mismatches eventually break something.

5. Customers buy outcomes, not software. The product is only the vehicle.

The throughline under all five: the most valuable thing a startup teaches you is how to build in ambiguity.

Ciao e benvenuti 😊

Seventeen months ago, I became the first hire at nestermind — an early-stage Swiss PropTech. At the time, I thought I was joining a software company. Looking back, I joined something more complex: a company still trying to find its place in the market while building the systems, processes, and relationships needed to grow — all at the same time.

That distinction matters, because startups are easy to misread from the outside. People see product launches, customer wins, fundraising announcements, growth milestones. What they rarely see is the constant adaptation behind the scenes. Every week brings new information, new constraints, new problems to solve.

A first hire — employee number one, before any department exists — sits in the middle of all of it. Over 17 months I’ve worked across sales, accounts management, customer success, customer support, operations, partnerships, enterprise conversations, and fundraising discussions, (and more recently, Vibe Coding 😁). Most of it was never in a job description. It simply became necessary as the company evolved.

Here’s the core of it: being the first hire isn’t about filling a role. It’s about helping build the company while the company is still figuring out what it wants to become.

These are the five lessons that shaped how I think about startups, execution, and the operator journey.

Lesson 1: Startup intensity only makes sense once you live it

I started on December 27, 2024. At that exact moment, nestermind was in the beginning of its Pre-Seed round. Imagine joining a company when the founders are pitching, negotiating, and fighting for the resources to make the vision real. There’s no time to ease in. You learn on the move.

In traditional companies, responsibilities are well defined and work fits inside systems that already exist. In an early-stage startup, many of those systems don’t exist yet — you’re building them while serving customers, improving the product, and trying to create momentum. So the work rarely stays inside fixed hours. Even after closing the laptop, part of your attention stays with a customer conversation, an open question, an opportunity that needs a fast reply.

Over time, the line between “my responsibilities” and “the company’s responsibilities” fades. You stop thinking in tasks and start thinking in outcomes. The question stops being does this belong to my role? and becomes does this help the company move forward?

It’s intense. And it’s exponential.

Lesson 2: The first-hire role isn’t a title — it’s whatever the company needs that week

I wasn’t joining as a developer. I wasn’t writing code. My role was everything else — sales, operations, jumping into client conversations, making sure nothing fell through the cracks.

And out of everything on the list — processes to set up, product to shape — one thing came first: picking up the phone. Cold calling. Because in the early days of a startup, nothing creates traction faster.

Early-stage startups don’t have the luxury of specialized departments. Until those teams exist, someone has to connect the dots between them. First hires become those connectors. The people who thrive here aren’t the ones who need perfectly defined responsibilities — they’re the ones who can create clarity when clarity doesn’t yet exist.

Lesson 3: Execution creates clarity faster than planning

Before joining a startup, I believed clarity was something you achieved before taking action. Today I see it the other way around.

Take this newsletter. When I started Vestingnotes, I never wrote content weeks in advance. I never planned today what I’d publish in three or four weeks.

The same is true inside nestermind. Many of our most important decisions were made before we had complete certainty. Not recklessly — but with the understanding that waiting indefinitely for perfect information carries its own risk. Startups compete on learning speed, and often the fastest way to gain clarity isn’t more analysis. It’s action:

Launch. Observe. Gather feedback. Adjust. Repeat.

Progress rarely comes from finding the perfect plan. It comes from continuously improving an imperfect one.

Lesson 4: Operations are the hidden foundation of growth

When people talk about startup growth, they usually mean product, customer acquisition, or fundraising. Operations get far less attention — yet they quietly shape almost everything.

And here’s the part nobody warns you about: operations never sit still. The CRM is only the beginning.

You set up a CRM. Then more customers come. Then even more. So you add a customer support system to keep up. Then you realize those two systems don’t talk to each other — so now you’re solving integrations. Then internal communication: how exactly do we use Slack so nothing gets lost? Then accounting. Then invoicing. Then ten other things you didn’t see coming. Every problem you solve quietly sets up the next one.

But underneath all of it, the question is always the same one:

If I’m on the other side of the world, how does a piece of information I’m holding reach the right team — asynchronously — so that everything keeps moving forward, correctly, without me in the room?

That’s what operations actually is. Not tools for the sake of tools. It’s building a system where information flows to the right place on its own, so the company keeps running whether or not any single person is online.

That’s also where scalability becomes real. You can have a scalable product — but if your processes can’t carry information without you, you’ve just built a bottleneck with your own name on it.

The hard part of growth is turning what lives in your head, in scattered Gmail threads and Drive folders named after clients, into systems that work while you sleep. That transition doesn’t make a company less entrepreneurial. It’s what lets it grow without breaking.

Lesson 5: Customers buy outcomes, not software

Customers rarely buy software because they’re excited about software. What they actually want is a better outcome — to save time, reduce friction, gain visibility, simplify a workflow. The product is just the vehicle that gets them there.

I see this most clearly in real estate, which moves carefully for good reason. Most professionals work with processes that have been in place for years, sometimes decades. They’re stable, predictable, and they get the job done. And precisely because those processes have always worked, introducing something new creates friction. People don’t resist innovation because they dislike it — they resist because they’re still building the structure needed to make change sustainable.

That reframes everything. The conversation moves from features to value — from what the software does to what the customer becomes capable of doing because of it. Get that wrong and even a great product stalls. Get it right and you’re no longer selling software. You’re selling time back to someone who never had enough of it.

The meta-skill: learning to build in ambiguity

If one lesson connects the other four, it’s this: startups teach you how to move forward without perfect information.

You learn to decide despite uncertainty. You learn to adapt when your assumptions turn out wrong. You learn to operate when the environment changes faster than expected. And most importantly, you learn that ambiguity isn’t an obstacle to progress — it’s often the environment in which progress actually happens.

The ability to build, execute, and keep momentum despite uncertainty might be the single most valuable thing an early-stage startup develops in you.

FAQ: Being the first hire at a startup

What does a startup first hire do? A startup first hire typically works across many functions — sales, operations, customer success, accounts management, partnerships, product feedback — and the role evolves as the company grows. In practice, the first hire often acts as a connector between functions that don’t yet have dedicated teams.

Is being the first employee at a startup worth it? For people who value ownership, fast learning, and rapid growth, the experience can accelerate a career significantly. The trade-off is real: more uncertainty, more ambiguity, and more responsibility than a defined role at a larger company.

What skills are most important for startup operators? Adaptability, communication, problem-solving, execution, prioritization, and relationship building. The common thread is the ability to create clarity and make progress before perfect information exists.

How is startup life different from working at a large company? Large companies generally offer defined roles, established systems, and predictable processes. Startups ask you to build the systems while executing inside a changing environment at the same time.

What is an ownership mindset in startups? Taking responsibility for outcomes rather than limiting yourself to the tasks in a job description — proactively spotting problems and helping solve them, regardless of whose “job” it technically is.

Why is execution so important in startups? Because uncertainty is high and resources are limited, startups learn primarily through action. Consistent execution generates feedback and insight that planning alone can’t produce.

A few things you might have missed on Vestingnotes:

• When Should an Early-Stage Tech Startup Introduce a CRM?

• Inside a Startup, Why this & Why now: A small reset before a new year of compounding

• My Second Giro di Boa - The Choice That Changed Everything

See you next week 🕶️

… and don’t forget to follow me on LinkedIn 😎

Cheers,
Jona

The self-storage industry rarely makes headlines.

It’s not AI. It’s not crypto. It’s not venture-hyped software, or Gold.

The global self-storage market is not emerging — it is already structurally large. In 2024, global revenues sit at approximately USD 60–61 billion, with projections reaching USD 107–109 billion by 2034, implying an annual growth rate of roughly 5.9–6.1% CAGR. North America currently represents just under half of global revenues (~48%), reflecting maturity and consolidation (Precedence research, 2025).

Europe alone accounts for an estimated USD 13.7–27.4 billion in 2024–25, depending on methodology, with projections ranging between USD 19 billion and USD 35+ billion by 2030–2034, growing at approximately 2.9–6% CAGR. Institutionalisation is increasing, particularly in urban and e-commerce-driven markets (Imarc Group, 2025)

Switzerland, often perceived as small, represents an estimated USD 10–10.6 billion market in 2024–25, with projections surpassing USD 13.5 billion by 2032–33, growing at around 3.8–4.2% annually, supported by urban density, high disposable income, SME activity, and digital commerce (Data Insights Market, 2025).

This is not a niche segment.

It is a multi-billion regional and global infrastructure market with recurring revenue characteristics, real asset backing, and steady mid-single-digit structural growth.

The interesting question is:

Why self-storage — and why now?

The Market Structure: Predictable Demand, Fragmented Supply

Self-storage demand is not built on trend cycles or speculative behavior. It is anchored in structural demographic and economic shifts.

Urban densification continues to reduce average living space per capita. Apartment sizes shrink while consumption patterns expand. People accumulate possessions faster than they increase square meters. At the same time, SMEs and e-commerce operators require flexible inventory space without committing to long-term commercial leases.

The result is a persistent mismatch between owned goods and available space.

Self-storage demand is driven by:

• Urban densification

• Shrinking apartment sizes

• SME storage needs

• E-commerce overflow

• Relocation and downsizing

Unlike volatile consumer categories, storage demand often proves resilient during economic downturns. Downsizing, relocation, restructuring, and life transitions tend to sustain or even increase occupancy levels. This resilience is precisely why institutional capital increasingly views self-storage as a defensive real estate asset class.

