The first time I saw Zurich framed as the “most connected” (or “smartest”) city in the world, I laughed — not because Zurich is bad, but because the label is a category error. And category errors are how otherwise serious executives end up making unserious decisions.
A ranking can be useful when it forces you to define what you mean by “best.” But when it replaces the definition — when the marketing headline becomes the strategy — it does something more dangerous: it manufactures complacency. If you’re constantly told you’re already #1, you stop competing with the future. You start defending the past.
That’s the moral of this story.
I lived in Zurich for a decade. I built a life there. My firm, RocketEdge.com, was born in Zurich in 2016 — and later moved to Singapore. People ask why. The answer is not “because Singapore has better rankings.” The answer is: because Singapore reduces friction across the entire founder operating system — legal, financial, administrative, and human — and those gains compound.
To explain that, we need to audit the rankings first.
1. The “Connected City” claim: what the ranking actually measures (and why it’s easy to misuse)
The most frequently cited “Zurich is #1” headline comes from the IMD Smart City Index (SCI). In the 2024 edition, Zurich is ranked #1, and Singapore is #5 in the top-20 list.
Here’s the key point executives should internalize:
The SCI is not a measurement of “connectedness” in the sense most people mean it (global flight networks, corporate graph centrality, digital transaction velocity, cross-border settlement rails, talent mobility throughput, etc.).
It is primarily a resident-perception index: it asks residents how they perceive “structures” (infrastructure) and “technology” in their city, organized across five areas (health & safety, mobility, activities, opportunities, governance). The final score is computed using a multi-year weighted approach (recent years weighted more heavily).
This is exactly why it’s easy to turn into marketing — not necessarily through fraud, but through interpretation drift:
- A perception survey becomes a “connectivity” headline.
- A “smart city” label becomes a proxy for “startup readiness.”
- A city optimized for resident satisfaction is assumed to be optimized for founder throughput.
That last leap is where founders pay the price.
From a methodology perspective, perception-based composites are intrinsically “tunable”:
- who you sample,
- what you ask,
- how you weight years,
- how you normalize across development groups,
- and what you decide counts as “smart.”
That doesn’t make the SCI worthless. It makes it specific — and dangerous when repurposed.
If you’re a C‑suite leader reading this: whenever someone shows you a single-number city ranking, your first question shouldn’t be “what rank are we?” It should be: “What did they actually measure — and what did they ignore?”
2. The recent startup survey: Zurich #2 vs Singapore #4 — and the scoring logic behind it
Now we get to the survey you referenced: Multipolitan’s “Startup Friendly Cities Index 2026” (published early January 2026). It ranks:
- #2 Zurich — 0.5869
- #4 Singapore — 0.5482
If you stop here, the conclusion becomes “Zurich beats Singapore for startups.”
That conclusion is exactly what a strategist should not do: accept the output without auditing the function.
2.1 What Multipolitan measured (and the exact weights)
Multipolitan’s city score, CitySFI, is a simple average of five equally weighted pillars:
- Startup Activity
- Digital Connectivity
- Young Talent
- Quality of Life
- Business Agility
CitySFI = (StartupActivity + DigitalConnectivity + YoungTalent + QualityOfLife + BusinessAgility) / 5
Each pillar is normalized using Min–Max scaling to a 0–1 range, based on the cities included in the index (28 cities).
Inside the pillars, there are additional weights:
- Startup Activity is computed as: StartUpActivity = 0.6 × Startups + 0.4 × Unicorns (Startups and Unicorns are each normalized first.)
- Digital Connectivity uses city-level median mobile + fixed broadband speeds (averaged, then normalized).
- Young Talent is computed as: YoungTalent = 0.6 × QS Top-100 Universities count + 0.4 × QS Best Student Cities score (Each normalized first.)
- Quality of Life uses a city Quality of Life Index (Numbeo), normalized.
- Business Agility is based on:
- average days to register a business (lower is better)
- corporate tax exposure (lower is better)
Both are normalized then inverted, then averaged.
This is a coherent model — but it’s also exactly the kind of model that is highly sensitive to definition and weighting.
And yes: that sensitivity makes it easy to “manipulate” in the soft sense — meaning you can legitimately change the outcome without changing reality, just by changing modeling choices.
3. Replicating the decisive parts of the index (Singapore vs Zurich) — using the same building blocks
We can’t reconstruct every normalized pillar score without the full underlying dataset used for min–max scaling across all 28 cities. But we can replicate the most decisive driver: Startup Activity, using the same kind of inputs the index claims to use (startup and unicorn counts).
3.1 Startup Activity: Singapore clearly dominates Zurich on ecosystem scale
From StartupBlink’s city ecosystem pages:
- Zurich: 1,099 startups, 2 unicorns
- Singapore (city): 3,852 startups, 15 unicorns
Now apply Multipolitan’s stated logic:
- Multipolitan weights “Startups” more than “Unicorns” (60/40), explicitly prioritizing ecosystem breadth.
- On both sub-metrics, Singapore is larger:
- ~3.5× more startups
- 7.5× more unicorns
So under Multipolitan’s own Startup Activity pillar concept, Singapore should score materially higher than Zurich on Startup Activity.
Which means: Zurich’s overall advantage (0.5869 vs 0.5482) must be coming from other pillars — most plausibly:
- Quality of Life (as defined by their chosen proxy),
- Young Talent (as defined by QS-based proxies),
- possibly Digital Connectivity depending on the specific dataset window.
That’s not a scandal. It’s the model doing what it was designed to do.
But it leads to a critical strategic insight:
The Multipolitan index is not ranking “best city to build a high-tech startup fast.” It is ranking “best average city across a mixed basket of founder + resident preferences.”
If your priority is execution speed and business focus (mine is), then equal-weighting “quality of life” against “business agility” is not neutral. It’s a choice. And choices are where rankings become marketing tools.
4. Why the methodology is “meaningless” in practice (for founders) — without being “wrong” on paper
Let’s challenge the model the way you would challenge a trading signal: not by insulting it, but by stress-testing its assumptions.
4.1 Equal weights are not “objective” — they’re an opinion disguised as math
Multipolitan assigns 20% weight to each pillar.
That implies a fictional “average founder” for whom:
- Quality of Life is as important as Startup Activity,
- and as important as Business Agility,
- and as important as Digital Connectivity.
That is not how real founders behave.
Founders have phases:
- pre-product,
- product-market fit,
- scaling,
- hiring wave,
- cross-border expansion,
- regulatory exposure,
- financing cycles.
Your weights shift across phases. A static 20/20/20/20/20 weighting is not “balanced.” It’s context-free.
4.2 Min–max scaling makes rankings unstable by construction
Min–max scaling forces the “best” city in a metric to be near 1 and the “worst” near 0 within the chosen set of cities.
Change the set (add a city, remove a city), and everyone’s normalized scores move — even if nothing changed in the real world.
That means the ranking is partly a function of:
- which cities were included,
- and how extreme the extremes are.
Again: not “fraud.” But absolutely a form of model-driven optics.
4.3 “Time to register a company” is not a single number in real life
You called this out — correctly.
“Days to register a business” depends on:
- entity type,
- regulated activities,
- shareholder / director residency constraints,
- banking onboarding and KYC,
- whether you need licenses,
- whether you need visas/employment passes,
- and whether you’re doing anything cross-border from day one.
So when an index publishes one clean number, it’s already compressing reality into a narrative.
That compression is exactly where founders get misled — because founders don’t operate in averages; they operate in edge-cases.
5. Zurich “quality of life” vs Singapore “quality of life”: why rankings say one thing and lived reality can say the opposite
This is where my personal experience diverged from the common narrative.
Zurich often performs extremely well on “quality of life” proxies. Many people genuinely love it — and I understand why: it’s clean, safe, orderly, and stunningly beautiful.
But the founder’s daily experience is not the same thing as the resident’s quality-of-life survey.
5.1 The hidden friction people don’t put into indices
In many Swiss apartment buildings, shared laundry rooms are the default. Tenants are typically assigned a laundry day (“Waschtag”) or a time slot — which forces you into batch-living: you compress mundane life admin into constrained windows. If you’ve ever tried to run a high-intensity company while also living on a building schedule, you understand the compounding cost.
Switzerland also has a culture of strict “quiet” norms. A famous and well-documented example: in Zurich, disposing of glass/aluminium in public recycling containers on Sundays is prohibited, and people have been fined for it. That’s a small thing — but it’s emblematic: it teaches you that life is optimized for rule adherence, not throughput.
Singapore is the opposite: the system is designed around flow — continuous services, digitized processes, less ritualized friction. You feel it daily.
5.2 Banking: Switzerland is improving, but Singapore built real-time years earlier
This matters far more than most lifestyle rankings admit.
