In 1999 Osterwalder co-founded his first startup Netfinance.ch, which focused on financial literacy. He was a journalist for the Swiss business magazine BILANZ in 2000–01, and Senior Research Fellow back at the University of Lausanne from 2000 to 2005 in the time he finished his PhD research. In 2006 he founded BusinessModelDesign.com, and in 2010 he co-founded the consultancy firm Strategyzer, which has provided over 5 million people with Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas.