Our workshop, mentoring and training for deep tech founders and incubators
We believe in transferring knowledge, and we do it with passion!
"How did you know?" We hear that a lot.
Some call it magic wisdom or oracle sense. In truth, it’s disciplined pattern recognition—paired with the ability to zoom out to the system level and zoom in to the decisive moment, instantly and repeatedly. We excel at revealing patterns, governing forces and details that drive decision-making.
Early missteps in this field echo for years; once consequences surface, they are often impossible to reverse, if not, at a high cost. This dual lens is essential—for individuals, and for organizations. The earlier it is learned, the better.
There is far more opportunity to outsmart the system when you understand where and how it ticks.
Alpha, beta, and alpha again: the heart of our practice
In finance, alpha is the performance above the market — in innovative Life Sciences, it means a good exit and/or a well-adopted product — the holy grail being a gold standard.
Beta is resilience of performance. In innovative Life Sciences, it means developing a performance profile that holds through market turbulence. You get there by not only generating optionality, but materialising it. A quiet, well-orchestrated compounding base.
Re-generating alpha is a challenge. It means operating within a set of constraints that still allows outstanding delivery. Having captured what is essential — in the mindset, in the organisation, for the market — to perform again, even when nothing is as before.
The rarest people in this field generate all three. More than once. They understand the long game, and know when to play short. As executives, board members, investors — often all three across a career, sometimes simultaneously. They stay in the field. They take on hard roles. Some command the spotlight; many are rarely seen in public and don´t need to. All of them share a talent to make and enable.
What we bring to workshops and mentoring is distilled from working with them, daily, for over twenty years.
Three formats. One discipline.
We offer three formats — until someone asks for something new: workshops, mentoring and training. Across all three:
- we transfer knowledge through hands-on workshops and mentoring, designing immersive games and real cases to ensure learning that sticks.
- we bring a drone-like perspective of the field—commanding the big picture while detecting the specific signals that drive decisions.
- we support over time, offering clear-eyed commentary on what we observe and, above all, the path forward.
For founders, for the teams that support them, and for those who want to think at that level — earlier.
Workshop — investor thinking for Life Sciences and Deep Tech founders
A full day. A group. Real cases on the table.
For incubator cohorts, biotech and medtech teams, and early-stage ventures — on market analysis, investor logic, financing mechanics, and the disciplines that most founders encounter too late.
– Capital allocation: reading the science from the investor’s seat
- Who´s in for High Growth / High Risk?
- The hidden "why" behind capital allocation in deep tech
- Cash vs. Science: what´s driving us?
- Market analysis from the investors´ perspective
– Asset story and equity story of projects and companies
- Cracking the innovative start-up code
- From Idea to funded Innovation
- Asset vs. Equity story
- How to think "Market-to-Bench"
- Pitch feedback circle
– Valuation
- Dealing with uncertainty
- Value of Science (rNPV) or Value of Cash (VC model)?
- Value of Innovation vs. Value of Adoption?
– Investor types, their mandates, what drives their decisions - from term sheets to governance
- In the mind and mandate of a VC
- In the mind and mandate of a FO
- Beyond Financial Terms
- Negotiating as founder: early exposure to decision making and governance (term sheet + shareholder agreement negotiation)
Duration:
- 3h, half-day or full day— depending on topic and audience.
- On full day workshop we usually stay until all questions are exhausted.
Type of workshop: interactivity supports learning, this is thus central for us. Beyond the more classic formats, we also work in,
- Live case analysis drawn directly from the audience
- Firechat circles — fast, context-specific, builds communication awareness and case-specific method
- Roleplays, typically to get the audience experience capital allocation, governance, fundraising, decision and deal-making
We also happily partner with other specialists in your ecosystem. Bridging silos and conveying the long-game reality on specialists topics (IP, legal aspects pertaining to shareholders and deal-making, governance, branding...) consistently delivers more.
A lot learned on a field that if often unknown to innovative founders and incubator staff : finance.
Less caricature. What we don’t understand on its own terms, we suffer through cognitive dissonance. Caricature is a symptom. These emotional loads slow founders in their learning curve and at critical moments.
A sharper eye, analytical tools and greater confidence for the long game.
Enhanced communication skills. Modern entrepreneurship gives the impression of a “come as you are” eldorado. However value dissolves fast, when founders and executives engage in a way that the financial ecosystem cannot endorse. The reality is closer to “develop who you are before the system and its social codes close in on you.” Few people learned this early. Most didn’t. We help close that gap.
Virtual only for targeted topics.
Mostly in person. There is a long-game, decision-making, and deal-making dimension to our workshops that requires confronting and adapting verbal and non-verbal language. We work on more dimensions at once in live settings.
Tell us the scope, focus, constraints, and the background of the companies and founders attending. We prepare jointly from there.
Preparation for participants is possible when organisers know their audience engages better that way — it works well, but is not required to generate interactivity.
We then schedule format, duration, on-site requirements, and logistics together.
Yes — for companies in innovative life sciences, deep tech, or sectors that operate closely with this field and want to understand it better.
We help reveal the different perspectives, mandates, and financial logic behind decision-making and deal-making — in view of generating alpha, building beta, or re-generating alpha. And that behind what is mathematical, there are significant human dimensions.
Format: dedicated workshop, or integrated into a larger team-building or immersive event.
1:1 mentoring
for Life Sciences and Deep Tech founders
A 1:1 session addresses strategic questions.
