Bettina Hein and the business of changing her mind

Bettina Hein wanted to start a company on her grandfather’s birthday. It was a reasonable tribute. He had helped teach her arithmetic, and his own working life had taken him from mining coal to selling it wholesale. March 15 would give her new business a little family history before it had any history of its own.

There was one complication: in 2008, March 15 fell on a Saturday. She founded Pixability on the Friday instead. Years later, asked about the significance of launching on Pi Day, she explained that the mathematical celebration had been an accident. The affection was intentional. The neat branding opportunity arrived courtesy of the calendar.

It is an appropriate beginning for a founder whose career has repeatedly involved revising a plan without abandoning its purpose. Pixability would change what it sold and whom it served. Hein would eventually give up its CEO’s chair. Through those changes runs a recognizable interest in making technology useful, building an employer, and helping somebody else get started.

A family business, several times over

Hein was born in Berlin and grew up between Germany and the United States. All four grandparents had run businesses. There was a corner grocery, a pharmacy and the coal concern. In that family, self-employment had several addresses and very little mystique. A business was something people made and maintained.

The grandfather who did homework with her supplied a particularly durable lesson. Mental arithmetic meant finding a way to construct an answer in your head. There is a pleasing distance between that exercise and a software company optimizing advertising, although both reward an ability to see relationships among numbers. The family influence gave her an example to follow long before she had a product.

Formal education took her through business administration at the University of St. Gallen and law at the University of Constance. Yet business school left a practical gap. Students could learn to devise strategy for an established corporation while remaining unsure how to finance a young company, protect its intellectual property or write its first business plan. Hein helped establish START Global in 1996, a student initiative for people interested in entrepreneurship.

In a 1997 university speech, she pressed the case for making St. Gallen fertile ground for founders. It was an early instance of a habit that would recur: when the useful institution was missing, she helped organize one. Years before her television appearances, her audience was a university that needed to hear more about starting.

First, give the machine a voice

SVOX brought her into the work of commercializing research. The Swiss company grew out of ETH Zurich and developed speech technology, including software that turns written words into spoken language. Its products found their way into mobile devices and automotive systems. For a company selling something largely invisible, being heard was rather the point.

Building it around the collapse of the dot-com boom was an awkward introduction to the entrepreneurial profession. The fashionable certainty that technology would change everything was suddenly less useful when asking for money. Hein has recalled the skeptical reactions to choosing a startup while classmates pursued recognizable careers in consulting and banking. The safe-looking job had a recognizable employer. Her choice required considerably more explanation.

SVOX was acquired by Nuance in 2011 in a deal widely reported at $125 million. By then, Hein had already begun her next company. The overlap matters: the familiar sequence of founding, selling, then calmly selecting the next adventure tidies up a career that was less conveniently arranged. Pixability had been established three years before the SVOX sale.

MIT supplied another part of her education. She and her husband, Andreas Goeldi, both became Sloan Fellows, graduating in the class of 2008. They had met in St. Gallen, where he worked in computer science. Her account of their acquaintance includes inviting him to explain the IT side of writing a master’s thesis and discovering that the quiet man could give a very good presentation. He later joined Pixability as chief technology officer.

The customer edits the script

Pixability’s early work was video production. Then came help with YouTube marketing, followed by technology for advertising. Each change moved the business closer to a problem customers were showing it. Making a video was only one task. Understanding where it belonged, who would see it and whether the spending worked created other work to do.

This is the less photogenic part of seeing the future. Hein recognized that digital video mattered, but recognizing a medium did not supply a finished business model. Customers had to make the opportunity more specific. Her company’s progression reads like an extended conversation with a market that was still learning how to describe its needs.

By December 2013, Pixability was expanding its North American presence into New York and Los Angeles. In October 2014, it announced a platform for optimizing YouTube TrueView advertising. The proposition had become concrete: help media professionals manage spending and performance as video budgets moved online. The company was building software around the decisions that followed the upload.

There was also a question of independence. Advertising platforms sold access to audiences and supplied measurements of the result. Hein made the case for an intermediary that could work across those platforms and advocate for advertisers. In a 2016 video interview, she described the danger with a compact classroom complaint: “You’re grading your own homework.”

Her advice to smaller businesses was similarly practical. Know the audience. Make an informative video that demonstrates a product and its usefulness. Be careful about betting a small marketing budget on being funny enough to become famous. For someone working in online video, she showed a welcome suspicion of the idea that every company needed to become a comedy act.

The number she wanted to count

Hein’s career produces the familiar business statistics: acquisition prices, capital raised, expansion and awards. Her own description of success adds a different measure. “My personal yardstick for success is in how many jobs I’ve created.” That puts the employees inside the account of achievement, alongside the founders and investors.

She and Goeldi have publicly described an ambition to create thousands of jobs. The figure has grown across accounts over the years; the consistent idea is that building companies should produce meaningful work for other people. It gives a long career a task that cannot be completed by changing a job title or receiving a prize.

“My personal yardstick for success is in how many jobs I’ve created.”

Bettina Hein, 2018

Getting the opportunity to build has not been evenly distributed. Hein has described presenting a strategy with a female finance executive to male investors who resisted it, then hearing the same proposal welcomed when Goeldi voiced it. The frustrating detail is how little the proposal needed to change. The room responded to the person delivering it.

SheEOs, the network she founded for women leading growing companies, supplied a place for more useful conversations. Members could discuss investors, employees, equity and boards in confidence. Its value lay partly in the ordinary specificity of those subjects. A founder trying to handle a difficult personnel decision needs people who understand what is at stake.

Her interest in mentoring has also taken a deliberately modest form. She described offering half-hour entrepreneurial office hours to people willing to wait for a slot. Questions about products, marketing and financing could get a hearing. Half an hour is small enough to put in a diary and long enough to make a question less lonely.

Making room for the next CEO

On March 6, 2018, Pixability announced David George as its new CEO. Hein moved to executive chairwoman, leading the board and serving as a strategic adviser. The announcement followed a profitable fourth quarter in 2017 and a decade in which she had repeatedly adjusted the business.

A founder’s departure from daily management can be mistaken for the end of the story, especially when the story has been told chiefly through the founder. Here it changed the work she was doing for the company. George brought experience from Facebook and digital media. Hein brought the accumulated knowledge of having built the organization. Pixability’s current team listing continues to place her on its board.

Back in Switzerland, she also became a familiar investor on Die Höhle der Löwen Schweiz, the Swiss pitch show. She has described the format as a way to introduce entrepreneurship to people who would otherwise have little interest in business financing. There is an educational intention beneath the television theater. The costume department is presumably pleased that she also collects unusual hats.

Another generation at the table

In January 2026, Hein joined Project Switzerland’s group of experienced entrepreneurs supporting companies with international ambitions. The initiative addresses a problem she knows from both sides of the Atlantic: a promising invention still needs people who understand how to build an organization around it. Growing beyond the home market creates demands that technical skill alone cannot answer.

There is a connection to her student days. START brought people together to learn how a company begins. Project Switzerland brings experienced builders into conversations about what happens after the beginning. Across the intervening years, she has been the person seeking the explanation, doing the work and making time to explain it to somebody else.

The grandfather’s birthday did not survive the administrative calendar. The example behind it has proved more durable. Hein keeps returning to the work of making businesses possible: finding a customer, changing the offer, hiring people, choosing a successor, helping another founder. The arithmetic now involves more people. She is still working on the answer.