EPFL spin-off Nexthink is the next Swiss unicorn

It's a great milestone for the team and a recognition of our market potential. On a personal level, I have never been prouder of the great pool of talent we have, along with the number of customers we've attracted – more than a thousand customers with 11 million employees are currently benefiting from Nexthink solutions. 

I was presenting some of the research I had done around advanced artificial intelligence at EPFL. One of the outside reviewers of this project was an IT director at a famous watch company, who said the research was so innovative that if it could be turned into a product, he would buy it. And that got me thinking that we really had something here. There has always been an inherent contradiction in IT— employees experience their digital work environments far differently from how IT perceives them. CIOs are understandably hyper-focused on delivering projects on time and on budget, but that doesn't have to come at the expense of poor experiences. This is a near-universal problem. Once we developed the technology that could effectively rectify this discrepancy, we were off.  

EPFL was not only a rigorous and stimulating learning environment, but it also provides a network of talented engineers, entrepreneurs and business leaders to connect with, which is crucial to any start-up, especially in the early days of starting a business.  

Yes, we have many employees from the EPFL and contacts with professors and researchers. We would like to do more together in future collaborations.  

Early on we knew we had something that could solve a major challenge for companies all over the world. It was then that we really committed to developing the technology into a product that would offer value unlike anything on the market. 

My years at EPFL played a big part in the decision to establish our headquarters in Lausanne. There is a huge pool of talent, Swiss engineers are among the best in the world, and we were fortunate to be able build an extremely gifted team there. Since then, we have established a second headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts, and we plan to hire an additional 200-300 employees in the next 12-18 months. We have more than 120 new job openings right now, so I would encourage jobseekers to check them out here. 

I believe it is. Switzerland's central European location provides access to a huge pool of talent. But more importantly, I think that that Swiss culture is very valuable for start-ups. It imbues new companies with a sense of corporate social responsibility and concern for the environment. Here at Nexthink, we are deeply committed to giving back to our communities and championing sustainability.  

To have more people who have built great companies mentoring and being involved with the next generations. I see too many 'professional' advisers who have never been founders themselves at scale.  

Don't build a company for the destination; build it for the journey and the people. Success can come or not, but it shouldn't matter as much in the big scheme of things. Everybody has 24 hours in a day and you decide how you spend them.