Just before midnight on Tuesday in Davos, Switzerland, a small black box vanished from the lobby of a luxury hotel hosting World Economic Forum guests. Within hours, its owner, a 31-year-old San Francisco startup founder, was in handcuffs and suspected of terrorism.
Sebastian Heyneman, a Rincon Hill resident, has worked at Asana, Notion, and 11x in data and product roles. He traveled to Davos on Thursday, hoping to pitch an anti-fraud hardware device to the global elite attending the forum. After leaving the prototype unattended in the lobby of the Grandhotel Belvédère, Heyneman found himself detained by Swiss authorities for 13 hours, having his fingerprints checked against a database of international spies.
“I thought it would be completely fine, because it’s a piece of plastic, which in retrospect is completely idiotic,” Heyneman said. “I’m not malicious, but I’m very stupid.”
In an interview with The Standard from Sevelen, a Swiss town an hour from Davos (he is now banned from the area near the conference until Friday), Heyneman said he has been working on this particular idea for a few weeks. Since last summer, Heyneman has been bankrolling a series of ventures using stock he sold from Asana’s 2020 IPO.
The device was supposed to be an anti-fraud hardware prototype, though it didn’t actually work. | Source: Courtesy Sebastian Heyneman
“I’m not in a dire situation, but I am very much kind of coming toward the end of the line,” Heyneman said. “And so my thinking was, let me make a big bet. Let me go to the center of power. Let me bring a physical object and see if anyone’s interested.”
He didn’t have time to assemble the prototype before leaving for Switzerland, so he took a Patagonia duffel bag stuffed with motherboards, loose wire, and a box of tools and finished building the device in his Davos hotel room.
“It looks super sketchy,” Heyneman admitted. “It’s got a little knob on the top, wires and glue — it’s very sus.”
Still, Heyneman carried it everywhere in Davos — through security checkpoints, into meetings, and to the bar at his hotel — hoping attendees would approach him for a pitch. The device, which Heyneman said does not work, is meant to recognize the unique characteristics of a silicon chip to prevent financial fraud.
On Tuesday, he went to snag a free salmon roll from a party, leaving the device on a table in the hotel lobby. When he returned, the device was gone. A bartender pointed him toward two burly security guards stationed by the door. “The police would like to see you,” they said.
Heyneman was taken to a private courtyard, where, he said, he was searched by a tall man in military greens. Heyneman had his Patagonia bag with him, which only heightened suspicions, he said.
“They opened the bag, and there were wires everywhere, spilled sunflower seeds, and an equipment case that looks kind of like a gun case,” Heyneman said. “It was such a comedy of errors.”
But things quickly turned serious. Detectives and apparent members of a bomb squad arrived, and Heyneman was handcuffed and taken to a Davos police station.
Other equipment in Heyneman’s baggage also seemed suspicious. | Source: Courtesy Sebastian Heyneman
“They took a fingerprint scan to see if I’m an international spy,” Heyneman said, adding that officers wouldn’t let him take his sleeping meds for fear that they were cyanide capsules. And so he spent the night mostly awake in his jail cell, the motion-enabled light flicking on every time he tossed and turned in the metal bed.
In the morning, Heyneman was asked to explain his device to a Swiss government technical expert named Chris (he didn’t catch the last name).
“I give him the same pitch that I gave all the business people in Davos,” Heyneman said. When Chris drilled him on his code, Heyneman admitted that he had used Cursor and Claude Code to vibe code the entire thing. Chris then took it upon himself to explain the code to Heyneman, line by line.
A few hours later, Heyneman was let go and told he was banned from Davos until the end of the week. He’s in Sevelen waiting for his Saturday flight back to San Francisco.
Does he plan to return to Davos?
“I will be there in 2027,” he said.
The Swiss police did not respond to a request for comment.