A team of serial founders

I met Patrice on a cold winter evening in the late -’90s. We were having an early company Christmas celebration. Patrice had just started his apprenticeship at Namics, our digital agency. 

At a partner event at around the same time, I met Toni. He was working for Obtree, a content management company. 

A couple of years later, we went on to found our next company, local.ch, which in turn became Switzerland’s largest web property. There we met Felix, who only joined us on the condition that together we would create another company after local.ch.

We did - two, in fact. The first was Memonic. In essence, we invented Evernote before Evernote was ever created - an online notebook. But in the consumer space, you simply have no chance against a better-funded American rival. Though we also got a piece of tech they didn’t have. Or has your notebook ever notified you with relevant updates on your topics of interest?

That was the moment we started to build Squirro, based on a simple insight: enterprise data is broken. 99% of all enterprise data generated is never used beyond its primary use. 

It is like buying a new company car, driving the car from the dealer to the company garage and then throwing the key away. A bad investment. Yet this is how most companies deal with data today. 

This is the problem Squirro addresses: turning this data into actionable insights. 

On this journey, we are joined by a team of fantastic colleagues. Shivani, Wiktor, Saurabh and Miguel have all been with us for more than five years.  

Why do we stick around together for so long, especially in this fast-paced startup world? We’re simply fond of each other. And on top of that, we are joined by another 40 talented colleagues from three continents.  

How do we make that work? With a serious and fascinating challenge as our focus - to build the world’s first true insight engine - and a few commonly shared rules. 

Dorian Selz, 
Co-Founder and CEO of Squirro