The Economics: Why the Model Is So Attractive

Self-storage economics revolve around two strategic models.

The first is asset-heavy. Operators own the underlying real estate, finance development or acquisition, and optimize long-term occupancy and yield per square meter. This model is capital intensive, slower to scale, but structurally powerful once stabilized. Ownership introduces margin expansion and real estate appreciation upside, making long-term equity value significantly more attractive.

The second model is asset-light. Operators lease warehouse space, optimize operations, and focus on speed of expansion with lower upfront capital exposure. This approach allows faster scaling but limits margin compression and real estate-driven upside.

The strategic tension lies between scaling and compounding.

Asset-light scales faster. Asset-heavy compounds harder.

The Friction Problem: Storage Solves Space, Not Time

Traditional self-storage models are operationally simple. Customers rent a unit, transport belongings, manage organization themselves, and retrieve items when necessary.

The model solves space constraints. It does not solve logistical friction.

In dense urban environments, the true constraint is often time, together with square meters. Customers must coordinate transportation, allocate half-days for drop-offs, and manage physical visits for retrieval.

This friction is where structural innovation becomes relevant.

If the customer no longer needs to physically interact with the facility, the economics and location strategy of storage change entirely.

The AnyWare Thesis: From Self-Storage to Managed Inventory

Before nestermind, I worked on an idea called AnyWare with a friend of mine, which attempted to rethink storage from first principles.

(Please don’t judge the aesthetics… it was a really, really early stage, and my Figma skills weren’t the best 😊).

The thesis was straightforward: people do not want a storage unit. They want the storage problem removed.

AnyWare proposed a logistics-integrated model built around:

• Home pickup

• Warehousing outside expensive city centers

• Digital inventory management

• On-demand item return

• Subscription-based pricing

The structural insight was economic rather than technological.

Urban real estate is expensive. Peripheral warehouse space is significantly cheaper. If customers do not need direct access, facilities can be located outside high-rent zones, dramatically improving cost structures. Storage transitions from self-service space to managed inventory.

Basically the opposite of what PlaceB is doing in Switzerland (btw, they’re doing a great job!).

I never really moved forward with this idea, because nestermind came along and I couldn’t pass on that opportunity. Deep down, I also felt that before building something of my own, I still needed to gain a lot more experience.

That said, I’m genuinely happy that SaveSpace has emerged in Switzerland in the meantime. I follow them quite closely, both to see what they’re building and how they’re solving some of the challenges we had identified when analyzing the business models.

SaveSpace is doing something similar to Wetacoo in Italy (EUR 3.4 million Series A, led by VC Partners) — not bad at all! 👍

So why this and Why now?

One question still remains.

If the self-storage market is already a multi-billion industry with stable demand, predictable economics, and structural growth — why hasn’t a dominant digital layer emerged around it?

In real estate, aggregation platforms have become fundamental infrastructure. Self-storage, surprisingly, still behaves differently.

Across Europe, the market remains highly fragmented. Operators tend to manage their own inventory directly through their websites, relying heavily on local SEO, brand visibility, and geographic proximity. Customers typically search for storage in a specific city, discover a handful of providers, and interact with them individually.

The result is a market where discovery happens locally rather than through a unified digital interface.

A few companies have started experimenting with aggregation models. Storabble, for example, is attempting to build a platform that centralizes self-storage listings, bringing transparency and comparability to the market.

The idea makes intuitive sense.

But it also raises an interesting question for the next decade.

With the rise of AI-driven search, GEO-localized discovery, and increasingly sophisticated indexing systems, do self-storage listings actually need a traditional aggregator?

Unlike real estate transactions — which involve large financial decisions and long evaluation cycles — storage decisions are often fast, local, and highly granular. Users usually search within a small geographic radius and prioritize immediate availability rather than browsing dozens of alternatives.

If AI systems increasingly surface the most relevant storage providers directly — based on location, availability, and pricing — operators with strong digital infrastructure and search visibility may already possess the distribution layer they need.

In other words, the future discovery layer might not be a marketplace at all. It might be the interface through which people search. And if that is true, the real opportunity may not lie in aggregating storage units — but in redesigning the storage experience itself.

From physical space to managed inventory. From access to convenience. From square meters to logistics.

And that brings us back to the original question.

Why this — and why now?

Because the structural conditions are finally aligning: urban density continues to rise, living spaces keep shrinking, and small businesses increasingly operate with flexible inventory and storage needs. At the same time, digital infrastructure — from logistics to AI-powered search — is making it easier than ever to build new layers on top of physical assets.

The self-storage industry may look quiet from the outside. But underneath, it sits at the intersection of real estate, logistics, and digital discovery. And markets that sit at intersections are often the ones where the next wave of innovation quietly begins.

A few things you might have missed on Vestingnotes:

• When Should an Early-Stage Tech Startup Introduce a CRM?

• Inside a Startup, Why this & Why now: A small reset before a new year of compounding

• My Second Giro di Boa - The Choice That Changed Everything

See you next week 🕶️

… and don’t forget to follow me on LinkedIn 😎

Cheers,
Jona

Just a brief intro for those who are new here 😊 — and a quick thank you, as I’ll never stop being grateful to everyone who’s following along on this journey 💚.

When I started Vestingnotes, I had no idea how difficult it would be to maintain the consistency a weekly newsletter requires. I never thought about writing content in advance. I never planned today what I would publish in 2, 3, or 4 weeks.

I simply started writing, promising that this newsletter would land in your inbox every Tuesday morning.

And believe me, I’m trying my best! 🚀

What Vestingnotes Is

Vestingnotes is written from the perspective of a first hire, documenting how founders and early teams think. It’s built around two core pillars: Inside a Startup, which shares first-hand situations in real time, and Why this & Why now, which gives founders the space to explain why they started what they’re building — and why now.

What Vestingnotes Is Not

Vestingnotes is not:

“Here are the 10 best AI tools you should use.” I’m overwhelmed by those posts myself.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) in Early-Stage Tech Startups

When you start a startup, 90% of internal processes run on:

• Google Sheets

• Google Docs

• Google Slides

• Figma → not always 😉

• Gmail

(Or Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook if you prefer Microsoft 365.)

And that’s not wrong. In the early stage, you must balance:

• Opportunity costs

• Simplicity

• Speed

• Avoiding overengineering

You use what works and what gives you enough clarity to move forward. If you are just starting a Tech Startup — and honestly, even more generally — don’t obsess over CRM software. Don’t obsess over “crazy AI tools” that promise to talk, take notes, and run your life. It doesn’t make sense.

When Should an Early-Stage Tech Startup Introduce a CRM?

The moment usually looks like this:

• You don’t know how many times a client has been contacted.

• Information is fragmented between team members.

• You search Gmail or Outlook threads for missing details.

• You navigate through Google Drive folders named after clients trying to find one document.

When confusion reaches the “right level,” introducing a CRM becomes one of the smartest decisions you can make. Not because it eliminates chaos — it won’t. But because it reduces it significantly.

A CRM adds:

• Internal structure

• Transparency

• Consistency in client communication

• Professionalism toward customers

It won’t solve startup chaos completely. But it moves you in the right direction.

What Does a CRM Actually Do?

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) allows you to manage clients and leads in a structured way.

It centralizes:

• Client information

• Communication history

• Tasks and follow-ups

• Sales opportunities

• and much more

Its purpose is simple:

To support growth without losing control. This is where startup scalability becomes real. You can have a scalable product. But if your processes are not scalable, you create a mismatch.

And mismatches eventually break something.

Accounting Software in a Startup: When Does It Make Sense?

An accounting software doesn’t require a long explanation…

It allows you to:

• Record income and expenses

• Create and manage invoices

• Track payments

• Monitor cash flow

• Generate reports

• And much more

Sooner or later, a new question appears:

“How do we integrate our CRM with our accounting software?”

That’s another story. You can think about full efficiency later. Often, if you choose your software carefully, integrations are technically possible.

Opportunity Cost in Startup Process Decisions

Every good entrepreneur keeps processes as they are until they start “shaking”. Then invests. Not too early. Not too late. At the right time. Every improvement has a cost. And not just in money — but in time, attention, and focus.

In early-stage startups, most internal processes are inefficient by design. Manual onboarding, fragmented reporting, improvised CRM workflows, ad-hoc communication across tools. They feel broken. They often are.

But improving them too early means reallocating scarce time and resources away from other activities that might create more value for the business — such as acquiring customers, testing distribution channels, or refining the product.

This is where opportunity cost comes into play.

Opportunity cost is not about whether a process could be improved. It is about whether improving it now is the highest-value use of limited time and capital.

Investing in automation, integrations, or internal tooling before operational strain becomes material may increase efficiency — but at the cost of delaying learning cycles elsewhere in the business.

At the same time, waiting too long introduces operational friction that can slow down execution, reduce team velocity, or even impact customer experience. The decision, therefore, is not binary between “optimize” and “don’t optimize”.

It is about timing.

Process improvements should occur when the expected value of investing in internal efficiency exceeds the expected value of allocating those same resources to growth, product development, or market discovery.

In other words:

Not when a process feels inefficient — but when the cost of keeping it inefficient becomes higher than the value of everything else you could be doing instead.

