 Hey, so hey, so where are we now? Hello. Welcome here. We are at a mountain above our headquarters in Horpe near Lucerne and We have beautiful view here on the lake of Lucerne and please introduce yourself. My name is Stefan Dubach I'm one of the founders of Toradex Working at Toradex for 18 years now and I'm currently leading the global operations supply chain and the likes And so so is this the place where you bring out the customers or employees or? Yeah, yeah, definitely. So that's really just a few minutes away So we had just here yesterday for example a company event with the If everybody working here or we can have customers up here and there are many other places around around here And is this also where you grew up? Yeah, so actually many of us grew up here near Lucerne and I myself actually am from behind that mountain And we all of us actually studied or worked at the Lucerne university, which is also actually just down there next to our office And that's also a little bit the history of Toradex And we wanted to talk a little bit about that how Toradex was started But I would really like to give the word to Stefan as a founder and maybe tell us the story how Toradex's inception and how it all came to where we are today Yeah Well, we started at the Institute of electronics at the University of science Applied science. We were doing a lot of industrial projects We always had more than enough projects So after a while we figured out. Well, let's let's try to do our own stuff Start our own company starting off as an engineering company Doing very diverse projects for Swiss and international customers But quite soon we found out it's it's rather tricky to you know Engineering it's sometimes you are 50 percent booked. Sometimes you are 200 percent booked So we turned towards products and that's where we actually got into the idea of doing sums because almost all products started to have some kind of computational power HMI's and that's where actually it started off and today we are actually still doing the very same thing So you you you met all all of you three at the university right here Pretty much. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean we started together Daniel myself. We started together And now we got to work together for many years already And you know the interesting story also for Toradex Why did we actually come up with building a product instead of doing engineering services was Back in the days 17 years ago If you wanted to buy an evaluation kit of an application processor back then it was the pxa processor from intel You'd pay five thousand dollars Just to get like a big board that you can start developing with And getting that board was really a pain because you had to go through many different channels So we figured we want to come up with a more affordable development kit for embedded devices That's kind of easily available. You can order it online So we were a little bit inspired by the Dell business model of a good online store Somewhat standard products that you can use to then you know build up one Is it this foundation at the university here? To to do exactly this kind of products or is it like Going away from the main classes that were there at that time or Well, it was some kind of a speciality what we did actually at the institute We were into miniaturization and also into High computing power So that's where actually it leads to industrial computing modules High performance low power as such but one of the key assets is still We still do the same because I think we try to keep things simple as much as possible But at the end, you know the complexity of such a module of a subsystem is rather high And it's essential actually to support your customers And that has been the case 18 years ago when we started this adventure and it's still actually the case that we really Highly foster Supporting the customers and bring them to market as soon as possible. Is it also to do with the swiss? style or what you call it the swiss Like value, right? You did it's about precision. It's about high tech. What is it? It is about first time right, which obviously makes it easier, you know, you're quicker to the market You don't lose any shares to your competitor But it's obviously also about reliability, whether it's hardware, but it's software It has a lot of this swiss touch Swiss engineering approach, of course and So so 18 years ago sounds like a long time, no, but it goes fast or For me it went very fast. I don't know Daniel. Yeah, I mean you're you're here since day one. Yeah Yeah, so I was actually a student. I said at the university and the chef was one of One of our teacher, right? So we are you know kind of got picked out by some other founders They were all from the university and they did a really good pitch To me at least you know to work for Torrex and not go somewhere else And then we started then a much smaller company But we just launched our first product and with the px a 270 and since then as as they said we're still growing Still make it simpler Still really the the quality and kind of the swissness is really embedded in the company Even we are very international even here in in harp We have people joining us here from from all over Europe and then even further away to come here work here We really need the best talent from all over the world And and we have offices all over the world in the meantime to really get access to that To that talent and you know you can work for Torrex you can come here, but we also have programs you can work remote So so we really grow more and we need more talent from from universities Like here, so it's quite desirable I guess for some some people to come here, right? It looks cool at least It looks at the air is nice the lifestyle I think it's also, you know the whole setup of the company. You are in a small Agile company You have a really wide Application area of of products where you support customers You have a global setup. You have global cultures around as mentioned by donny It is really cool to you know having that in a in a small and agile setup there It is very attractive obviously for a lot of engineers and other other people I also think you get the chance to work with the latest tech I mean we're like here in a smaller village in front of Lucerne But you we get to work on latest tech technology We're in early access when new processes come out from our suppliers And it's very exciting if you like computer technology if you like embedded software If you like to build devices together with customers that make a real impact It's a very rewarding environment and you can learn a lot. I mean for us, you know, we've been with the company for 15 plus years myself and it's an amazing journey of learnings in in the computer industry Which you know, it's nice that you can do something like this in switzerland Was it a little bit scary in the beginning to like do the whole startup idea the going to a startup? What are you considering for example? Otherwise, yeah, otherwise here we do have some more established companies Which probably would have been a little bit safer and then that at the beginning You know, so you don't know you have you know these big plans at that time It was you know already established engineering company, but I never not Experienced with product, but yeah, that's really kind of also the exciting part right try it out Make it grow, you know expand, you know listen to customer really, you know Try to fit what you know a customer really won't find that out and you know make that and and and so grow So it was was very exciting You know, we're growing a still growing. So it's it was a very exciting thing Yeah, a little bit more risky than you know, just go to one of the of the huge companies Where everything is in plan, and you know everything's are you trying to make things feel like still like a startup or how do you make sure that all your the colleagues are able to be as Creative as did like yeah, if you look at our culture that we have in the company So we really try to have an entrepreneurial mindset across all the departments whether you're in sales What you actually help customers Build devices and sometimes we're involved into Actually doing system level design of their end devices together Or whether you are in in the supply chain where you can bring your creativity in and making sure in these difficult times We can source key components. I think it's really within the departments and the culture that we have at Toradex We really can keep this this startup feel and also if you look at the different offices Of course, we have now seven offices around the world with about 140 employees Still, you know, none none of the offices is bigger than 40 50 people And so you still know everyone on your floor, you know, everyone by first name And and that's really a rewarding environment to work in how would you describe the role of each of the different offices? Are they like that some of them Get to come to the headquarters here in Lucerne sometimes and go back and forward and Yeah, I mean we have we have different we have shared service centers So offices for instance one example is our office in some paolo brazil is a mixed office So we have engineering services there. So we have development teams our tries and core team has a lot of the engineers there But they also serve the local market like south america We have some our pure sales offices at the moment because they're a little bit earlier stages That's for instance right now in japan We're ramping up our office back there again just focusing on sales and working close with the customer It really depends on we even have offices in vietnam where we just do pure internal services Like website development market marketing and it internal services. So it's really cross functional There is no one single schema that we apply It's it's basically where we find the talent to for the services and and um employees that we need it's that's what we do And in the tour we were mentioning it a little bit like you have not been slowing down Like the last 18 months and basically are you hiring or are you looking for? Yeah, absolutely. We we always have some lists or positions open But also we also source a lot of the talents through our network You know, if you know someone who likes to work in this kind of field Send us an email through our contact You know contact emails that we have listed or you know, just reach out and because for us It's like we're all very passionate what we do And and we look for this kind of talent and people that really like that work And make a change, right? I mean you also want to bring in your own ideas and that's a nice thing, right? Yes, are we still like a startup environment today? Yes, today you can still a new employee can come to tortex and say hey, I saw this on your website It really doesn't make sense. We should change it and we will change it And so there are some employees who came from a little bit around the world kind of and come to live here Yeah, absolutely. I mean we we are of course as far as like the free movement in europe Of course, we have people joining us from east in europe. We have people from italy We have a nice little community from italy that is with us So this is absolutely whatever is possible from the restrictions that are currently in place or just a general I think free travel Allowance that we have we do that and we source talent globally and even if you want to work from home When we have people that are, you know south-east asia They they work for us from home and they're as part of the team like everyone else who joins us in the office And they can commute even from further away and come once in a while or correct? Yeah, so in terms of the setup because we are so central here in switzerland We have like a company apartment. So our remote workers they get to come in once every two weeks or maybe once Once a month they can stay an eye or two in the company apartment Join the teams for maybe some of the important meetings and then go back So we're definitely very flexible there, especially here in europe We're traveling and getting around still very easy But the same in the u.s. Or even in brazil or in asia It's the same motto we try to you know get together Whether it's for a trade show where we all meet or whether it's for an important product meeting Bring people in and let them collaborate. So did you imagine all this when you in the beginning? Uh I think you know At at the beginning obviously you're all new you try a lot a lot of things As I mentioned we have been agile. We have to being a steep learning curve But the good thing is actually you can Always improve yourself. You can grow personally and along with your your your company But you don't never know what's what's what's coming up As such I think staying agile and actually having really great employees is is the key to success And you have more and more recruits from the university right here in lucerne or eth 0 or All over wherever we get them we will hire Talents really good talents. They are not you know not all all around and we are happy to you know Taking in any any requests and You know improve our company bring it further as well as the employee himself Yeah, one nice benefit about being close to universities. We can have internships people who join our teams They maybe still work part-time because they're still studying we can hire junior engineers But we also look for senior people. So if you look on the spectrum, we really were we have something for everyone Even you know middle-level management. We have positions open So if you're interested if that excites you this industry working with computers Here in switzerland or all anywhere where you are. It's it's definitely a fun place to work because embedded Linux is a field that just keeps exploding forever Exactly. I mean if you look right now when we list the position embedded linux engineer It will take us about six months to close that position So actually the labor force or basically just the talent right now in this industry is really It's really sold after and so what we try to do at torix We try to keep the work environment fun. We try to make sure that people can have an impact and decisions that we make And yeah, and that's how we try to compete in the in the market for this talent And all the new talents coming out. They should definitely Try to learn as much as possible to be an expert linux hacker, right? Yeah, I mean basically everyone these days has a raspberry pi Right and so if you add your fingers on a raspberry pi and you like it then give us a call and we will have something fun for you And they can learn in the process. Correct. I mean, of course learning in this industry. There's always learning. I think You know, there's every year. There's new technology coming out before we're doing with horizon right now We moved a little bit from just focusing on the hardware and the bsp Which is really just a port support package that that low level software We're going now up to building a full operating system and offering even cloud services So in terms of like talent today, we don't just need an embedded engineer We need we need cloud service full stack development engineers So really if if that is just if that excites you that industry, you know building devices together with customers that change lives That's really that's really where you want to be All right, so looking forward to 2022 and see what's going to happen like the embedded world there You're going to be there for sure, right? Maybe Daniel can give us a little piece of it for embedded world for the show Yeah, I think we will we will be there and we will be there as long as the show is there Yeah, as long as the show is there So if you are around and you can travel there, yeah, we sit us at At the embedded world 2022