Diego Berchtold

Diego BerchtoldSep 14, 2026

Metaverse is dead. NFTs failed. 99% of all ICOs went bankrupt but Blockchain survived. AI is next & almost everyone in the room is trying to figure it out currently. Last Friday at the Digital-World Conference in Basel I got a very clear look at how that actually plays out. I asked Dr. Daniel Diemers how he reads hype cycles after all these years. We had an interesting exchange about it. → 2017 Blockchain. The ICO bubble popped, the rails stayed. Today they move real money at scale. Survivors like SwissBorg became a unicorn. → 2021 Metaverse. Never made it out of the demo. Facebook rebranded to Meta but aside of that there is not a lot left from 5 years ago. → 2021 NFTs. Wrong use case (sorry Bored Ape Yacht Club), but right idea. Digital ownership is still a layer nobody has built properly yet. → 2026 AI. Here we are. Hype prices the story. Infrastructure prices the cash flow. The first takes 6 to 18 months. The second takes a decade. That gap is where portfolios quietly get destroyed. People buy the narrative at peak volume, then sell the build phase out of boredom, right before it starts compounding. Which is also why Vemo.® was in the room, in conversations instead of on stage. The feedback on what we are building was honest, specific and extremely encouraging. Fee transparency & AI powered applications are not a hype. It's the future in my opinion. Thank you Zana Iseni for the invitation. She ran a great breakout session on Bitcoin. It's awesome that the Digital-World Conference team made this kind of discussion possible. Well done Patrick Gross! Cheers 🥂

Diego BerchtoldSep 1, 2026

We crossed 100 clients at Vemo.® 9 months after the launch of our digital investment advisory and almost forgot to mention it. Not out of modesty. Out of tunnel vision. Milestones at a bootstrapped startup with 2 Co-Founders happen in a WhatsApp message at 23:40, someone sends a 🎉 and then both go back to work. Cyrill Lüchinger lol So, belatedly: 104 clients. CHF 9.4 million in estimated saved wealth. That second number isn't a marketing figure. It's arithmetic and we publish exactly how we get there: Per client, conservatively ~CHF 90'000 over 20–25 years. → CHF 1'500 per year in fees they simply stop paying. No commissions, no retros, no kickbacks, lower product costs. Over 20–25 years: approximately CHF 35'000. → Those 1'500 stay invested and keep compounding: another approx. +CHF 55'000. Same client. Best fitting investment strategy, funds & provider after our FIDLEG-compliant consultation. Very different cost structure. Internally we turned it into a game with badges, because apparently we're both still twelve and gamification is a real thing. At CHF 9 million we unlocked "Raise the Anchor." A used 30-metre yacht costs around CHF 3 million. So our clients collectively kept a small yacht fleet's worth of fees. Next badge sits at CHF 9.5 million: "Lord of the Castle." A small castle in Valais or Vaud starts at about CHF 8 million. We're roughly CHF 140'000 away. The counter runs live on our site. Not because the number is impressive, actually it isn't, yet. But because a non-commission advisor who won't show his own numbers is just a broker with a better vocabulary. Badges and live counter: link in the first comment. PS: You have to scroll down a little on the website. 🤷🏽‍♂️ More to come, upwards & onwards with Vemo.® We have some big news soon. 🗞️ Cheers 🥂

Diego BerchtoldSep 8, 2026

I have a ticket for Alan Frei's A3F Startup Breakfast on 25 September in Zurich. It's sold out. And I can't go. So I'm giving it away: Inspired by Alan's own post: use your reach to help other builders. I think it's a great chance to do so. So here's how it works: → Pitch what you're building in the comments → The top 5 comments with the most reactions by this Friday 11. September, 18:00 make it on the shortlist → Alan and I pick the winner based on which pitch convinced us the most. Cheers 🥂