Zürich has the talent. What it needs is density.

Six months in San Francisco, then a room full of Zürich builders on a July evening. Abigail Holland came back with a diagnosis, and the room spent the night testing it.

Abby founded Go Go Gaia and has built and worked across Toronto, London, San Francisco and Zürich. She came to Ship26-Talks to compare the two cities she knows best.

Zürich already has the raw materials

Deep technical talent. Patient capital. Political and economic stability. Global leadership in biotech and robotics. Abby's argument opened by conceding all of it, because the gap she sees sits somewhere else entirely.

She named three missing pieces: early-stage funding that moves fast, mentorship networks a founder can actually reach, and a culture of gathering often, openly, and without needing a reason.

Density is the mechanism

Abby spent part of her San Francisco stretch living in an accelerator dorm with 35 other biotech founders. Breakfast doubled as a status update. A dead end someone hit on Tuesday saved somebody else a fortnight by Thursday.

None of that is a programme. It is proximity, repeated daily, and it turns the grind of building a company into something closer to a shared sport.

The questions started before she finished. Oliver first, then Paul-Emile, and the talk turned into the room comparing notes on what Zürich is actually short of.

What that looks like in Zürich

The version Zürich can build doesn't need a dorm. It needs rooms that repeat: the same faces, often enough that people stop performing and start comparing notes. Founders here are surrounded by talent and capital, and the thing that compounds fastest is still the person two seats away who solved this last month.

That is what we are building at Schifflände 26, ten steps from the Limmat in the old town. One table, a deliberately mixed room of founders, independents, investors and the people who help work get made. Ship26 is a curated community with a home on the water in Zürich, and the argument for it is the same one Abby made: surround yourself with who you want to become.

Thank you to Abby for challenging the room's assumptions and for making the comparison a fair one in both directions.

Zürich has the talent, the capital and the stability. Density is the piece we can add ourselves, one evening at a time. If you want to be in the room for the next one, check out our next talks.