Why this question

Switzerland creates record numbers of companies every year, yet only 50.7% of those founded in 2018 still existed five years later. A founding boom means little if half of it disappears, so I wanted to know what separates the survivors.

How I chose the data

• BFS company demography counts only genuinely new companies. It excludes mergers, relaunches and holding companies, and follows each founding year for five years. The 2018 cohort is the latest with a full five-year record.
• Population data turned raw counts into rates per 1,000 residents, because Zurich is twelve times larger than Zug.
• The Swiss Venture Capital Report is the only complete record of Swiss startup funding. Bern and Lucerne are not shown separately, so I rebuilt their figures from the list of individual rounds.

The hypothesis I got wrong

I expected regions with little venture capital to survive less. Lucerne proved me wrong: almost no venture capital, and survival as good as Zurich. Venture capital reaches about 350 companies a year, against more than 46,000 new ones, so it cannot explain the survival of companies it never touches.

What I would do next

• Test how much of Zug’s churn comes from foreign-owned and mobile companies.
• Survey Swiss SMEs on which AI projects they tried, dropped and why.
• Rerun the analysis when BFS publishes the next cohorts.