Business Ideas
Module 1

Martina is the Founder and CEO of Shavejack. It all started because she stole her husband’s razor and realised that the blades are sharper, last longer and are free of pink tax. Beside the development of plant-based shaving products, they are developing a zero waste shaver as 2 billion razors get tossed out in the U.S. only each year.

She was a managing director of a digital agency in Zurich, worked as a consultant for 10+ years and studied part time at the HWZ, before she quit her job and founded Shavejack. In her opinion there are way too few female entrepreneurs in the Swiss startup ecosystem. Each Shavejane product sold, will therefore support another female founder in the early stage. As a founder and mother of two, she wants to encourage other women to start their own business.

Mathilde is the co-founder and Head of Business at SURI BioTech. SURI BioTech is a biotech startup, which develops health promoting bacterial strains with clear mechanism of action to improve people’s well-being and quality of life. The first application targets the alleviation of infant colic.

Mathilde teamed up with her co-founder and CEO, Vanesa Rocha Martin, to bring in her business experience to the founding team. After her management studies at ESSEC Business School in Paris, Mathilde moved to Zurich and worked in financial consulting and corporate M&A. Being part of a female founder team, Mathilde strives to encourage other women to consider an entrepreneurial career.

http://suribiotech.com/

Dr. Marjan Kraak is an Alumna from the University of Groningen with a degree in microbiology and she has a PhD in Biotechnology from ETH Zurich. She has 10 years of industry experience in product development and project management in several companies in the fields of biotechnology and molecular diagnostics. Since 2014 she was heading the Spin-off group at ETH transfer and she is currently the Managing Director at ETH Entrepreneurship.

Prof. Vanessa Wood is a full professor and chair at the Institute for Electronics (IfE) in the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (D-​ITET) at ETH Zürich. Her research group is the Materials and Device Engineering Group (MaDE). Besides her professorship, Vanessa Wood is the Vice President for Knowledge Transfer and Corporate Relations at ETH Zürich since 2021.