That is the moment a process starts “shaking”. And that is when the investment makes economic sense.

Choosing the Right Level of Structure at the Right Time

There are infinite software solutions you could implement and integrate inside every startup.

In this newsletter, without going into unnecessary technical detail, I wanted to focus on two key processes that matter early on — at least for nestermind, based on my personal experience.

1. Client management (CRM)

2. Financial management (Accounting software)

The goal is not perfection. The goal is alignment between growth and structure. Understanding which solution makes sense for the stage you’re in.

An Open Invitation

If you’re living an experience similar to the Inside a Startup pillar — joining early, building from the inside, figuring things out as you go — don’t hesitate to reach out.

I’d love to exchange notes, compare perspectives, and learn from your journey.

And if you belong to the second pillar — Why this & Why now — whether you’ve started a startup or invested in one, I’d love to hear your story.

Share your “Why this” and “Why now,” and I’ll bring those perspectives into future issues of Vestingnotes.

This project grows through conversations.

🎁 You Made It This Far: Here’s Your Spoiler

If you’ve made it this far, here’s a small reward — a preview of the next newsletter. It will fall under the Why this & Why now pillar and, no, it’s not about a crazy AI company.

It’s about self-storage. Surprising, right?

Take a moment to look up the market size — it’s far from small.

If you don’t want to miss it, make sure you’re subscribed to receive the next newsletter straight to your inbox 😊

Subscribe now

nestermind is where I work - and where I grow 😃

If you want to learn more and stay updated, you can subscribe here (at the bottom of the page!)

A few things you might have missed on Vestingnotes:

• Inside a Startup, Why this & Why now: A small reset before a new year of compounding

• My Second Giro di Boa - The Choice That Changed Everything

• Emotions, Conviction and Champagne

See you next week 🕶️

… and don’t forget to follow me on LinkedIn 😎

Cheers,
Jona

Writing a newsletter is hard. Staying consistent is even harder. warned me about it - and I can only confirm everything.

Vestingnotes went quiet for a few weeks.

In the past weeks, my mind felt like the images below: many staircases, many directions, moving from one to another.

But now there is only one staircase. It’s long, but growing linearly.

This maze of staircases didn’t appear because the ideas ran out. It came from trying to balance a role inside a fast-growing startup with the discipline of a weekly newsletter. That balance isn’t easy - and anyone who chooses the startup path knows that from the start. If it feels hard, it’s usually a sign you’re in the right place.

So here I am again. Back to writing. With new questions, a clearer structure, and a renewed commitment to keep going.

It all starts from two simple things: I like talking about startups, and I’m obsessed with why. Why this idea and why now.

And that’s how Inside a Startup connects with Why this & Why now the two core pillar of Vestingnotes.

Btw I wish all of you a fantastic 2026! 🎉
A year of steady growth, intentional decisions, and quiet - but powerful compounding.

A small change

These weeks were also deeply reflective.

I used the time to give Vestingnotes a small aesthetic refresh and to bring a bit more order to the website. Nothing dramatic, just small adjustments.

Now let’s talk about the two pillars mentioned, which represent the backbone of Vestingnotes and what it aims to do.

Pillar #1 - Inside a Startup

This pillar isn’t going anywhere. It’s where everything started.

Inside a Startup is simply a new name. The idea remains the same: the first-hire perspective.

It’s a collection of stories from the inside - starting with my own journey as the first hire at nestermind, and expanding to observations and experiences from others going through similar early-stage paths.

It’s about what happens when you join early, before roles are clearly defined and before there’s a playbook to follow. When decisions are made in real time, priorities shift fast, and learning happens by doing.

The name changed. The perspective didn’t. This remains the core of this community - and it always will be.

Pillar #2 - Why this & Why now

This pillar focuses on two simple questions that sits behind every venture:

Why this and Why now. It’s a space to understand ventures through simple questions - like why they started, and why now.

Some pieces are personal reflections. Others come from conversations with founders, operators, or investors who are directly connected to the venture. Different roles, same question.

It’s about recognizing windows of opportunity before they’re obvious. About starting when things are still unclear, and choosing to act without full certainty. Not every venture succeeds. But every venture has a moment where it makes sense.

This pillar is about finding - and understanding - that moment.

And just to be clear: this is not a podcast. It’s written interviews (for the moment 👀).

Feel free to suggest any person you’d like me to interview 😊.

A few things you might’ve missed on “Vestingnotes”:

• My Second Giro di Boa - The Choice That Changed Everything

• Emotions, Conviction and Champagne

• Switzerland: The Perfect PropTech “Pilot” Market?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the structure behind Vestingnotes - how to make it a broader space built on two pillars. Like two legs it can stand on, and eventually run on. Fast. And uphill, as always. 😃

I’m excited to start gathering your feedback and insights on what’s coming. Vestingnotes isn’t a promise of perfection. It’s a promise to do the work - consistently - in order to get closer to it.

2026, will be a year of editorial discipline. Of showing up. Of protecting consistency and trusting the kind of compounding most people are searching for, but few are willing to sustain.

I’ll keep writing from inside the process, not after it. With curiosity, with doubt, and with the belief that the things that truly matter grow this way: slowly, almost quietly, but always with intention.

Let’s start with myself - a small spoiler.

Think of this as the kind of question you might ask a startup founder, an investor, or anyone building something with intention. Why this? And why now?

Why this?

I’ve always felt the need to make sense of what I’m living while I’m living it. I’m less interested in finished stories and more drawn to the process - to the tension between uncertainty and responsibility. Vestingnotes is how I think in public, how I connect dots between startups, people, timing, and my own path as a first hire building from the inside. Writing helps me slow things down, stay honest, and remain curious, especially when everything moves fast.

Why now?

Because this phase feels fragile and intense at the same time. I’m inside something that’s growing, where days are full, and there’s little distance between action and consequence. If I don’t pause to reflect now, this period will pass unexamined. Substack gives me a simple, quiet place to return to - something stable while everything else is moving. Writing here is a way to create continuity in the middle of change, to stay intentional, and to hold myself accountable to the kind of consistency I want to live by.

An Open Invitation

If you’re living an experience similar to the Inside a Startup pillar - joining early, building from the inside, figuring things out as you go - don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d love to exchange notes, compare perspectives, and learn from your journey.

And if you belong to the second pillar - Why this & Why now - whether you’ve started a startup, invested in one, I’d love to hear from you. Share your why this and why now, and I’ll bring those perspectives into future issues of Vestingnotes.

This project grows through conversations.

nestermind is where I work - and where I grow 😃

If you want to learn more and stay updated, you can subscribe at the bottom of the page!

See you next week 🕶️

Cheers,
Jona

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If you enjoy Vestingnotes, inviting friends to read along would mean a lot to me.
Every referral helps push forward a question I keep coming back to:

How do the right people, at the right time, in the right market, turn ideas into companies that last?

How to participate

1. Share Vestingnotes. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.

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See you soon 🕶️

Cheers,
Jona

Ciao e benvenuti 😊

Another week, another Vestingnotes.

This time, a shorter newsletter - a few quick reflections on what emerged from last week’s edition.

And forgive the slightly delayed release - I’ll do everything I can to keep the rhythm and maintain the consistency this project deserves.

Recap from last week

I wrote about two markets that behave in completely different ways: Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Switzerland moves in months - longer due diligence and a market built around trust and personal relationships. The Netherlands moves in days - almost every step is digital, closing faster than you can schedule a visit.

Same scarcity, opposite speeds.

Yet when we look at digital maturity in the construction and real-estate industries, progress remains modest - as we saw in the previous newsletter.

Is it that real estate innovation in Switzerland lacks perceived value, or is it that the market isn’t yet ready for it?

How do you see it? 👇🏻

Leave a comment

Innovation at the Crossroads

Most real estate professionals work with processes that have been in place for years, sometimes decades. They’re stable, predictable, and they get the job done. But precisely because they’ve always worked, it’s hard to introduce something new without creating friction. IT systems don’t always talk to each other, responsibilities are split across many actors.

Many companies are still building their internal digital foundation. They might be testing a tool, experimenting with data, or trying to automate one part of the workflow.

So it’s not that innovation is lacking. Organisations meant to adopt it are still preparing themselves - structurally, culturally, and operationally. Until those pieces align, adoption will move slowly, not because people don’t want change, but because they’re still building the environment needed to make that change sustainable.

Will Switzerland become a real estate innovation powerhouse, or continue to move forward one careful step at a time?

Happy to read some of your thoughts below 👇🏻

Leave a comment

Switzerland: The Perfect PropTech “Pilot” Market?

Take pricing models or valuation engines. In many countries, real estate behaves in predictable patterns: similar streets, similar neighbourhoods, similar price curves.

Switzerland is the opposite.

A single property can have lake view in front, mountain view in the back, and a train line running underneath - all influencing the valuation in completely different ways. Move 50 meters uphill and you may shift into a different tax zone, a different level of sunlight exposure. Noise levels can change from one side of a street to the other because of tunnels, or wind corridors.

It’s a market made of nuances - and nuances inside nuances.

For PropTech companies working on data analytics, Switzerland offers an endless playground: dense urban centers, alpine regions, cross-border dynamics, multiple languages, topographical differences.

