Pierre-Alain Masson and the geography of a good idea

Before there was a map of startup competitions stretching across continents, there was wine. In January 2014, Pierre-Alain Masson was discussing a Seedstars business called Wiine.me: bottles delivered by subscription, with ambitions beyond Switzerland. He said it had reached break-even less than six months after launch. Another early venture, Jobooh, helped startups recruit. The future was arriving with a delivery schedule and a job listing.

These are pleasingly ordinary beginnings for an organization now working across more than 90 countries. Masson, Seedstars’ CEO and co-founder, has spent years helping connect entrepreneurs in emerging markets with education, investors and one another. His career includes company formation, corporate finance, teaching and a travelling competition. Follow it backwards and the grand language of global entrepreneurship gives way to a familiar question: can this business actually work?

The wine came first

Seedstars began in 2012 with Masson, Michael Weber and Adrien de Loës. They wanted to build businesses. Their early approach favoured internet ventures that could reach the market quickly and required less capital than more complicated technology projects. In Carouge, near Geneva, the company was putting between 50,000 and 100,000 Swiss francs into individual projects, with an ambition to launch three or four a year.

The recruitment business already covered 54 countries by early 2014. Wine subscriptions offered a different test: could a recurring consumer service expand beyond its first market? Germany was on the agenda. There were other possibilities under consideration, including ecommerce in Morocco and an agency in Serbia. Even in this relatively small portfolio, the geography was beginning to spread.

It is an instructive starting point for Masson’s later work. Each venture had its own customers and practical demands. A recruitment site and a wine subscription cannot live on the same sales pitch. The portfolio made room for different problems, while requiring each business to find a way to support itself. A bottle, at least, has the courtesy to be a tangible deliverable.

A finance education, put to work

Masson graduated from the University of St. Gallen, where he studied business administration and founded his first company at 20. Entrepreneurship therefore arrived before the degree was finished. He went on to work in mergers and acquisitions, founded Ensures Capital and co-founded ventures including Trace Technologies and Jobooh. He also wrote a column about Swiss startups for Market.ch.

His experience included serving as the CFO of an international insurance company and advising on transactions or exits worth more than $100 million. Those roles put him on several sides of the business table: starting a company, examining a deal, thinking about financing and explaining entrepreneurship to readers. The eventual Seedstars role brought those activities into the same organization.

A glimpse of that financial background survives in his writing. In July 2017, he published an explanation of M&A auctions, including the difference between a competitive bidding process and a negotiation. He examined why rules, deadlines and access to information affect a sale. Beneath the vocabulary sits a straightforward concern: how do people make decisions when their interests differ?

His companion article on acquisition financing considered debt, equity, timing, currency exposure and control. It looked at the same deal through the perspectives of investors, creditors and management. Reading the two pieces together, one encounters a founder willing to spend time on the mechanics. The exciting announcement of an acquisition occupies very little space compared with the arrangements that allow it to happen.

Twenty cities, one travelling question

The international competition began in 2013. Masson and Alisée de Tonnac travelled to establish Seedstars World, launching events in 20 cities in a year. The work took the competition to places where founders were already building companies. Local events created a way to meet them, understand their businesses and bring selected entrepreneurs into a wider network.

A competition gives an unfamiliar organization a useful reason to knock on doors. There is an event to organize, a company to nominate, a pitch to hear. Repeated across cities, those encounters can become relationships. The premise behind Seedstars was that entrepreneurial ability exists in many places, while access to capital, education and business connections varies considerably.

“We created our network through events, meetups, and startup competitions.”

Pierre-Alain Masson, 2018

The colleagues matter to this story. De Tonnac helped establish and lead the competition. Charlie Graham-Brown developed the investment work; Benjamin Benaïm joined to advance company building. Weber was part of the original founding group. Seedstars’ different activities grew through people with different responsibilities, rather than through a single founder collecting countries on a map.

Masson and de Tonnac’s connection also extends beyond the office: she has publicly discussed their partnership in life and at Seedstars. Their shared professional history includes that first year of travel. It is a substantial amount of early company experience to share, with the added complication that the office kept changing cities.

