Switching sides
Switching sides
A former professional athlete and founder, he was once on the brink of failure. Today, ETH alumnus Joel Roos champions others in his work as investor and philanthropist.
Writing his Matura paper was a pivotal moment, Joel Roos recalls. As a volleyball player at national junior level, he developed a machine that players could use to train their ball-receiving skills. Was it a success? His team rose to the next league, at least.
After graduating in robotics from ETH Zurich, he spent another year as a professional player. Besides training four hours a day, he followed up on an idea: why not use the technology he’d learnt about at ETH – like camera-based motion analysis – to help athletes? His first prototypes using this technology were created for fitness coaching apps. These were designed to give athletes feedback on how to optimise their movement patterns.
A critical situation
After a few months, Joel Roos convinced a former school friend, who was studying computer science at ETH, of his vision. Later, a graduate of University of St.Gallen was to join the founding team. Despite its successful start, the ETH spin-off VAY found itself in 2020 on the brink of collapse. At this point, Joel Roos had been working for two years without a salary, having ended his volleyball career for his start-up. “Our pilot projects were not going as well as we’d hoped, and we could barely pay our staff’s very low salaries. When at the last moment our seed financing suddenly collapsed because a lead investor pulled out, November saw us in a highly critical situation.”
Deal or no deal?
But shortly afterwards, the pivot – a start-up term for a fundamental strategic shift – that had been introduced a few months earlier finally began to bear fruit: VAY no longer had its own fitness app, but instead licensed the technology to manufacturers of digital fitness and physiotherapy solutions.
“When faced with a choice, I’ll always go for the challenge. Giving up is never an option.”
Joel Roos
And suddenly everything took off. “These manufacturers had been looking for a technology like ours. Our product was ready, and way ahead of the competition. We were pushing at an open door.” As if out of nowhere, an initial purchase offer came in March 2021, heralding the start to six months of “surreal negotiations”.
In the end, the founding team was to clinch the deal with American company Nautilus. Looking back on this time, Joel Roos says: “As we’d already been working with Nautilus, we knew that we’d feel comfortable with the company. They painted a very clear picture for us of what our future together would look like.” Nevertheless, the negotiations with the purchaser were “scary times” and made up a full-time job: there was no time to acquire new business, and the start-up even had to cancel partnerships with certain customers during this period. “If the deal hadn’t come off, it would’ve been not only a failure, but an extreme setback for us.”
In September, the moment finally arrived and the 80-page document, which had been sent back and forth countless times, was signed – and, in one fell swoop, the young founders were set for life.
And Joel Roos now? He has thrown himself back into work. He doesn’t attribute too much to his success: “We were also lucky – Nautilus had this purchasing power because the home fitness market was doing extremely well during Corona.” But he credits himself and his team for their resilience, as this meant VAY was still around when the offer arrived. “When faced with a choice, I’ll always go for the challenge. Giving up is never an option.” His current challenge is to make headway in digitalising all the products in Nautilus’s range – a hardware company with over 40 years of history.
The joy of giving back
Today, ETH and its young entrepreneurs are a matter close to Joel Roos’s heart: “Not long ago, I was on the other side. For a long time, my co-founders and I were unable to find funding which is why, at the time of our exit, we promised to support future entrepreneurs. Looking to the long-term, we want to reinvest up to 50 per cent in the ecosystem.”
As a top-tier university with affordable tuition fees, ETH is unique by international standards, but when it comes to promoting start-ups, Joel Roos sees room for improvement. This is why he’s actively involved as an early-stage investor,
including in S2S Ventures, a student-led venture capital company. With Nautilus, he’s also an industrial partner to the ETH AI Centre, and he’s a private donor to the ETH Foundation. Commenting on his philanthropic efforts for the planned Centre for Students and Entrepreneurs, he says: “ETH has given me so much, for me it’s a no-brainer to give something
back. I expect the Centre to transform countless more ETH graduates into successful young entrepreneurs.”