Switzerland is modernizing: instant payments became possible in Switzerland starting August 2024, enabling transfers within seconds (instead of waiting longer for clearing).
Singapore has been operating with real-time rails for a long time:
- FAST (Fast And Secure Transfers) launched 17 March 2014
- PayNow enables near-instant bank transfers using identifiers (mobile number, UEN, etc.)
- MAS has also been building cross-border real-time payment linkages (PayNow ↔ DuitNow, PromptPay, etc.)
If you’re building a financial or AI business, financial plumbing is not a “nice-to-have.” It’s your execution substrate.
5.3 The real differentiator: cultural posture toward the future
Here is the most important part, and it’s not easily captured by indices.
My experience in Zurich was that the system often assumes: “We are already excellent. Conform to the way things are done.”
My experience in Singapore is closer to: “We can be the best. Measure it, plan it, execute it.”
That difference shows up everywhere:
- speed of adopting infrastructure,
- how government agencies think about competitiveness,
- how people respond to ambition (support vs suspicion),
- and how much “basic life admin” you have to fund with your attention.
As a founder, attention is your scarce resource. Every hour burned on the basics is an hour not spent compounding product and distribution.
6. The personal reason I left Zurich (and why “citizenship” didn’t equal belonging)
This part isn’t a statistic. It’s simply my story.
After 10 years in Zurich, I had built enough continuity to get Swiss citizenship. But I also learned something uncomfortable: citizenship is a legal status; belonging is social.
Despite building a company and contributing economically, I repeatedly felt I would never be accepted as “native.” I was even advised at one point to consider changing my name to sound more Swiss to reduce negative attention.
I’m not claiming this is every Swiss person. It isn’t. I met excellent people.
But I am saying this: if you are a foreign founder, the tail risk of social friction is real — and it carries a cost.
And Switzerland does have documented issues in this area: reported racist and xenophobic incidents increased sharply in 2024 in Switzerland, with xenophobia/hostility toward foreigners featuring prominently in reported motives.
In Singapore, as a foreign founder, I experience the default posture as: “What are you building, and how do we make it work?”
That difference is why Singapore became home.
7. The morale: treat rankings as inputs, never as strategy
Here is the executive takeaway:
- Rankings are not useless.
- Rankings are not truth.
- Rankings are models — and models are opinions with decimals.
If you use them, treat them like you’d treat an investment model:
- inspect assumptions,
- stress-test sensitivity,
- and translate the output back into your own operating reality.
The Multipolitan index is actually a perfect example of why this matters:
- Singapore loses to Zurich largely because of how “quality of life” and “young talent” are proxied and weighted.
- But Singapore crushes Zurich on what founders feel daily: operational speed, digitization, and reduction of friction.
That is why RocketEdge.com moved.
Zurich helped birth the firm. Singapore helps it scale.
8. References and methodology notes
Rankings discussed
1. IMD Smart City Index 2024 (Zurich #1, Singapore #5 in top-20)
2. IMD Smart City Index methodology overview (resident perceptions; pillars; multi-year weighting described for recent editions)
3. Multipolitan — Startup Friendly Cities Index 2026 (Zurich #2 = 0.5869; Singapore #4 = 0.5482; plus full scoring framework and formulas)
Data used to replicate key pillar logic
4. Startup ecosystem scale (Zurich: 1,099 startups, 2 unicorns)
5. Startup ecosystem scale (Singapore city: 3,852 startups, 15 unicorns)
Quality-of-life proxy used by the startup index
6. Numbeo city comparison (Zurich vs Singapore quality-of-life components used as a proxy in many indices)
“Rule friction” examples
7. Swissinfo: disposal of glass/aluminium in public recycling containers prohibited on Sundays; Zurich fine case cited
8. Shared Swiss laundry rooms / assigned “Waschtag” described (common building practice; varies by building)
Financial plumbing (payments)
9. Singapore FAST launch date and system overview
10. PayNow service overview (Association of Banks in Singapore)
11. Switzerland instant payments availability (SIX Group; Aug 2024)
12. Reuters: Swiss launch instant payments scheme; transfers within ~10 seconds
Documented discrimination / harassment indicators
13. Swissinfo: sharp rise in racism incidents in 2024; xenophobia/hostility toward foreigners as a frequent motive
14. OSCE/ODIHR hate crime reporting reference (Switzerland 2024)