The useful part comes after the applause

In 2017, Masson presented the Seedstars World trophy to Acudeen Technologies from the Philippines. Its business addressed a specific difficulty: small companies waiting to be paid could turn invoices into working capital through receivables discounting. The winner was eligible for up to $500,000 in equity investment. Behind the ceremony was a business problem familiar to anyone who has waited for a customer’s payment.

The competition made these companies visible. Seedstars also developed programs to work on what followed: growth, fundraising and the decisions inside a business. Physical Seedspace hubs gave entrepreneurs places to work and meet. Investment activities created another relationship with selected companies. The prize ceremony occupied one afternoon; these other activities required a longer calendar.

At the 2018 investor forum, Masson and colleague Igor Ochvarenko had explained a blended approach: physical entrepreneurship hubs alongside an online community, including a networking and mentoring app. Local ambassadors were part of the plan. The ambition depended on having people present between major events, able to keep relationships moving. It gave the competition a more demanding follow-up task. Once founders had been introduced, someone needed to help them remain in contact, exchange knowledge and find another useful conversation.

In Kazakhstan in 2019, Masson co-led a one-day growth bootcamp with Agahuseyn Ahmadov at the Seedstars Summit CEE. The agenda covered choosing a north-star metric, examining the customer funnel and setting up experiments. More than 300 people from 25 countries attended the broader event. Masson’s contribution included getting into the details with founders before the summit’s presentations.

There is a useful change of scale here. The international network brings people into the room. Once they arrive, the questions become particular to a company: which measure deserves attention, where customers drop away, what an experiment should test. The glamorous version of entrepreneurship rarely gives the funnel much dialogue. It nevertheless turns up for work every morning.

The Online Seedstars Academy extended the teaching into digital courses. In his welcome, Masson acknowledged the organization’s own challenges in scaling and described learning as an ongoing process. That places the instructor and the entrepreneur in a recognizable relationship. Both have businesses to develop; the teaching comes from accumulated experience while the learning continues.

A second look at the application pile

Meeting founders also produces information. By 2018, Masson was discussing how Seedstars could use the data submitted through competition applications to support screening with machine learning. The interest came from an existing activity: companies were already describing themselves to the organization. There was a growing body of material to examine.

In June 2023, that question appeared in another form through AI Start, an exploratory collaboration between Seedstars, Katapult and Bakken & Bæck. The project investigated whether artificial intelligence could add to early-stage investment analysis. Its proposed inputs included qualitative and quantitative information, such as the number of founders, media coverage and data about the surrounding entrepreneurial ecosystem.

“We recognize that each startup has its own unique journey”

Pierre-Alain Masson, discussing AI Start, 2023

The stated research aim included estimating a startup’s likelihood of raising a Series A or B round. That is a defined outcome to investigate, with limits: raising another round is one event in a company’s life. The project was presented as exploratory. Its place in Masson’s story is as another attempt to examine businesses across different circumstances, using information that extends beyond a financial statement.

Still answering ordinary business questions

Seedstars now describes itself as an investment and education company headquartered in Geneva, working across more than 90 countries. Its official leadership pages list Masson as CEO and co-founder. Seedstars International Ventures also lists him as an investment committee member. The responsibilities combine the operating organization with the assessment of businesses it might support.

The institution has its own vocabulary for the work, including an emphasis on experiments, independence and financial discipline. One of its stated values is “Follow the money.” That is an unusually candid phrase to put beside a social purpose. It acknowledges a constraint every founder eventually encounters: the resources supporting a mission need care as well.

Masson’s path makes the coexistence understandable. Before the international competitions were the first companies. Alongside the education work sits the financial experience. Behind the investment experiments are years of applications and meetings. The thread is a willingness to engage with the arrangements around an idea, from its first customer to the people who may finance its growth.

Return to that wine subscription and the distance becomes easier to understand. The territory has widened considerably since Carouge. Yet the work still involves people trying to sell something useful, pay their bills and take a next step. A good idea can travel a long way. Someone still has to work out the delivery.