SSY               Welcome Philippe! We start in this big common space. What is it exactly?

Philippe      This is the Forum. A common space for the whole building. The three incubators share it. There are no fixed desks here. Just meeting rooms in different formats. People come here to drink a coffee, take a break, or step out of a long meeting to recover a bit.

SSY               What kind of rooms do you have around the Forum?

Philippe      We have a boardroom. A bit more chic. A big table, nice chairs, a large screen. That one is for meetings with investors or important clients. Then we have two rooms, a small one and a bigger one. You can open the wall between them and create a theater room. That is for trainings, workshops, offsites. You want to do a team building with your employees? You can do it here.

SSY               Does each incubator have the same type of spaces upstairs?

Philippe      Each incubator has its own meeting rooms, but smaller and less formal. The Forum is for the big formats. Ten, twenty, thirty people. Normally an incubator does not have a room for thirty people. Here we have one. And we have the boardroom when you need to impress.

SSY               On the walls, we see some very official visits. Tell us about these photos.

Philippe      We have a lot of political visits, no surprise. This one is the inauguration in June 2018. We had the great honor of having Grand Duke Henri with us, with Etienne Schneider, the Minister of the Economy at the time, and Michel Wurth, our president back then. And this one is from December 2021, with Grand Duke Guillaume. The whole family has visited the building. For the startups, meeting a Grand Duke is huge. Ministers come regularly too. We always say the paths are short in Luxembourg. In this building, even shorter.

SSY               Next to the boardroom, there is another wall of portraits. Who are they?

Philippe      The founding teams. Because in the end, this building exists for the founders. We picked success stories from each incubator and accelerator and put them on the walls. It is recognition for them. And it works. It motivates everyone who walks past.

SSY               We have to talk about the rabbit. What is the story?

Philippe      The rabbit is our mascot. Everyone who enters the House of Startups for the first time has to find it. There is a small anecdote from our first year. One morning, the rabbit was outside on the street. There had been a party the night before. A well-watered one. Everything ended fine, but someone had to go get it back. And it is heavy, believe me.

SSY               Three incubators share the building. Can you map it for us?

Philippe      Almost the whole building is the House of Startups. On the ground floor and first floor, the Luxembourg City Incubator. It belongs to us, the Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with the City of Luxembourg. On floors two, three and part of four, the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology, linked to the Ministry of Finance. Everything fintech and insurtech. And the third one is Le Village, the accelerator of Crédit Agricole. That one is private. They help French startups internationalize to Luxembourg, and Luxembourgish startups reach the French market.

SSY               Inside the incubator, the design is very colorful. Was that a choice?

Philippe      Yes. Color invites creativity and innovation. On each floor, we have spaces where anyone can sit down and work. Real cosy corners. It should not feel like a bank.

SSY               What is the secret weapon of every incubator?

Philippe      The coffee machine. Always. That is where people actually meet. A lot of coffee goes through this building. And over time we added the call boxes. Small ones for one person, bigger ones for four. The acoustics are so important. You are confidential, the others are quiet. They have air, power, light. You just need a plug. Now we have them everywhere.

SSY               How does a startup grow inside the building?

Philippe      An incubator is always half open space. You rarely take an office right away. You do not have the resources, human or financial. And you do not need it. You start in the open space. Then at two or three people, maybe you take a small office. From four or five, you move to a private office. We have offices from three people up to ten. We call it Tetris. We move teams around based on their needs and the right spot for everyone.

SSY               Do you choose who sits next to whom?

Philippe      We try to group people by interest. Every connection is a bit of chance, but you can provoke chance. We look at what could work well together. And direct competitors, we will not put them side by side. It happens that startups in the building do similar things. That is business. But we are not going to provoke it.