If this got you thinking, I’m curious to read your thoughts 👇🏻

Leave a comment

If you’ve made it this far, drop a like so I know you’re actually reading along 😉

And if you’re curious why I chose the name Vestingnotes, leave a comment and take a guess!

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading - and if you subscribe, welcome to Vestingnotes! 🎉

See you next week 🕶️

Cheers,
Jona

nestermind

Here our last update: 🚀 nestermind Product Update – August/September 2025

If you want to learn more and stay updated, you can subscribe at the bottom of the page!

Follow me on LinkedIn

Follow Vestingnotes on LinkedIn

Follow Vestingnotes newsletter on LinkedIn

Another week, another .

Lately, I’ve noticed how often the same topic keeps coming up in conversations: housing. Fair enough, I spend most of my days surrounded by listings and real estate professionals, besides tech.

Recently I ended up diving into the Dutch housing market. Not for investing (definitely not enough cash for that 😄), just out of curiosity. I came across a YouTube video by Marcello Ascani - an Italian creator who, besides making great content about startups and entrepreneurship, travels around the world asking Italians living abroad about the quality and cost of life. He did one in Zurich too, by the way.

One of his latest videos was filmed in Amsterdam - and that probably pushed me to take a closer look at how things work there.

What I found was surprisingly impressive - at least to me.

Recap from last week

Last week was all about itself - how it’s been slowly finding its own shape, somewhere between curiosity and creation.

And how sometimes, the right direction doesn’t come from a plan, but from the people it attracts along the way.

The takeaway? Not everything needs a clear purpose from day one.

Some projects grow simply by showing up - week after week, note after note.

If you missed it, you can read it here 👇🏼

Why does the Swiss market move in months, while the Dutch one moves in days?

🇨🇭 Switzerland - The Silent Market

Selling a home here takes roughly seven months on average (Blick). In cities like Zurich or Geneva, 4–5 months. In rural areas, up to a year.

There are about around 4.7 million dwellings for 8.9 million people - and only 36% of residents own the home they live in (Global Property Guide).

Transactions are rarely rushed. They involve extended due diligence, and face-to-face negotiations. And while PropTech adoption is growing, the Swiss real estate digitalisation index still sits at around 4/10, one of the lowest in Western Europe (pom+ Group AG 2024).

🇳🇱 Netherlands - The Market on Fast-Forward

Then there’s the Netherlands.

Here, around 8.2 million of dwellings for 17.9 million people - roughly twice Switzerland’s housing stock.

Yet homes sell in 27 days on average and 90% of listings close within a quarter. Most even sell above the asking price (+ 5.6%) (DMPM).

Average number of days needed to sell

It’s not just the demand - it’s the infrastructure. From listing to contract, nearly every step can be handled digitally. Digital signatures are the norm, and property data is public by default.

Digital Distance, Human Common Ground

Switzerland scores 4/10 on digital maturity.

The Netherlands, by contrast, is considered one of Europe’s most advanced markets.

In Switzerland, digitalisation still feels like a tool - something external. In the Netherlands, it’s become invisible à- part of how people already work.

And the irony?

Both markets are driven by the same human forces: scarcity.

The Takeaways

1. Technology doesn’t replace trust - it scales it.
   The faster a market moves, the more structure it needs underneath. That’s where PropTech quietly earns its place.

2. Digitalisation isn’t about adding tools, but removing friction.
   The markets that win are those where people spend less time managing information - and more time acting on it.

3. You can’t automate relationships, but you can enable them.
   Good software should help people focus on what’s human - not replace it.

4. The next evolution won’t come from more features, but from better flow.
   The right PropTech doesn’t add noise; it makes the existing rhythm visible.

If you’ve made it this far, drop a like so I know you’re actually reading along 😉

And if you’re curious why I chose the name Vestingnotes, leave a comment and take a guess!

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading - and if you subscribe, welcome to Vestingnotes! 🎉

See you next week 🕶️

Cheers,
Jona

nestermind

Here our last update: 🚀 nestermind Product Update – August/September 2025

If you want to learn more and stay updated, you can subscribe at the bottom of the page!

Follow me on LinkedIn

Follow Vestingnotes on LinkedIn

Follow Vestingnotes newsletter on LinkedIn

Ciao e benvenuti 😊

Another week, another .

The days keep getting shorter, but the lists keep getting longer.

I’ll try to keep it short this week - not sure how many of you actually make it to the end. The first likes always come from my brother and girlfriend anyway, though I’m still not convinced either of them actually read it all 😅

Average jokes aside. Let’s start!

Recap from last week

Last week was all about scalability.

In the early days, progress comes from momentum, from quick decisions and constant motion. But as things grow you start to see that what once worked effortlessly now needs structure.

And we ended with what we could call the trade-off mindset: every improvement, automation, or process carries a cost.

If you missed it, you can read it here 👇🏼

When Growth meets structure

I looked at the LinkedIn analytics the other day - out of curiosity.

41% of readers work in real estate.

Fair enough - is written from inside nestermind, a startup that lives at the intersection of technology and real estate. So it’s natural that part of this audience reflects that world.

But what’s interesting isn’t the percentage.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been getting few messages about real estate - requests for feedback on properties, on the Swiss market.

It makes me smile every time, because it gives a whole new dimension - one I hadn’t planned for.

If you’ve ever read the “About” section (which I’m sure all of you have - right? 😅), you might remember a line that said would explore how PropTech and real estate are shifting in Switzerland and beyond.

In the past few weeks, I’ve been reminded of something I already knew, but hadn’t really felt in this way before: the real estate market is a silent market - built on relationships and trust.

You don’t always see it moving, but it’s constantly alive in the background. A message, an introduction, a quiet conversation. That’s how things happen.

Somewhere between stories and markets

Everything I know about real estate comes from two worlds that couldn’t be more different.

From my family - always active in metal construction and architectural design, where progress happens slowly, through materials, precision, and patience. It’s a world where innovation comes more through design than process. Every change takes time, and the beauty often lies in the detail no one notices at first glance.

And then nestermind - a startup where change isn’t a phase, it’s the operating system. Every day moves fast, and that pace demands simplicity, and constant adaptation. It’s the kind of environment that teaches you how to move forward even when the map is still being drawn.

One world measures progress in “millimeters”. The other in “milliseconds”.

And maybe lives somewhere in between - between my first-hire experience and that intersection where the tangible meets the digital, where both worlds quietly learn from each other. Because I’ve always loved both: seeing physical structures take shape, and watching software evolve line by line.

A shift I didn’t plan for

If I’m honest, two questions have been on my mind lately.

The first is the same one that’s been there since the beginning:

“How do the right people, at the right time, in the right market, turn ideas into companies that last?”

It’s a question that shaped from day one - the lens through which I’ve looked at startups, teams, and decisions since joining nestermind.

But over the past few weeks, another question has started to take space next to it:

“What exactly is - and what does it want to become?”

It’s not confusion. It’s curiosity - and maybe a bit of healthy obsession. The kind that pushes you to step back, observe, and give time to take shape.

I’ve got plenty of ideas, but not all the connections between them.

Maybe you, reading this, have a few hints of your own. And if you happen to work in real estate, leave a note below - I’m always curious to hear how people in the field see things.

The Takeaways

1. The direction of a project often reveals itself through the people it attracts.
   Who follows, engages, or asks questions says more about what you’re building than any plan or metric.

2. Not everything needs a clear purpose from day one. Some projects grow by showing up - through iteration, curiosity, and the people who keep believing in them.

3. Connection shapes identity. A project becomes clearer as it attracts new perspectives - it’s the mix that defines the meaning.

If you’ve made it this far, drop a like so I know you’re actually reading along 😉

And if you’re curious why I chose the name Vestingnotes, leave a comment and take a guess!

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading - and if you subscribe, welcome to Vestingnotes! 🎉

See you next week 🕶️

Cheers,
Jona

nestermind

Here our last update: 🚀 nestermind Product Update – August/September 2025

If you want to learn more and stay updated, you can subscribe at the bottom of the page!

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As you might have noticed - or maybe not (perhaps some of you were secretly happy to get one less notification from Vestingnotes 😅) - I didn’t manage to publish last week.

Funny enough, the same week AWS (Amazon Web Services) went down, Vestingnotes decided to take a short break too - though mine didn’t involve servers.

At first, I took it as a small failure. After just two months, I had already missed a week. But it wasn’t about lack of ideas, motivation, or consistency. The last few weeks have just been… a lot. Different priorities, and not enough hours to sit down and write.

The feeling reminded me of losing a hockey game - something every player knows well. It hurts for a moment, but you know the season is long. And if I remember correctly, there are 52 games in the regular season. You lose one, you move on, you show up for the next.

So yes, I missed a week.

But it also gave me space to think - about balance, focus, productivity, and execution - and the chance to enjoy some time in Lugano with family and friends after a while 😊

And now I’m here again, writing Vestingnotes - for those of you who keep reading, week after week.

Recap from last week

Last week’s newsletter (the one before the skipped one 😁) was all about emotions, conviction, and champagne - about what it means to close a pre-seed round.

I wrote about how preparation often matters more than the moment itself - about conviction over validation, and clarity over complexity.

I shared the journey leading up to our pre-seed at nestermind, the lessons from pitching week after week.

Because just like in hockey, momentum is built one shift at a time.

If you missed it, you can read it here 👇🏼

When Growth meets structure

In the beginning, everything feels intuitive.

