Uhlík vs Křemík · Czech podcast about artificial intelligence

Jiří Vicherek: Czechia has excellent science but cannot turn it into companies

Episode 16 · 19 August 2026 · 1:18:37 · Guest: Jiří Vicherek

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A startup is not just a small tech company. According to Jiří Vicherek, chair of the Czech Startup Association, what sets it apart is speed and ambition. On the Uhlík vs Křemík podcast he explained how venture capital works, where Czechia is falling behind and what the Startup Act should change.

Speed, ambition and scalability

Asked how a startup differs from an ordinary business, Vicherek answered briefly: speed and ambition. In his view, a startup is a company designed to turn one client into ten and ten into a hundred, with a chance to grow into a company worth a billion dollars. That is why it can attract venture capital, which counts on a tenfold return. A restaurant has no such chance, not even as a franchise. An agency with a team of programmers building e-shops is a tech company, but usually not a startup.

Startup know-how, he says, was created for an unpredictable modern world. Instead of long plans, the market is validated step by step and money is always raised only for the next phase: a prototype, the first clients, the so-called valley of death and finally product market fit, which brings Series A and scaling. "Market validation and the feedback loop are the most startup thing there is."

Investors expect most bets to fail

Venture capital, according to Vicherek, means that individual investments are more likely to fail than succeed. An investor picks ten companies with big potential and expects three to end up in the red, three to roughly pay back the money and two to make something. The investor hopes, and does everything possible, for one of them to pay for the whole fund. It is not for someone who has fifteen hundred crowns left at the end of the month, he says. It only makes sense for wealthier people with a diversified portfolio.

What he sees in successful founders above all is commitment. "Successful founders are truly in love with the problem, not with their product, but with solving the problem." Working at a startup is very demanding, he says, and investors trust founders more if they have already launched companies or even sold one.

Seven spin-offs a year

Czechia is not doing tragically, says Vicherek, but not well either. There are successful founders, but the average numbers are below the European Union average. Czechia has a few hundred angel investors, while the United Kingdom has 7,000 per 10 million inhabitants. What troubles him most is technology transfer: last year saw seven university spin-offs, while a single university in Munich produces 150 a year. "What tears me up is that we have excellent higher education, we have excellent science and research."

Universities, he says, often take too large a stake at the start, so no further investor wants to finance the company. A sensible deal is something like five percent equity and five percent of so-called revenue share, which he described as a share of profits. The system also motivates schools to keep their best PhD students on the academic track, while a startup needs a full-time founder. He sees hope in the changes at the Czech Technical University (ČVUT) under its new rector Michal Pěchouček.

The Startup Act and the European market

For Vicherek, the most important thing is the Startup Act, which will make the term startup part of Czech law for the first time. Incentives and a specialised legal regime can then build on that definition. At the time of recording, the bill existed as a full legal draft and was heading into the interministerial comment procedure. According to him, the association has already managed to get startups into the government's economic strategy.

The second big thing is the European initiative EU Inc, a single company structure for all member states. Today, he says, a Czech startup expands to America as a whole, but in Europe it has to go separately to Germany, Poland and Hungary. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is changing rules that held in venture capital for twenty years. Subscription software companies are threatened by users building smaller solutions themselves with their own Claude. Still, Vicherek sees startups as one of the few cards Czechia holds in the global game.

The full conversation with Jiří Vicherek is available in episode 16 of the Uhlík vs Křemík podcast.

The episode is in Czech. Czech page with chapters, quotes and the full transcript