House of Startups celebrates its first birthday. On Monday, they summarised the events of its first year in a press conference on Monday (3 June). Over the course of the year, more than 100 small businesses have set up in the so called Dôme on Rocade de Bonnevoie.
The House of Startups includes four different incubators, which are structures to support young businesses. Among them is Luxembourg-City Incubator, which is formed by House of Startups SA in Luxembourg City and aims to attract projects which could be of particular interest to the Chamber of Commerce or Luxembourg City, for instance in the domain of tourism or construction.
The General Director of House of Startups, Karin Schintgen, explained that the procedure that startups should follow to be able to rent an office is similar for the different incubators. She said that, in general, a startup signs up at the site of the incubator and provides the necessary information to base a decision on. Then, for example in the case of Luxembourg CityIncubator, there is an acceptance committee who the startups need to pitch their ideas to.
A further criterion is that people who own the startup also "need to work there and not just sign up without ever having a physical presence at the business". An example of a successful startup that started there would be CaptainJet, said Schintgen. It's a business that rents out private airplanes. The business has now been bought by Jetfly, a company that sells private planes. She said that it is common for larger companies to buy startups, such as in this case, where Jetfly took over the 20 people who were employed by CaptainJet. Small businesses are taken over by larger ones or regroup with other companies when they become too big. Schintgen added that they do not keep any startups that count more than 30 employees.
In the future, House of Startups wants to use the project EU-Tribe to promote collaboration in the wider region an thereby help new businesses to find investors.
The Chamber of Commerce is lobbying the government to allow individuals who invest in startups to deduct a part of this money from their tax payments. This already exists abroad.
Schintgen continued to explain that they would like to "keep the startups that they've helped to get started with them and that these businesses therefore need two things: money and customers". She went on to say that House of Startups is able to help them find customers and that they need to find money.
The government programme states that the introduction of such tax measures should be analysed.