Decisions are made in two minutes on Slack, every piece of information lives in a chat or a shared file, and the goal is simply to make things work. But after a funding round, priorities multiply.

You have more clients, more requests, more people, and more channels open at the same time. That’s when you realize that speed alone is no longer enough. Because growing in a healthy way doesn’t mean adding more - it means organizing better.

Not just doing more, but doing it right.

And the first challenge is to make visible what was once implicit:

• How do we manage a new client from start to finish?

• How do we collect feedback that actually improves the product?

• How do we share information so it doesn’t get lost?

• How do we maintain the same quality even when everything doubles?

Every startup reaches that point where a step toward maturity becomes necessary.

Not to become “corporate,” but to be able to replicate what works.

That’s where real scalability begins - when chaos turns into method.

Building scalability into the everyday

When people talk about scalability, they often think about technology, automation, and numbers. But in reality, scalability starts much earlier - and much smaller. Not just for the product you build, but for the company itself.

It means creating clear processes that reduce the margin for error.

It means that every client receives the same experience, no matter who they work with.

It means that every offer, every meeting, every activity follows a trace, a logic, a standard.

For us, it’s been a gradual journey: standardizing client onboarding, defining internal checklists, centralizing information, automating where it made sense, and simplifying where things were getting unnecessarily complicated.

Scaling isn’t about adding layers - it’s about removing friction. Eliminating unnecessary steps, making workflows feel natural, and giving the team time to focus on what truly matters. Technology can help - a lot - but it’s never enough on its own.

Every time you remove a manual step, clarify a flow, or create a repeatable logic, you’re building scalability.

One piece at a time.

The trade-off mindset

Every startup, at some point, faces the same temptation: to automate everything.
To build perfect flows, spotless dashboards, and processes that update themselves.

And yet, reality is more nuanced. Every automation, every attempt to make something more scalable, comes with a price. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes it’s time - but most often, it’s focus.

Because every time you choose to improve a process, you’re also choosing - at least temporarily - not to work on something else.

So the point isn’t to automate more, but to automate better.

In our case, we realized early on that we didn’t need perfect systems - we needed systems that could hold. Processes that could evolve, not models destined to break at the first change.

The truth is, in the early stages of a startup, almost nothing stays stable for more than a few months. The product evolves, the number of clients grows, workflows shift. Every time you think you’ve found the right formula, something happens that forces you to rethink the process.

And that’s not a failure - that’s the game.

That’s why it doesn’t make sense to spend days building complex automations or hyper-defined processes when the context itself is still moving. It’s better to start from a clearly defined problem and solve it with the simplest, fastest, and cheapest solution possible.

Then, only when the flow starts to stabilize, does it make sense to make it more sophisticated. It’s a constant balance between efficiency and adaptability. Because every hour spent optimizing a detail is an hour taken away from asking whether that detail should even exist.

We can call it the trade-off mindset - in a startup, everything is a compromise. Every decision has its trade-offs. Every organizational choice carries one question:

Are we solving a real problem, or just simplifying our perception of control?

A concrete example: deciding whether to automate an onboarding process or keep it manual. On one hand, automation saves operational time. On the other, it removes direct contact with clients - and the subtle signals that only human interaction can reveal.

So the real question becomes: when is the right moment to automate?

For me, the answer is always the same:

If tomorrow ten times more clients arrived, what would happen to this process?

Would it hold? Would it break? Or would it stretch until it becomes unmanageable?

It sounds simple, but it can guide a lot of decisions. It forces you to take perspective, think in scenarios, and ask yourself how far a process can really scale.

A startup isn’t meant to look like a perfect machine - it’s meant to behave like a living organism that adapts. And every time you choose not to over-engineer something, you’re protecting its ability to evolve.

The Takeaways

1. After the round, growth doesn’t come from more resources - but from more structure. Funding gives you time, but real progress comes from how you build processes and habits.

2. Scalability ≠ complexity. It’s not about adding layers - it’s about creating clarity. Remove friction, don’t add control.

3. Automate less, but better. Every automation is a trade-off between time, cost, and focus. Start with the clearest problem and the simplest, cheapest solution.

4. Ask the right question: “If tomorrow ten times more clients arrived, what would happen to this process?” It’s the most honest stress test you can run on any system.

5. True scalability is cultural. It doesn’t live in the tools or procedures, but in how the team thinks, communicates, and adapts.

Closing Thought

Scaling isn’t just about adding people, tools, or automations.

It’s about building systems that adapt when things start to move faster. The goal isn’t perfection - it’s resilience.

Every decision comes with trade-offs, every process has limits, and every improvement should leave space for change.

Scalability isn’t a static target - it’s a balance you keep adjusting as you grow.

In the end, progress isn’t measured by how much you build, but by how well what you’ve built holds when everything accelerates.

If you’ve been through this phase too, I’d love to hear how you handled it👇🏻

Leave a comment

Vesting Community

A space where first and early hires can share what the early days really feel like.

Where students and university associations curious about startups can ask questions directly to those already in the trenches.

And where founders and investors can exchange perspectives on what truly makes teams work.

Somewhere between stories and reality - a place for the lessons that never make it into pitch decks or headlines.

No slides, no polish - just honest talks.

So if this sounds like something you’d like to be part of, send me a message.

If you’ve made it this far, drop a like so I know you’re actually reading along 😉

And if you’re curious why I chose the name Vestingnotes, leave a comment and take a guess!

Leave a comment

Why Vestingnotes

Why bother writing all this down?

Because the messy, unexpected, human lessons usually vanish in the rush of startup life.

I don’t want to forget what it feels like right now. And maybe by writing, I can give something back - to students curious about startups, founders searching for a first hire, and investors wondering what really happens in the trenches.

Thanks for reading - and if you subscribe, welcome to Vestingnotes! 🎉

See you next week 🕶️

Cheers,
Jona

nestermind

Here our last update: 🚀 nestermind Product Update – August/September 2025

If you want to learn more and stay updated, you can subscribe at the bottom of the page!

Follow me on LinkedIn

Follow Vestingnotes on LinkedIn

Follow Vestingnotes newsletter on LinkedIn

One of my coaches once told me:

“Jona, if you put the same consistency and effort into something outside of hockey, I’m sure you’ll find your place - and probably even more success.”

At the time, it sounded like a bold statement. But he was right.

Beyond what we call “success” - which is subjective anyway - step by step, I’ve started finding my own dimension. Not in a sports career, but in a space where the same principles still apply: consistency, emotion, and team.

That same coach, together with another - who was then leading HC Lugano - gave me the chance to debut in Serie A.

After hockey, I spent a long time searching for an environment that could give me the same emotions - the intensity, the teamwork, the constant challenge. I eventually found it in startups - and now, I try to bring those same feelings here, through Vestingnotes.

When you start a newsletter, experienced people often tell you the same thing: Find your target. Know exactly who you’re writing for. Niche down. Define your audience.

And that doesn’t just apply to newsletters - startups hear it all the time too: define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).

And I get it - that’s good advice!

But if I followed it too strictly, Vestingnotes probably wouldn’t even exist. Because let’s be honest - how many people really want to read about what it’s like to be a first hire? If I had to bet, most would rather hear the stories of founders. Fair enough!

But here’s the thing - I’m not really thinking about how big my “target” is. Because no matter the title, the background, or the path, there’s something we all share - something that cuts across every role, every stage, every story.

And it always comes back to the same thing:

Emotions.

The excitement of starting something new. The fear of failing. The pride when things finally click. That’s what connects us. And that’s what I try to capture - not just the facts of startup life, but the feeling of it.

Recap from last week

Last week’s newsletter was about stepping on stage - literally and metaphorically.
I shared my experience at Venturelab’s “Innosuisse Business Creation ICT” - part of the Innosuisse Entrepreneurship Training.

For a few days, I stepped outside the usual rhythm of nestermind to zoom out, rethink, and learn from people who have helped build and fund dozens of Swiss startups.

From customer needs and market validation to pitching and financial planning, each session pushed one question forward:

Do you truly understand why your company should exist?

The final Pitch Day brought it all together. Standing in front of Nicolas Berg, David Studer, and Madhur “Maddy” Agrawal, I realized how much clarity matters more than confidence.

Pre-seed round

Because raising capital isn’t the destination.

It’s just the start of a new chapter - one where clarity, focus, and execution matter more than ever. The pre-seed round marks one of those rare moments in a startup - the kind that feels both like an ending and a beginning.

Here’s a small snapshot from that moment - one that reminds me that behind every round, there’s a story made of people, patience, and a lot of work.

I had an important task that day - making sure the champagne got to its destination.

Find out more here

The Build-Up - Before the Round

People often imagine a funding round as a single big moment - the handshake, the signature, the announcement. But before that moment, there’s a long stretch of quiet work.

You pitch, you adjust, you pitch again. Week after week, you test your story with new investors, refine your numbers, rework your slides, and question every assumption you once took for granted.

It’s not about chasing validation - it’s about building conviction.

And sometimes that conviction gets tested hard. You walk out of a meeting thinking “that went great”, only to receive a polite “not for us” the next day. Other times, the investors challenge you in ways that hurt - but those are usually the conversations that matter most.

Because preparing for a pre-seed means preparing to be uncomfortable. It’s not just fundraising - it’s fundamental questioning.

You’re not only defending your idea; you’re defending the way you think. And each “no” becomes less personal, and more like a piece of feedback in disguise.

