EP #299 - Vincent Bieri: A Swiss Unicorn

About Vincent Bieri:

Vincent Bieri is the co-founder of Nexthink, a leader in digital employee experience management software and one of the rare Swiss unicorns. He studied Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences of Fribourg, and later went on to work for Cisco for 7 years, before starting his own venture in 2004. His time at Cisco, which coincided with the dot com crash, taught him to temper his expectations of wealth and success and ground them in what is real and measurable.

In 2004, together with friends Pedro and Patrick, Vincent co-founded Nexthink, a B2B SaaS business monitoring user experience for large organizations. It’s estimated that people working for big companies lose on average 20 min per day dealing with computer issues – much of this technical failure is not even reported to upper management but merely dealt with, so companies are often unaware that such a problem exists. Nexthink allows you to monitor and proactively anticipate the problem, so that time lost to technical difficulties is greatly reduced, leading to higher productivity, higher employee satisfaction, and a lower churn.

Since 2004 Nexthink has scaled up over 1'000 employees, equipped 15 millions users with its software and raised a total of $345M in funding. Reaching a 1.1B$ valuation in 2021, Nexthink earned the title of Swiss Unicorn. Vincent attributes the success of the company to several factors, both circumstantial and not, and he highlights a few rules of thumb:

• Don’t delegate: distribute. You should create a team structure which allows for absences, doesn’t overburden any single person, and doesn’t necessitate micro-management.
• Hire great recruiters. Recruiters tend to hire people like themselves, so this is a key first step in your scaling journey. Make sure as well to have a great onboarding process.
• Hire excellent sales people who come with a good network of other sales people, in order to increase the overall number of quality applicants.

In 2019 Vincent left his operational role at Nexthink. He remains a shareholder, friend and advisor, but has since begun to enjoy having more time for himself and his other hobbies and projects.

Memorable Quotes:

"Anticipating major market transitions is the secret to a company’s success."

"Don’t celebrate one-off successes too much. You never know how circumstantial they are. Focus on positive trends instead."

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