Where
YOU
matter
Where we
CATALYZE
your startup
together
Where
founders
CONNECT
in nature
When we say brave, we mean founders with real skin in the game, ventures aiming for true innovation and people who challenge themselves honestly.
Building an authentic venture will make you most happy and we know from statistics that the most successful startups are built by founders who are deeply, passionately connected to what they create.
To make sure that your entrepreneurial journey is both successful and truly fulfilling, we support you in the building of your startup and coach you in how to build a life that is reflective of who you are and what you prefer.
Being impactful means for us not just financial bottom line success for your company, but also real, big impact for your target customers, the overall economy, our society and last but not least for you & your loved ones.
Currently we offer two formats that are reserved for you as a founder & person:
Personal Growth Coaching: Develop yourself while developing your company – for founders already on the journey, we help you understand the personal patterns that shape how you decide, lead, communicate, handle pressure and build relationships. Claim your Personal Growth MORE
IKIGAI4Founders: Clarify where to start and how to take the first step — whether you are a first-time founder, a founder after your first exit, or searching for deeper impact and a more fulfilling entrepreneurial journey. Find your ikigai MORE
As a founder, you bring your very own passion, talents and life experiences into your startup and take risks that affect your personal life too. You stand for what you believe and make yourself vulnerable. As much as your strengths will catalyze your startup, your struggles will also hinder the best development of your company.
Personal growth coaching helps you unlock your full potential, live a happier life and build with purpose.
Our methodology uses insights from psychology to explore conscious and subconscious belief sets, behavioral patterns, and habits, as well as your expectations for other people. We help you let go of "old" belief sets and break bad habits that might sabotage your life and substitute them with new, life-affirming, effective behaviors.
We developed a Founder Growth Compass that guides us in our assessment as well as during our personal growth coaching sessions.
BOOK a Free 45’ Founder Compass Discovery Video-Call
The Japanese Philosophy ikigai is centered around the meaning of life. Until the 1980s, ikigai was thought to have two primary forms of manifestation: either in terms of the betterment of society "subordinating one's own desires to others" or the improvement of oneself "following one's own path". It is precisely this double meaning that led us to choose this philosophical approach as a basis for our personal growth offering. We want you to not just be individually successful but also to strongly contribute to the betterment of economy and society.
After having successfully applied the philosophy for our own entrepreneurial journeys and developed it further with founders from our portfolio, we have found a strong formula to use this methodology for your intention setting process, idea or venture potential analysis, and clarification of roles within a startup, as well as a career counseling tool for entrepreneurial minds at the very beginning of their journeys or after their first successful exit.
Do you want to find out how IKIGAI4Founders can boost your journey and life?
BOOK a Free 45’ IKIGAI4Founders Discovery Video Call
Strategic: Smart Venture Building
We challenge what you build, why it matters and where you can win and capture most value – tailored to the stage your venture is in. Find your strategic edge MORE
Masterful: Execution Excellence
We translate strategic ambition into roadmaps that create energy, accountability and movement. Create execution momentum MORE
Outside-in: Customer Traction & Fundraising Success
We dig deep into customer pain, buying & market logic, trends and the customer segments where your venture truly matters. We shape your story that make the right people lean in – backed by how investors really think. Unlock customer traction and craft a memorable investor narrative MORE
People-focussed: High-Performance Startup Team
We work on the people behind the venture – co-founders, core team, board of directors, advisors, partners and the talent you need to win. Build your winning team MORE
Strategic: Smart Venture Building
Most ventures do not need more ideas. They need better, more strategic, fact-based decision-making.
We work with founders in their most critical transition moments: from turning conviction into incorporation, to completing founding and core teams, finding product-market fit for complex deep-tech ventures, and navigating major scaling or industry-defining challenges.
We work with you on the foundations that determine everything else: your reason why, shared vision & mission statement, positioning, value proposition, business modelling, and target markets worth pursuing.
