Invited to the World Economic Forum 2025 in Switzerland!🇨🇭
Recap: Lessons, Luck, and Lots of Snow
Catch us on the Promenade again in January 2026, or Barry’s @ 4am.
My incredible friend and me were invited me to attend the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland—a prestigious event her family office attends every year. AI House was impressed by my AI startup and extended an invitation.
What started as a whirlwind planning experience, turned out to be uniquely valuable all-in-one networking opportunity, life milestone, and vacation.
When I arrived, I started comparing it to my usual networking events in New York and Paris (the French taught me to complain), but it took on a world of its own.
Conversations happened that would never have happened in America or France, and I gained a top notch introduction to Switzerland as a country: The food, language, people, cantons, and business ecosystem.
What made it so great?
1. Hotel Badge to The Belvédère
2. Group Chats on Telegram & WhatsApp
3. Hosting a Yorkseed Side Event
4. Unserious Networking & Spontaneous Ski Trip
5. WEF Shuttle System
6. Affordable Accommodations
Highlights:
Ran into the CEO of JP Morgan
Ran into a16z friends from NY
Found my CTO <3
Growth through co-founder conflict
Hung out at Barry’s with YC alumni
Book recommendations
Breathtaking views 🏔️
Lesson 1
I don’t have a photo, but it did happen, I met eyes with and shook hands with Jamie Dimon. I had just arrived at the Belvedere and didn’t want to be a rude thoughtless fan girl with a camera. But I know better now, for next year 📸.
This is the best I can do. He was there that night, ask his PA.
Hotel badges to access Hotel Belvedere are 1250 CHF! Luckily, I found an affordable shortcut and only paid 105 CHF. Whew!
I was a star stricken fan girl for the rest of the evening wondering who else I could run into there–– since this hotel badge thing isn’t normally within my budget I counted my blessings into the night. I was up all night to get lucky.
I tried to break into some private events like I had at Andrew Yeung tech parties in NYC, but there was high security and strict rules. Tried to walk in with some a16z people I recognized from NYC, but too bad it was “invite-only” (in the non-negotiable sense).
I worked with what I had, neglected by unapproachable people for 30 minutes, then saw a guy passing out on the couch from an Oxford-Cambridge alumni event who talked a good game about starting companies since he was 15 and breaking into YC together. I said I had 6 referrals already.
We merged our ideas and the rest is history.
Lesson: You never know who you might meet ✔️
Luck: Do I have to say it?
Lesson 2
I got the badge from someone I met in a group chat that had a spare, an Ex UPenn-Yale Climate Tech VC guy looking to floor-surf closer to Davos-Platz. 7k-20k avg for the week. 2.5k/person in Klosters if luckiest. Couch-surf restricted. Head count max.
He was a snow driver so I had looped him into discussions of our deposit-secured Airbnb a 15-minute drive away in the mountains 🏔️. We had more beds to fill, meanwhile the price seemed too good to be true.
It was! As we took some time to fill the beds the host started using pressure tactics and being unprofessional. Then more red flags.
Rule #1 never send money online to someone you met online— unless it’s to secure housing in Davos during WEF.
Then withdrew his offer when we finalized! We were distraught as the WEF was only a few days away, and we had tiny budgets, I mean we shouldn’t even have been going to meet billionaires in the first place. We are just girls.
This setback put tension on our group, but seeing that he posted the same place again for an even higher price, proud we trusted our gut in delaying the rest of the deposit and went with someone from our network, and landed Silvretta ParkHotel.
With free WEF shuttles going every 20 minutes to the Promenade.
And a sauna, jacuzzi, and pool. Hot-cold therapy downstairs.
Price was the same (after some negotiations).
Common theme in my life when I’ve been pushed out of something is failing up.
Later on my way to St. Moritz I met someone confirming that house flipping was a thing, and their group had a bad experience, and were scammed from it. Glad we dodged a bullet.
Lesson: Negotiate with all you’ve got ✔️
Luck: Not getting scammed 🪄
Lesson 3
As a member of Yorkseed NYC, and then the Paris chapter, and now Zürich, I was asked to co-host the iconic Passport Series, themed Java & Journeys: Conversations That Inspire Change.
On the Promenade, the day of we discovered that Kaffee Kulche got shut down for an event, and had zero time to find a location change. To prevent hosting on a public bench next to probably delicious food trucks but trade-off to the cold, I messaged Jessica asap, and I ran across the street to Hotel Europa where they told me in half English there was a quiet restaurant café upstairs. She changed the location and we hauled ourselves upstairs and set up. I think we lost an Australian in the location change, but YC alumni, Hedge Fund founders, and real-estate tycoons were in attendance.
