Notes, essays, and dispatches from the people building at ship26.
Fabian Dittrich came to Ship26 to show Wispr Flow, the voice AI that turns raw speech into clean text. Then the former German freediving record holder taught the room how to stay calm under pressure, one breath at a time.
A voice memo from a boat on Lake Zürich, a coding agent shipping a feature live on stage, and one question Chris Griessmann left with a packed room at Ship26: which part of your week would you hand to an agent first?
Johannes Röhrenbach took the stage at Ship26 and talked only about what went wrong: a solar company, a boat-sharing startup and an agri-fintech in Tanzania, and the rules he builds by now.
Simone Longo brought Foldini's newest protein pasta to a Wednesday Talk at Ship26 and asked the room to be as transparent as possible. An hour later, a room of guinea pigs had turned into a co-creation session.
Lidia Zabala's #IamRemarkable workshop handed everyone at Ship26 a pen and one sentence to finish: "I am remarkable because…" What the room wrote, and why it's not bragging if it's based on facts.
Xaver Walser on André Melo's Wednesday Talk at Ship26: why everyone in the room had already used quantum mechanics that day, what a spinning coin has to do with a qubit, and why useful quantum computers are still a decade out.
Crew member Johannes Röhrenbach brought musicians from all over to Schifflände 26 for a live unplugged evening, and when the room ran out of space the session moved down to the community boat on the Limmat.
Ellen Louw analyses what six billion people say online for a living. She brought the uncomfortable version to Ship26: trust has collapsed from the national level down to the person across the table, and the way back starts with a beer, not a debate.
Teodora Vuković spent six years labelling speech by hand. At Ship26 she showed the room what machines can now read in a face, a voice and a gesture - and what they still get badly wrong.
Two people save the same amount every month for thirty years, and one ends up with three times the other. Oliver Angélil spent a Wednesday evening at Ship26 showing the room where that gap comes from, and the three ETFs he holds himself.
In his final year at university, Pieter Walser sold wine in bottles with nothing on them. It cost him nearly everything, and the condition for starting again was a label. What he came back with named no grape at all.
Abigail Holland spent six months inside San Francisco's startup scene, then came to Ship26-Talks with a diagnosis of Zürich: the talent and the capital are already here, and density is the piece still missing. Three things she says come next, and a 35-founder dorm that explains why.
Xaver Walser brought two weeks of footage from the Banyak Islands to Schifflände 26, and a running commentary on what he was thinking in every frame. Waveski surfing, a year of 4 AM training in a landlocked country, three kinds of wave, and the crew he went with.
Welcoming Oliver Angélil, PhD — ETH climate scientist, Ishango.ai CTO, and elite athlete — to the Ship26 crew.
Why we built a co-building space on the Limmat where openness beats gatekeeping and everyone genuinely wants you to win.
A night of live demos — from agentic social campaigns to one-line coding agents — that sparked the launch of the Ship26 Academy hands-on workshops.
A morning 6K run, a Limmat cold plunge, and a workshop from a former Googler on running a VC fund with zero employees — and why the future may belong to “Donkeys,” not Unicorns.
Stephanie Leue came to Ship26 with blunt advice for anyone going independent: throw the old corporate titles in the bin. At a Portfolio Careers Hub event on the Limmat, she made the case that the hardest part of leaving corporate life isn't the work - it's finding the right people, and letting go of the status you used to hang your name on.
A one-week trip to Shanghai and Hangzhou became a two-hour debate: the room included a former expat, a fluent insider, and a table that wouldn't let an easy thesis stand.