After 18 years, I will leave Squirro at the end of October. I will obviously stay connected to the company as a shareholder and strong supporter. At this point I have no concrete next step planned and will take a breather first.
Back in 2008, while at local.ch, some of us discussed how to better work with information. How can we better make use of all the data that we get bombarded with every day? Those conversations with Toni Birrer, Dorian Selz, Felix Hürlimann, and Chris Hauzenberger led first to Memonic, a note-taking app, and then to Squirro, now an enterprise generative AI platform. These are two products that look very different on the surface but actually had the same vision backing them: continually use the right data to back work decisions.
The emergence of LLMs in the last few years has since massively accelerated the journey towards our original vision. For the first time I now see a large part of that mission executed with high quality. As one example, six years ago we implemented a fantastic prototype for conversational search. It analysed the user’s question and came back with a combination of structured data dashboards and search results depending on the intent. This was a lot of hard work with many brittle components back then. It involved search, named entity recognition and other natural language processing techniques, text classification, and even early LLM work with BERT. Nowadays an LLM call with a clever tool selection allows implementing this use case at a really good quality level with probably a hundred times less implementation effort.
What I have enjoyed about the journey during all this time is the constant learning. And this is far from only technical learning. When co-founding Memonic / Squirro I worked with the team as a software engineer. Since then I have filled a bunch of different roles, basically functioning as the wildcard and stepping in where we did not yet have a suitable person on board. This way I have worked on such polar opposites as software engineering and enterprise sales. This is a unique privilege as a founder, and one I do not think would have been possible anywhere else. It has allowed me to become much more well-rounded, being able to link together technical realities with business requirements.
I’m immensely grateful to the amazing people I’ve been able to work with during all of those years. Startup and scale-up life is hard. Doing it together with people I trust and admire is how I managed to stick with it during these 18 years. I look forward to seeing how all of you at Squirro continue working towards our mission, and know that many of us will stay connected as lifelong friends.
This journey started back in 2008 with some dinner conversations. I’m excited to find out what the next ones bring.