We read your material before we arrive. We bring the investor’s perspective — what they see, what they don’t say out loud, what they will ask in two years that you need to be able to answer today.
It is dense. It is direct. Founders and executives leave with a clear to-do list and different questions than they came with — better ones.
It starts from your live case. No fixed syllabus. The most frequent areas:
- Project/company value: what it means, what it doesn’t, and why most early-stage founders misread it
- Mandate and operating style of VC, FO and BA.
- Disruptive deal-making strategies and maximisation of outcome
- Term sheet mechanics, timeline and milestone design that stakeholders can read and trust
- Competitive positioning — the difference between differentiation, defensibility, and adoptability; the level and cost of disruption
- RD& Productivity vs. Market fit
- Your pitch: what lands, what flags risk, what creates doubt before you know it
- The long game: what decisions will echo at Series A, B, and beyond
- How talented executives, investors, and board members approach key decisions and deal-making — and why this is, at its core, a co-construction
1h30 to 2h per session, max 3h. We prepare from your materials in advance.
Sessions are in person where possible. Remote for follow-up or when distance requires it.
When a start-up is supported by an incubator, we encourage the main point of contact to join, as the insights shared often help strengthen ongoing incubation or acceleration support.
Eye-opening, usually. A new dimension is introduced — one that the founder can own and work with independently from that point forward.
Solutions. Topics that companies spend weeks or months circling — because they cross silos that hide the pattern, from people as much as from AI — we often crack in a couple of hours. This is our daily practice. It is why executives who have the dual capacity to generate alpha and beta come to us.
Less unnecessary emotion. More energy directed at the actual goal.
New method and analytical tools.
Some founders report the full effect unfolding over one to four years. “Now I make full sense of what you meant that day.” For those who ride mountain bikes or motorcycles: it is like the use of the left brake — once discovered, you never ride the same way again.
Founders at early stage — biotech, medtech, digital health, deep tech, agrotech, fintech, greentech.
Executives, who still have a limited operating network, board or investor support — who sense a turning point ahead, and want to advance strategy, decision-making, and deal-making in one session.
Executives who need a fully confidential space to work through something highly strategic. A sparring partner who can rub and care at the same time.
Supported by an incubator in Switzerland, France, or Germany? Ask them to contact us. We discuss the situation first and whether the format fits before committing to anything.
For others and more mature companies, contact us directly at contact@villigervaluation.ch or reach out to Marie on LinkedIn.
" Our mentor’s expertise allowed us to gain a deeper understanding and get a feeling for whether conditions are fair or not. Not just an opinion — well-founded statements with background, explanations and examples. "
The sessions leave a mark.
In their own words — founders and executives, on what shifted.
" I was impressed by how quickly our mentor understood the concept, the project, its challenge. It was the first time I felt my brain was at saturation — and that I needed to digest the info right now, though within my own domain of expertise. "
" Marie articulated complex concepts in an easy-to-understand manner. Her capability to make difficult concepts accessible made the meeting very productive. "
" The meeting was absolutely eye-opening, very inspiring and throughout highly constructive. Very direct, specific and honest feedback — specifically on market-to-bench thinking, clinical and patient relevance "
" The support was again extremely helpful to arrive at a plan that is oriented on established business rules and not personal interests. The "real life" experience was crucial for us to get a good orientation."
" Both workshops were extremely valuable — and the ones that had the greatest impact on our narrative and framing. Several points were exactly what we had been missing: the need to clarify our equity story, the white space we were addressing, and the potential for high growth. These elements helped me see the project from a much more investor-oriented perspective. "
Custom
training for incubator teams and tech transfer offices
For the people who run the field — not just the ones building in it.
Programme managers and TTO staff who sneaked in our workshops and sessions came back with the same request: they wanted to go further themselves. Not just to support founders better — but to build more in-field culture. To understand the long game — why it plays out as it does, what actually drives the decisions and the deals.
Finance is rarely anyone's original background in this field. For most, it has been kept at a distance — abstract, uncomfortable, someone else's domain. What changes everything is when it becomes readable.
What we do in our sessions makes the logic suddenly clear. From there, the patterns intersecting finance, legal, strategy, governance, and market-to-bench thinking become visible — including the ones that create problems years later, already present at the early stage, if you know what you're looking at.
Working only at early stage, you miss the long game patterns. Knowing how it tends to go next changes every conversation you have with the founders in your cohort — and with the investors in their orbit.
No catalogue. We work from your brief.
Services to incubators
It is clear to us — and to founders — that an entrepreneur-centric, growth+risk critical approach that starts from what truly matters to a venture’s long-term trajectory delivers far greater impact than supplier-oriented models that treat start-ups as future business leads.
We bring in the longer game, a hands-on vision of how the ecosystem actually works. What we bring bridges silos.
What founders rarely get elsewhere is a clarifying picture of how investors decide — not the caricature, but the constraints and decision mechanics of capital allocation. We bring founders up to speed with that reality before they are in the room. It works like a prophylactic: less emotion, faster processing, better questions. They listen differently. They filter better. They get more from every other resource your programme offers.
Successful founders and executives come in far more diverse profiles than cohort dynamics tend to surface. It is not simply about assertiveness, but developing a good eye and skilled communication. There we focus.
Workshops for the cohort. Live case discussions, governance and investment roleplays, 1:1 sessions, pitch feedback circles. Debrief with your team. We discuss what fits, tailor the format together.
Incubators that truly grasp the challenge beat the odds. We stand with them — and help set the benchmark.