By the time you’re halfway through, you start realizing that the goal isn’t to prove you’re right - it’s to stay curious enough to make your thesis stronger.

The Reflection - What Funding Really Means

Closing a pre-seed round feels like validation - but it’s actually responsibility.

It’s proof that others see potential, yes - but it’s also a reminder that potential now needs execution. Money doesn’t change the rhythm. It amplifies it. Everything that worked (and didn’t) before the round becomes even more visible after.

Funding gives you resources, but it also gives you pressure - to deliver, to focus, to make every next decision count. And that’s not a bad thing. It sharpens your sense of direction.

Because the people who invest don’t just buy into your product; they buy into your ability to learn faster than everyone else.

So yes - the round closed. But in a way, it also opened something new.

A new chapter. A higher bar.

And the same lesson I keep writing about here in Vestingnotes: the journey doesn’t start when you raise. It starts when you prove you can keep going after you do.

The Takeaways

1. Clarity beats complexity. A strong pitch isn’t about having dozens of slides - it’s about making people understand “why you exist” in one clear sentence.

2. Momentum over perfection. Progress beats polish. It’s better to test, iterate, and move forward than wait for the perfect timing.

3. “No” is part of the game. Rejections aren’t personal; they’re feedback disguised as friction - helping you sharpen your story and your thinking.

4. Defending your thesis is everyday work. Closing the round isn’t the end. It’s when the real pressure - and the real growth - begin.

5. Storytelling builds trust. Data convinces. Stories connect. When you tell yours with honesty, people believe in you before they believe in your numbers.

Closing Thought

In hockey, every shift matters - not just the final goal. What defines the game is how you play each minute on the ice: adapting, supporting your teammates, staying sharp even when you’re tired.

It’s the same in startups. Closing a round isn’t the victory; it’s just the next shift.

What truly counts is how you’ve played so far - with conviction, precision, trust in your team, and the willingness to adjust when the game changes.

Because just like in hockey, momentum is built one shift at a time.

Agree? Or maybe you see it differently - how do you build momentum? 👇🏼

Leave a comment

Vesting Community

A space where first and early hires can share what the early days really feel like.

Where students and university associations curious about startups can ask questions directly to those already in the trenches.

And where founders and investors can exchange perspectives on what truly makes teams work.

Somewhere between stories and reality - a place for the lessons that never make it into pitch decks or headlines.

No slides, no polish - just honest talks.

So if this sounds like something you’d like to be part of, send me a message.

If you’ve made it this far, drop a like so I know you’re actually reading along 😉

And if you’re curious why I chose the name Vestingnotes, leave a comment and take a guess!

Leave a comment

Why Vestingnotes

Why bother writing all this down?

Because the messy, unexpected, human lessons usually vanish in the rush of startup life.

I don’t want to forget what it feels like right now. And maybe by writing, I can give something back - to students curious about startups, founders searching for a first hire, and investors wondering what really happens in the trenches.

Thanks for reading - and if you subscribe, welcome to Vestingnotes! 🎉

See you next week 🕶️

Cheers,
Jona

nestermind

Here our last update: 🚀 nestermind Product Update – August/September 2025

If you want to learn more and stay updated, you can subscribe at the bottom of the page!

Follow me on LinkedIn

Follow Vestingnotes on LinkedIn

Follow Vestingnotes newsletter on LinkedIn

You’ll see layouts evolving, logos that sometimes don’t match the exact color coding, and a few details that aren’t perfectly polished yet.

And for those who’ve been here since the beginning… yes, I know - you’ve probably spotted all of that already 😅.

I’m on it. It just takes time.

But as many of you already know - that’s part of the process.

When I first launched Vestingnotes, I wrote:

I’m probably writing this for my family and for that one friend who still hasn’t figured out how to unsubscribe.

Well - one month in, it’s a little different now.

There are more of you reading, commenting, and joining the journey every week. And that’s exactly what keeps me motivated to keep writing - even if the corners aren’t all perfectly aligned yet.

Recap from last week

Last week’s newsletter was about celebrating small wins - those early startup days when everything feels uncertain, yet that’s exactly where the biggest growth happens.

I shared what my first week as a first hire at nestermind looked like - from cold calling in three languages (yes, with a strong Italian accent 😅) to realizing there’s no playbook when things are just starting to take shape.

We explored the first two dimensions of the question behind Vestingnotes:

How do the right people, at the right time, in the right market, turn ideas into companies that last?

People - because everything starts with them.
Timing - because even the best idea can fail if the world isn’t ready for it.

If you’re looking for a great read on how different startups failed - and what lessons founders and leaders can take from them - ’s article 10 Failed Companies: 10 Lessons is definitely worth checking out.

Every failure tells a story - and sometimes, those stories teach you more than the success ones ever could.

If you missed it, you can read it here 👇🏼

From Venturelab to the Startup Stage

What happens when you stop talking about startups - and start pitching one.

Back in March, I had the chance to step outside the usual pace of nestermind and join Venturelab’s “Innosuisse Business Creation ICT” - part of the Innosuisse Entrepreneurship Training.

A great program designed to help early-stage founders and startup teams define and or redefine their strategy, validate their market, and learn how to pitch their vision to investors and partners with clarity and confidence.

Learning by Doing (Again)

We went through sessions on customer needs, go-to-market, financial planning, IP strategy and more.

Each topic could fill a book - and yet, each conversation came down to the same core question:

Do you truly understand why your company should exist?

When you’re building from zero, it’s easy to lose perspective. You get caught between product iterations, investor talks, and onboarding clients.

But these few days forced me to zoom out - to translate complexity into clarity, and to articulate not just what we do, but why it matters.

Product-market fit isn’t a destination, it’s a moving target. You can’t wait to be “ready”. You build, test, adapt - and the faster your feedback loop, the stronger your company DNA becomes.

That mindset - the one that values speed of learning over fear of failing - is exactly what I try to capture in Vestingnotes.

The Pitch Day

Then came the Pitch Day - the final step of the program.

Standing in front of people like Nicolas Berg, David Studer, and Madhur “Maddy” Agrawal was both exciting and surreal. Only three months earlier, pitching nestermind in front of such experienced investors and entrepreneurs would have felt almost impossible.

Their feedback was sharp and deeply constructive - not just about the slides or the storytelling, but about how well we truly understood our market, our timing, and our differentiation.

What hit me most was how much insight you can gain in just a few minutes when people challenge your assumptions with the right questions.

It was a reminder that pitching isn’t about performance - it’s about clarity and conviction. About showing that you understand not only what you’re building, but why now and for whom.

And maybe that’s the real beauty of programs like Venturelab: they don’t just train founders - they shape how entire teams think, communicate, and align around the same vision.

The Takeaways

If I had to summarize the Venturelab experience:

1. Clarity beats complexity.
   The best pitch isn’t the one with the most data; it’s the one that makes someone understand in one sentence why you exist.

2. The team defines the story.
   The way founders and first hires communicate - their tone, their energy, their belief - becomes part of the product itself.

3. Momentum matters.
   In early-stage startups, momentum isn’t created by capital - it’s created by consistent movement. Small wins, small experiments, constant adaptation.

Closing Thought

For me, Venturelab wasn’t just a learning experience.

It was a reminder that storytelling and strategy are two sides of the same coin. If you can tell your story clearly, you probably understand your company better than most.

So, to anyone building, joining, or investing - when was the last time you pitched your story, not just your product?

I’d love to hear what that looked like for you. 👇🏼

Leave a comment

And if you want to see what those pitch days actually looked like, here’s a picture

Vesting Community

A space where first and early hires can share what the early days really feel like.

Where students and university associations curious about startups can ask questions directly to those already in the trenches.

And where founders and investors can exchange perspectives on what truly makes teams work.

Somewhere between stories and reality - a place for the lessons that never make it into pitch decks or headlines.

No slides, no polish - just honest talks.

So if this sounds like something you’d like to be part of, send me a message.

nestermind

That’s a chapter I’ll share with you very soon 😃

Here our last update: 🚀 nestermind Product Update – August/September 2025

If you want to learn more and stay updated, you can subscribe at the bottom of the page!

If you’ve made it this far, drop a like so I know you’re actually reading along 😉

And if you’re curious why I chose the name Vestingnotes, leave a comment and take a guess!

Leave a comment

Why Vestingnotes

Why bother writing all this down?

Because the messy, unexpected, human lessons usually vanish in the rush of startup life.

I don’t want to forget what it feels like right now. And maybe by writing, I can give something back - to students curious about startups, founders searching for a first hire, and investors wondering what really happens in the trenches.

Thanks for reading - and if you subscribe, welcome to Vestingnotes! 🎉

See you next week 🕶️

Cheers,
Jona

Follow me on LinkedIn

Follow Vestingnotes on LinkedIn

Follow Vestingnotes newsletter on LinkedIn

I’ve now been part of nestermind for 9 months.

If you’ve been following Vestingnotes, you probably know that already. I’ve mentioned it a few times — maybe even too many 🙃.

But here’s the new milestone:

→ Vestingnotes just turned one month old 🎉

This is already my fourth newsletter in a row, and yes, I’m counting that as a win.

Because one thing you quickly learn inside a startup is this:

Small wins matter.

In early-stage startups, progress rarely comes in big, dramatic leaps. Instead, it’s built through dozens of small milestones that slowly move the company forward.