We know that different startup situations need different strategic interventions: sometimes more clarity, sometimes more focus, sometimes more market validation and depth, other times more ambition, or the courage to stop doing the wrong things.
We help unblock what slows you down: unclear priorities, weak decisions, missing milestones, incomplete information, weak relationships, and team tensions (or even gaps).
The outcome is not a strategy paper. It is clarity on what matters, what to stop doing, who should own what, who can help and how to create the next level of impact and capture as much value as possible.
Start a conversation with Roman | LinkedIn or Lukas | LinkedIn to find your strategic edge.
Masterful: Execution Excellence
Strategy only matters when it becomes actionable.
We help you develop a 4-6 year strategy and tactical 6–15 month roadmap, as well as helping you master the «dance» between different dimensions of your venture building: technology & product development, sales & marketing, team & partnership building and financing.
Great roadmaps create energy: everyone knows what matters, who owns what, and what needs to happen in order to unlock the next milestones and achieve traction in the customer and investor markets. We call this «Critical Milestone Design»: identifying what needs to happen to unlock your next big thing, from landing your first customer, to making a decisive hire, finding the right scaling partner, or closing a successful fundraising round.
Depending on your concrete needs, we work hands-on and support execution through co-founder sparring, management team support, advisory involvement, or in a board role.
Start a conversation with Roman | LinkedIn or Lukas | LinkedIn to create execution momentum.
Outside-in: Customer Traction & Fundraising Success
The easiest customers to find are not always the ones that matter most. Traction starts where customer pain becomes real – not theoretical, hidden or nice to have. We help you distinguish between early interest, real pain, and strategically valuable customer segments. Together, we analyse who truly needs your solution, what they currently use as a workaround, which use cases are must-haves, and how buying decisions are actually made. We also look at timing, geography, regulation, trends & market dynamics, and trusted signals wherever they influence traction. The goal is to identify where your first customers, strongest validation, and scalable market path can emerge.
Fundraising is not mainly about raising money. It is about building trust in your logic. We help you shape your fundraising strategy across competitions, grants and investors – and develop the storyline that makes the right people lean in. Our «Magic 13Q» framework builds the case step by step: Why you founded this, what problem you solve, why it matters, why now, why you, how it works, how you make money and how you can prove you can execute & scale. Our own experience and built investor network over more than 15 years helps us understand how startup investors think, what creates trust and where your story needs to be more concise, complete, or convincing.
Start a conversation with Roman | LinkedIn or Lukas | LinkedIn to unlock customer traction and craft a memorable investor narrative.
People-focussed: High-Performance Startup Team
Startups are not won by ideas. They are won by the right people in the right roles at the right time – executing at highest performance. Like in professional sports, every position matters: founders, core team, board of directors, external advisors, investors, strategic partners and key opinion leaders all shape whether your company gains momentum or gets stuck.
Co-Founder Search & First-Hire Support: We help you identify the critical profiles your company needs early on – and support you in finding, assessing and attracting co-founders or first key hires who truly fit your mission, your stage and your current team.
Team Intervention: We help you understand how your team today really works – how decisions are made, how responsibilities are structured, where processes create clarity or friction, and whether the team is focused on what matters most. We identify the bottlenecks that limit performance, as well as define and help you implement next steps to improve alignment, speed, and execution.
High-Performance Startup Team Offsite: A deep format to assess team dynamics, capabilities, roles, culture, leadership patterns and collaboration quality – and to define what needs to change for the team to perform at the next level, achieve important milestones, and make your vision become reality – one step at the time. Borrowing from disciplines like psychology, sociology and even art, we create offsites with lasting impact.
Start a conversation with Roman | LinkedIn or Lukas | LinkedIn to build your winning team.
Meeting the right people changes everything. We build spaces where founders connect naturally, engage in deep formats and grow together.