Lesson: It’s never too late ✔️
Luck: Great last minute turnout! 🪄
Lesson 4
The timing was excellent, it was the end of WEF Week and everyone wanted to be social casual and have fun with the time left. A few of us went to Swedish Lunch (again), and others took a ski detour.
(Iva protectively let our new friends know that I didn’t have an EU eSim yet and to take care of me before going off to lunch. 😂🤍)
To my dismay and misfortune, skiing in the Catskills and on the Swiss Alps are not the same. Blue zone doesn’t mean blue zone. It’s not standardized.
“Where is the Bunny hill?” in NY English translates to “I took to the Gondola up the wrong mountain!” in Swiss German, and regular German.
I fell 5x and got picked up by German advanced skiers too many times.
It was hard to get up.
My friend of a friend who I met that day chose to snowboard.
She couldn’t stand up at all.
To our ignorance we tried going down some hills. They were too steep, I was accelerating too fast. My pizza was weak and imbalanced, and there’s some left right left right technique people were using to go down that I think I am supposed to have learned in traditional lessons to keep me from accelerating to fast in one direction — that’s when I realized it wasn’t enough the one-off instructor I met in the Catskills whose spontaneous pizza lesson got me from green to blue in a day 3 years ago.
Unaware of the danger of not finding a way off the slope immediately I asked the ski instructor who had helped me get up for a lesson 🙄. She had offered it and a coffee inside the pit stop, I joined her as my beginner friend snowboarded off to “practice” (in her words 😂) on what we’d later discover through SOS calls was the black diamond slopes.
The color coding was unclear and not visible throughout.
Those were Arielle’s words “Ok, I’ll see you later, I have your number right? We’re in a group chat. I’m going to PRACTICE”. Practice, in the Swiss mountains where people die. We had a good laugh after she cried.
100 CHF/hr even with a discount was a lot for me, but how else was I supposed to get down I didn’t have insurance and there was no end in sight!
I explained to her over coffee break that I was blue in NY. She said sternly “This is Switzerland.”
I trusted she could get me down.
She fixed my pizza and taught me how to balance and take a safe standing position without being taken by the snow, but she added that it was already past 2 and the Gondola closed at 4. She also brought to my attention that this was the easiest slope on the mountain but there are red hills within the blue slope, and that I was in danger!
We took off my skis and I walked down to prevent dying.
Germans are mean — she yelled at me but later explained that she doesn’t normally push her clients but that had she not pushed me we wouldn’t have made it to the last Gondala in time and I would have had to ski down to the valley, unthinkable at my level, and would be all night, sunset was at 5!
Maybe she was mad also because I almost wiped her out on skis!
Germans are tough love. She walked me back to the ski rental place where the advanced skiing-since-I-was-5-or-could-walk-whichever-came-first-I-can’t-remember types had returned their equipment and on the phone with SOS for beginner #2 we had lost, and she told me to have a serious conversations with these Germany-Austria friends that they should never have left us in the first place.
And that people die.
SOS found Arielle’s phone in the trees / forrest area.
I later read there were some deaths on this slope a week ago.
And got chills.
But I survived my first Swiss mountain!
I hurt my knee from trying to get up so many times, but I’m healed now.
Lesson: Stop getting on slopes without lessons. ✔️
Luck: Do I have to say it? 🪄
Lesson 5
I went back to the hot sauna at my hotel to replace the cold anti-therapy⛰️, and reminisced over the very safe Swedish Lunch on a mountain top and wish I had gone again instead of risking life but proudly resilient in having courage to discover all of WEF and Switzerland.
Like the Sacred Shell and St. Moritz.
Overall, my best day was a very serious AI House panel on opportunities and challenges for investing in AI startups, where I met investors, collaborators, and potentially my first client, Juan the CEO of Milagro, who had just dined again with Shakira and will.i.am.
And the very unserious networking @ Berghotel Schatzalp, which we managed to get into although we had lost our invitations.
Making the most of everything WEF had to offer, successfully co-hosting a side event for a multinational VC-founder network, and having the grit to negotiate during a housing shortage was tough, but we made it through with even stronger, more trusting relationships. Catch us on the Promenade again in Jan 2026, or 4am @ Barry’s.
Until then, I’ll be reading The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects and building LexPal AI.
Lesson: Life is too short not to start companies and travel with friends ✔️
Luck: The luck I carry 🪄
🚨🚨🚨WARNING: DANGEROUSLY UNSERIOUS NETWORKING🚨🚨🚨
🚨🚨🚨WARNING: DANGEROUSLY UNSERIOUS NETWORKING🚨🚨🚨
Interesting events. It looks like you had fun!