1:01 - A family full of role models
8:23 - The doubts of an entrepreneur
18:56 - Moving back to the US
29:41 - A partnership in equality
40:41 - Working with your spouse
Bettina Hein is the co-founder and CEO at juli Health, an app for managing chronic health conditions, and an investor at the Swiss Shark Tank Höhle der Löwen. She also co-founded START Global when studying at HSG, as well as Svox and Pixability. She’s married to Andreas Göldi, who is an investor at btov partners.
Bettina grew up in a family full of entrepreneurs and so was never short for role models; despite this, she did not feel confident to jump straight into entrepreneurship after her university studies and ended up interning and working for a series of corporates instead. She particularly remembers her unpleasant experience at McKinsey, which she says had a cutthroat environment.
During her time at HSG, she co-founded the largest student-led entrepreneurship conference in the world, START. The people she co-founded it with would go on to start btov ventures, and also put her in touch with an engineer developing text-to-speech technology - and so Svox was born.
Due to the telecom bust in 2001, Svox went through a number of difficulties, having had to fire more than half of their staff and place the rest on short time work. Despite the hardships, Svox turned the tide and was eventually sold to Nuance for $25M. By this point, Bettina and her husband Andreas decided to get a mid-career masters at MIT, and it was out of MIT that Bettina built Pixability, the video advertising software company. She left Pixability after 12 years to support her husband in moving back to Switzerland. Shortly after moving back, she was invited to star on Höhle der Löwen.
In 2020 Bettina co-founded juli Health, an app for managing chronic health conditions. Juli Health is geared towards US customers, since it aims to help compensate for the US healthcare system’s many inefficiencies.
"No one in my family ever had a 9 to 5 job, so it was rather easy for me to envision myself becoming an entrepreneur."
"Before starting my first venture, I told myself 'If this doesn't work, I can always get a job at McDonalds.'"
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