SanDono Impact Salon
Twice a year we host an evening with selected founders, investors and ecosystem-builders @ SanDono HQ in Lucerne for honest and meaningful conversations, as well as new perspectives, in a great atmosphere. A crucial part of the experience is our SanDono Concierge desk: come by during the event, state your need and we will do everything to help you on the spot within SanDono & friends, right at the event!
Save-the-date & REGISTER for the next SanDono Impact Salon: Nov 26 5-8 p.m.
Naturpreneurs by SanDono
We create deep, honest group experiences in nature for brave entrepreneurs seeking clarity, connection and impact. Expect movement, reflection, real conversations and a curated group of like-minded entrepreneurs – sharing experiences in nature and beyond and building long-term relationships that matter.
GET INVITED to upcoming Naturpreneurs events.
Since 2016 we substantially contributed to the building of more than 100 ventures from over 15 leading universities and 10 different countries – most of them science-based DeepTech startups. Below you find our main fields of expertise and exemplary startups from our portfolio:
Health & MedTech
GreenTech
Advanced Materials
Future of Manufacturing & Robotics
AI & Machine Learning
Software
B2C
Exceptional founders deserve to be in exceptional places. We believe that some conversations need a different setting and some decisions even require a dedicated space that helps you think bigger, speak more openly and reconnect with what truly matters.
SanDono HQ in Lucerne (CH)
For focused work, workshops and community gatherings in the heart of Switzerland.
A place to meet, think, challenge ideas and move ventures forward with clarity.
Alpine Hub in the Grisons Alps (CH)
For strategic workshops, founder retreats, and deep team interventions.
Surrounded by mountains, silence and space – where founders step out of the noise, reset their perspective and shape important thoughts that don’t have space in their daily startup life and hustle.
Maritime Hub near Barcelona (ES)
For strategic offsites, high-performance team retreats and special events.
A breathtaking Mediterranean setting for bold conversations, energy boost and many memorable moments that remind founders of why this entrepreneurial journey is worth taking.
SanDono Venture Studio was founded in 2016 by serial entrepreneur Roman H. Schmid with the aim of helping people create better and more authentically. Through empathetic but also honest founders sparring, access to his network, and personal growth coaching as it was always clear to him that business and life coaching for entrepreneurs cannot and should not be separated. Founders shouldn’t only be successful in financial terms, but deserve to live happy and fulfilling lives and also creating the impact that they envisioned for themselves, and our economy & society.
In 2018, his wife & business partner, Natalia Schmid, helped to establish the Health & MedTech vertical and bring SanDono to a next level of impact through the fully integrated business & personal growth coaching offerings. And it was clear from the beginning that SanDono should also grow outside of the Swiss comfort - at times conformist - bubble and benchmark with other leading global startup ecosystems such as Berlin, Munich, Vienna, London or Paris, as well as building bridges to leading startup ecosystems in the US and China. SanDono was and should always be the venture studio for the brave, ambitious founders with startups that can potentially change the way our world runs - for a better economy, for a better society.
In 2021, Ivan Büchi joined SanDono and strengthened the Software and AI & Machine Learning verticals. In 2024 & 2025, Lily Pepper & Lukas Angster joined SanDono and strengthened further the GreenTech, Robotics and Health & MedTech verticals and SanDono was further expanding into Northern Italy, France, Spain & the Netherlands. Over the years and through its proximity to leading universities, SanDono developed a big interest and competence in the fields of Advanced Materials Innovation and the Future of Manufacturing & Robotics.
Over the past decade, SanDono has built a strong portfolio of science-driven startups, often university spin-offs: helping great scientists become impactful entrepreneurs and create better.
The current management team of SanDono consists of:
Contact us. We look forward to helping you create.
SanDono GmbH
Pilatusstrasse 19
6003 Luzern
Switzerland
© SanDono GmbH, 2026
Concept and Design: Sonja Studer
Programming: codess media GmbH
Photography: Anna-Tina Eberhard, Stefan Schlumpf, Thinkstock