“My personal goal is to create 5,000 jobs…”

Startupticker: You lived in the US for a long time and in Switzerland, and you regularly moved back and forth. One could assume that you live between the worlds. How did this happen?

Bettina Hein: My mother and father are German and I was born in Berlin, Germany but both of my parents married Americans in their second marriages. I have, therefore, always had an affinity to the United States. I spent my elementary school years in the United States and then another year in high school. On a professional level, I wanted to play in the big leagues of entrepreneurship. I founded my first software company in Switzerland, and it was a great experience. I'm very proud of what we did. However, it was clear that we were not only capital constrained, but also lacked an ecosystem and experienced executives that had already scaled companies. I wanted to learn how to scale. Entrepreneurship is like any other career in that you learn faster if you have role models. If you are surrounded by people that have done it before, they can mentor you and coach you. That is the surrounding that I had in Boston.

Why Boston?

I wanted to go to MIT because my first startup was very technical and I wanted to increase my technical skills coming from a business background. I relished the opportunity to spend a sabbatical year to get my masters at MIT.

You have left the CEO position in your second company, Pixability, that was very successful, and now you are part of the Board. How do you manage to be a board member in a company in Boston and at the same time a CEO and founder of your new startup HelloYellow in Switzerland?

I do not manage two companies. The CEO of Pixability manages the company, and I sit on the board where we provide oversight in a governance sense. We are six board members at Pixability, and we meet once a quarter to get a report on the progress of the company. 

Will you continue to support Pixability as a board member or do you intend to give it up at some point to focus on your startup here in Switzerland?

The only reason I would give up that position is if we were to sell the company. I imagine being a board member there for the foreseeable future.

What was the most important thing that you learned as a Swiss founder in the US?

One of the things that I wanted to learn was marketing. The largest competitor of my first company had much weaker technology, but they had much stronger marketing chops. What is a better way there to learn than founding a marketing company myself? I have learned a whole lot in that regard. I discovered that marketing is very numerically and analytically driven if you do it right. Sales is equally very numerically driven. I’m a numbers person and I’m also, very analytical. It was a great learning for me: to see how to set up scalable marketing in an (almost) scientific way.

There is also the art of marketing, which has to do with chutzpah - putting yourself out there. In German-speaking countries, people will often not sell the promise of their product, but instead, they will speak about what it exactly can do today, what its functions are. But Americans often sell the dream behind the product; how can it improve your life? What is the vision and the mission behind it? I have also learned that what makes a difference is not only selling your product, but also motivating people inside your company to understand they are doing something worthwhile.

What advice would you give Swiss startups?

One thing I believe is important in Switzerland is to look for ideas that have a large enough market so that they can scale. I see many founders planning to make a couple of million in revenue in five years. For many people, it's totally fine to create jobs at a small scale and I respect that but I wouldn't get up for that in the morning. Real tech entrepreneurship is about building scalable things. I feel passionate about helping people to create bigger companies that can compete on an international scale.

Is this something that has inspired you to continue engaging in the startup scene?

Since I was in my very early twenties, I have been involved with entrepreneurship. In 1996 I started student initiative at the University of St. Gallen called Start Global. The Start Summit that they organize today has grown into the largest student-organized startup conference in Europe with 3500 attendees. The reason I did that was because I wanted to learn about entrepreneurship myself but as business administration students, we were not at all being taught how to start new companies. Instead, we learned how to operate large companies, to understand and plan their strategy. So, from the start, I have been passionate about learning about entrepreneurship, promoting entrepreneurship and getting other people to become entrepreneurs. That is why I decided to be part of the «Höhle der Löwen».

Do you then believe that the show will make entrepreneurship more popular in Switzerland?

Yes, it is an opportunity to further entrepreneurship and it is also an opportunity to invest in great entrepreneurs in the tech space. It is also an opportunity for me to expand my reach in Europe since I just returned from the United States 9 months ago.

You are one of a handful of serial entrepreneurs in Switzerland - your new company is already the third one that you are building. What motivates you to build companies?

For me, the most important thing is to create jobs. My personal goal is (together with my husband Andreas Goeldi) to create 5,000 jobs in our career. We’ve created over 800 jobs so far. There is strong symbolism behind that goal: 5,000 good jobs would be enough to feed the town that I grew up in Germany. Of course, entrepreneurship is not an end in itself, but it is a way to bring new, important things into the world and to give people a livelihood. Some people think entrepreneurship is all about getting rich. But if it’s just about the money for you, then entrepreneurship may not be the right path because it’s a hard, long road and there are definitely easier ways to get rich.