And celebrating those moments is part of the journey.

Over the past months at nestermind, we’ve celebrated things like:

• Signing our first LOI (Letter of Intent)

• Growing the team

• Launching new product features

Each of these moments is a reminder that progress is happening — even when the road ahead is still uncertain.

Why Celebrating Small Startup Wins Matters

This mindset isn’t unique to us.

In a podcast episode hosted by Alan Frei with Besfort Biljali, they discussed something that stuck with me: the importance of celebrating every success, no matter how big or small.

Whether it’s:

• Closing a small deal

• Landing a big client

• Publishing your first newsletter

the level of joy should be the same. That episode was both inspiring and practical.

And as a bonus, it gave me a perfect excuse to keep my Schweizerdeutsch sharp while running or commuting to the office 👌🏼

Thank You to the First Vestingnotes Readers

So before going further — thank you.

During this first month of Vestingnotes:

• 199 people started following on LinkedIn

• Several readers subscribed on Substack

That might not sound like a huge number in internet terms. But in startup terms?

That’s 199 people who decided this journey is worth following. And that means a lot.

If you’d like to join, you can subscribe and get Vestingnotes straight into your inbox every Tuesday morning 🚀

A Cold Calling Story From My First Hire Experience

As I mentioned, cold calling was a huge part of the process.

And speaking of it - in my last newsletter, I actually forgot to share this picture as “proof.”

Funny story:

I wasn’t even on a call in that picture - it was right after a team event when I finally got a proper headset with a microphone, ready to call.

The very next day, excited to test my new gear, I called a potential client.

Here’s how it started:

“Hello XY, this is Jonathan - Jona from nestermind. […] How much time do you currently spend updating your CRM?”

His reply?

“Jonathan, do you know how I actually save time?”

I could feel a big wave coming, so I said:

“Sure! Tell me…”

His reply:

“By avoiding conversations with people like you.”

Fair enough. Probably not the German accent you want to hear on a rainy Monday morning.

Feel free to share this story with your friends and colleagues - maybe someone in your network has experienced something similar 😁

Share

The Bigger Question Behind Vestingnotes

Finally, I’m starting to sketch out some answers to the big picture behind Vestingnotes:

“How do the right people, at the right time, in the right market, turn ideas into companies that last?”

Of course, what follows isn’t a universal truth. It’s just my perspective - shaped by what I’m living right now as a first hire inside an early-stage startup. These are observations in motion, not conclusions.

From where I stand today, I see the question splitting into different layers.

Some pieces you can address from the very beginning, others only reveal themselves over time.

People and timing are the first two dimensions you encounter.

People are where everything begins. Skills matter, yes - but they can be built along the way. What’s harder to find is the mindset: the ability to stay steady in uncertainty, to adapt when plans fall apart, to keep moving when there’s no clear road ahead. And it’s also why startup CEOs invest so much time in recruiting - because choosing the right people early on has an exponential impact.

Timing, instead, is something no one fully controls, but no one can ignore.

Sometimes the very same team and idea can fail one year and succeed the next - simply because the market or culture wasn’t ready before. Timing is always a mix of luck, awareness, and trial-and-error, and often you only recognize the “right moment” afterwards. Even when the timing feels off, it still comes down to people - the right team can adapt, adjust, and keep going until the timing finally aligns.

As for market and companies that last - those parts of the question will come later in the story.

I’d be very curious to hear your opinion 👇🏼

Leave a comment

nestermind

Here our last update: 🚀 nestermind Product Update – August/September 2025

If you want to learn more and stay updated, you can subscribe at the bottom of the page!

Why Vestingnotes

Why bother writing all this down?

Because the messy, unexpected, human lessons usually vanish in the rush of startup life.

I don’t want to forget what it feels like right now. And maybe by writing, I can give something back - to students curious about startups, founders searching for a first hire, and investors wondering what really happens in the trenches.

Thanks for reading - and if you subscribe, welcome to Vestingnotes! 🎉

See you next week 🕶️

… and don’t forget to follow me on LinkedIn 😎

Cheers,
Jona

I had already wrapped up the Substack newsletter and the LinkedIn version. But after launching my LinkedIn newsletter yesterday morning at 7:30 and seeing the response, I just had to get back to my laptop and add this update.

130 subscribers in just 10 hours 🎉 🚀

It might seem small to some, but for me it’s a milestone worth celebrating with you.

So a huge thank you to everyone who subscribed on LinkedIn and to those now signing up on Substack with their email to receive Vestingnotes directly in their inbox every Tuesday morning.

It’s amazing to see how many people are interested in Vestingnotes and to start the week with a dose of first-hire perspective!

Now, back to what you actually came here for…!

Last week I shared the story of my second giro di boa: the moment I decided to join nestermind.

This week, I want to dive into what happened right after that decision…

What’s it really like to join a startup, when things were just starting to take shape?

First week as a first hire

It all started right after Christmas - as I mentioned in my last post - on December 27, 2024. While most people were still on holiday, I packed my bag in Lugano and headed back to Zurich

No smooth transition, no warm-up phase - just straight into startup life.

At that exact moment, nestermind was in the middle of its Pre-Seed round. Imagine joining a company when the founders are pitching, negotiating, and fighting for the resources to make the vision real. There’s no time to ease in. You have to learn on the move.

And here’s the point: I wasn’t joining as a developer. I wasn’t building codes. My role was everything else. Sales, operations, coordination, jumping into client conversations, making sure nothing fell through the cracks.

When you join a startup, titles and clearly defined tasks don’t really exist. You have to be ready to switch from one topic to another, create new processes, and think both short- and long-term. At the beginning, there’s no such thing as “my task” or “your task.” Everyone tries to cover where a teammate can’t, simply because they’re busy with something else. Basically, I became Lucas’s right hand.

Looking back, I realize there’s no better way to accelerate your learning curve. You’re close enough to the founders to see the strategy take shape, but also deep enough in the execution to feel every win and every mistake. It’s intense - and it’s exponential.

This reminds me a lot of ice hockey, the sport I grew up with. The culture of helping each other, never giving up, and asking your teammates if they need a hand. There’s no selfishness, no “this isn’t my job.” Instead, it’s: “I have no idea right now, but I’ll figure it out and come back with a plan or something already in place.”

Of course, that’s just the start. As months go by, the structure begins to solidify and everyone becomes the owner of specific topics, taking full responsibility. But at the beginning? Oh man… you do everything. Literally everything. And that’s exactly what makes the learning curve so exponential.

Okay Jona, that’s all great - but what actually happened in the very first week?

📲 COLD CALLING

Yes, you read that right.

Out of all the things on the list - processes to set up, product to shape, documents to prepare - one thing came first: picking up the phone and making calls.

Why cold calling?
Because in the early days of a startup, nothing creates traction faster. You can run surveys, write LinkedIn posts - but none of that compares to talking directly to potential customers.

Cold calling does three things at once:

• Speed: in just a few hours you can hear real feedback, instead of waiting weeks for warm introductions.

• Conversion: people say yes or no on the spot. It’s not filtered by polite email exchanges or long decision cycles.

• Learning: every rejection tells you what’s missing, every “maybe” shows you where to adjust, and every “yes” becomes proof that someone is ready to use your product today.

Agree, Stefan Velikov?

I still remember my first calls.

My heart was beating fast, my hands were sweaty. I had no perfect script - just conviction and curiosity. But those first calls with Lucas and conversations with potential clients opened doors that no marketing campaign could have opened at that stage.

They gave us more clients, the ones willing to bet on us when everything was still taking shape.

That’s why cold calling matters in the beginning: it forces you to face reality. You test if someone is actually willing to use and pay for what you’re building.

And if they are, congratulations: you’ve just found traction.

The funny part? My native language is Italian… but I was calling in German, English, and sometimes even French when there was no other way. Let’s just say my accent was working harder than I was.

Chaos vs opportunity

My first week at nestermind started with cold calling.

Picking up the phone was the fastest way to bring more clients on board, to test if other clients out there were willing to use nestermind.

And here’s the thing: cold calling was just the tip of the iceberg. Behind it, there was the bigger challenge - the chaos.

No processes. No playbooks. No “this is how we’ve always done it.” Just a small team, a huge vision, and a lot of things that had to be figured out along the way.

At first, it feels like standing in the middle of a storm. One call brings you closer to a client, the next meeting pulls you into operations. It’s messy. It’s unpredictable. And it can be overwhelming.

But here’s what I realized: chaos isn’t just disorder. Inside it lies opportunity.

• Opportunity to learn faster than you thought possible.

• Opportunity to leave a fingerprint early, when culture and processes are still being shaped.

• Opportunity to prove to yourself that you can adapt, improvise, and deliver even without a manual.

That’s the paradox of the first hire experience: the chaos that scares you at first is the same chaos that gives you room to grow.

And maybe you’ve felt it too - in your first job, your first internship, or the first time you took a risk that didn’t come with a safety net. The mix of fear and excitement, of not knowing exactly what’s next but moving forward anyway. That’s where the opportunity hides.

Agreements and equity

After my last post, some people asked me:

Okay, but what kind of agreement do you actually make with the founders when you’re the first hire?

The truth is: there’s no single formula. When it comes to equity, the conversation almost always leads to ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans).

I highly recommend reading ’s post on - a clear explanation of how ESOPs actually work, from pools and vesting to cliffs, phantom shares, and more.

If this is a topic you’d like me to go deeper into, leave a comment and I’ll dedicate a future newsletter to it.

Leave a comment

Why Vestingnotes

Why bother writing all this down?

Because the messy, unexpected, human lessons usually vanish in the rush of startup life.

I don’t want to forget what it feels like right now. And maybe by writing, I can give something back - to students curious about startups, founders searching for a first hire, and investors wondering what really happens in the trenches.

Spoiler: I haven’t even told you what nestermind actually does yet. That’s coming soon😉

Thanks for reading - and if you subscribe, welcome to Vestingnotes! 🎉

See you next week 🕶️

Cheers,
Jona

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Have you ever had a moment that changed everything?

In Italian, we have an expression: giri di boa. It describes those turning points that mark a clear before and after - the moments when you realize nothing will ever be the same again.

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I’ve had two giri di boa.

The first came when, within the span of a week, I decided to leave my life as a professional athlete and return to studying (here’s the link).

But today, I’d like to focus on the second one, which is definitely more relevant for my readers and for the purpose of Vestingnotes.

The second giro di boa has a name: nestermind - the moment when Lucas Pelloni decided to reach out to me.

For those who don’t know him, Lucas is the CEO and co-founder of nestermind. Like me, he grew up in Lugano, Switzerland. I was lucky to meet him through a mutual friend and my brother, with whom he shared his high school years.

During my university years, driven by my passion for the startup world, I reached out to him to share some ideas. He gave me valuable feedback, and even then, Lucas had already realized that I’d probably be a good fit for a startup.

Then, on December 12th, 2024, I received a message from him:

I apologize to those who don’t speak Italian, but the text simply said:

Hi Jona, how are you? What's new? Have you found a job?

It was a simple message, but one that would change a lot. Lucas knew I was about to finish my Master’s at the University of Zurich, that I had already gained experience in corporate and a bit of sales, and that I wouldn’t be continuing at the company where I was working. Good catch, Lucas! ✅

When I walked into nestermind’s “office”, I met the entire team at the time, the three co-founders: Lucas, Severin and Stephan. We talked about many things, but one moment I will always remember. Lucas said something that he later repeated on the VESS podcast by (Alessandro Soldati, and by the way, thanks for following Vestingnotes! 🚀).

Here’s what Lucas said:

Jona, I don’t know where we’ll go with nestermind, but I know it’s going to be awesome!

Severin followed with:

From my side, I can’t tell you exactly where we’ll go with nestermind either. What I can assure you is this: in the other companies we founded (like Axelra), not a single day went by when I came to the office without feeling motivated and happy to work - just like on the very first day.

Those two sentences were decisive. It wasn’t about the product, the market, or even the work itself - which was, of course, extremely stimulating. What made the difference was the team, the exponential learning curve, and the clarity with which they explained the culture they wanted to build.

And then the decision came, on December 20th, 2024.

Again, I apologize to non-Italian speakers. Here is the translation:

Lucas:
Good evening :) did you receive the email yesterday? Was the email correct?

Jonathan:
Good evening Lucas! 😊 Yes, I received the email!
Today I had a very intense day, I’m replying to your email just now!
I can already tell you that I’m happy we found common ground on all my requests, I’m excited to join the team and can’t wait to get started 🤘🙏🚀🎯

Lucas:
Hi Jona! This is wonderful news ❤️ I’m really glad you made this decision. We can’t wait to start! ❤️

Jonathan:
I’m also very happy about this opportunity, super excited! 😊
In the next few days we can organize a product overview and everything you’d like to show me! From the 27th I’ll be in Zurich 🤘

Last message does not need translation 😊

Completed with an Aperol at 5:55 p.m. that same day - exactly what any proud holder of an Italian passport would do. In Zurich, as I mentioned in my post, they’d probably opt for a Glühwein. But let’s go with it…

At that point, it was clear: my choice wasn’t about salary, title, or prestige. It was about the team and the joy of waking up every morning excited about what I was doing.

People often talk about work-life balance, and I value that too. But I also believe that putting in extra hours feels completely different when it’s for something you love, instead of just filling your CV while waiting for the next move.

A simple example: a few nights ago at 7:30 p.m. I went for a run, then came back and worked some more. Was I asked to? No. Did I want to? Absolutely.

Because when you do something you love, everything feels different, lighter.

Here’s a picture from my run ✌🏼

If you were expecting crazy edited, stunning visuals - sorry, not there yet. Maybe one day, but not now (forgive me) 😁. For now, let’s get back to the story.

Sure, jumping into nestermind wasn’t easy. And that’s exactly why I want to talk about it.

Whether you’re wrapping up your studies, in the early days of your career, or already halfway through it, you often face tough calls. An opportunity comes up and you’re not sure if it’s worth taking.

That’s exactly what happened to me after I made my final decision. I was contacted by a large bank. An interview, a potential career path.

Oh my, now what? What should I do?

For me, the answer turned out to be simple: I already knew why I had said yes to nestermind. It wasn’t about money, it wasn’t about the brand, it wasn’t about external expectations. It was about the team, the pace, the chance to learn directly from the founders and to grow in an environment where I could make an impact every single day.

So even though that might have been a valuable experience, I knew I wouldn’t be sitting at a desk working on a pitch deck for investors just seven days later - let alone talking to them directly.

In a startup, yes. In a large company, hardly at that speed. And that’s exactly what I wanted at that point in my life: to learn fast, and to learn directly from the founders.

I thought the topic was closed… until the next day, when another email landed in my inbox.

And my answer was not different from the previous one.

Jona - Who the F**K cares about a fancy application and a maybe-opportunity

Exactly, who cares? No one. The point isn’t the application itself, but what it taught me about choosing the right path for me.

I’m not sharing this to say “I could have worked at a big bank” or to show off a fancy application. I’m sharing it because many of us face the same crossroads. An opportunity shows up that looks like the obvious choice: salary, brand, CV boost. And yet, deep down, you know it may not be what you really want.

For me, saying yes to nestermind was the right decision. For someone else, the right choice might have been the other way around. And that’s exactly the point: the question we need to ask ourselves is the same - am I choosing this path because it’s truly mine, or just because it looks like the obvious one?

That’s what the first hire experience is about. No manual, no fixed processes, just writing the first pages of a story together. From the outside it may look risky - even reckless. From the inside, it’s priceless.

And that’s the real “giro di boa”: not simply choosing the path that looks polished, but the one that makes sense for you. For me, it started with a simple message. For others, it might be something completely different.

So no, today isn’t about KPIs, VCs/Angels rounds or vesting periods - those will come later. Today is about the psychology of a choice like this, and about those turning points.

These are my “giri di boa”. Now I’d love to hear about yours. What were the turning points that shaped your journey? Share your experience in the comments 😊

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading - and if you subscribe, welcome to Vestingnotes! 🎉

See you next week 🕶️

Cheers,
Jona

Ciao, I’m Jonathan (Jona),

I was born and raised in Lugano, in the beautiful Ticino region of Switzerland.

I swapped the hockey rink for university books - first in Lucerne, then in Zurich, where I studied Banking and Finance. After that, I traded textbooks for startup life.

I have now been living in Zurich for three and a half years.

Today I’m the first hire at nestermind, a proptech startup in Switzerland. I joined the company on December 27, 2024, and I’m figuring out every day what it really takes to build a company from the ground up, learning from the founders along the way (Lucas Pelloni, Severin Wullschleger and Stephan D. Meyer) and from my colleagues Claudio Gebbia, Remus Nichiteanu and soon from Sofia Luraschi who will join the company in October 🎉.

That’s me. Building chairs for our new teammates.

Why Vestingnotes?

Because being at the very beginning of a startup is a unique perspective.

It’s fast, messy, intense - and yet most of what happens in those early days never gets written down.

The voices of the first hires - the people helping to build from scratch - are often missing, and there is no community that brings them together.

Vestingnotes is my way of documenting this journey - bringing together:

• First hires already in the trenches;

• Students who aren’t yet ready to be founders but want to explore what it means to be a first hire;

• Founders with their stories and experiences;

• Investors;

• And anyone curious to follow along.

It’s a space to:

• Capture lessons from life as a first hire;

• Explore shifts in proptech and real estate in Switzerland and beyond;

• Reflect on team dynamics, timing, and the human side of startups.

And keep asking the bigger question that drives my curiosity:

“How do the right people at the right time, in the right market, turn ideas into companies that last?”

What you’ll find here

A mix of personal notes and broader reflections on:

• First hire perspective → lessons from being a first hire, equity in practice, how culture and roles take shape when the team is still small and a lot’s more.

• Proptech & real estate → observations on how these markets are evolving in Switzerland and beyond.

• People & growth → reflections on timing, team dynamics, and the human side of startups.

Who it’s for

Vestingnotes is for first hires, students curious about startups, founders, investors, and anyone who wants to follow the journey.

The bigger picture

I don’t know exactly where this will lead - and that’s the beauty of the journey.

For now, it’s a place to capture notes, lessons and mistakes. Over time… keep following and you’ll see 😉

This is just the beginning. I have plenty of ideas for what comes next - and I’d love to have you along for the ride!

Thanks for reading - and if you subscribe, welcome to Vestingnotes! 🎉

See you next week 🕶️

Cheers,
Jona