Swiss Base for Unbureaucratic Global Reach

“I, a native of Heidelberg, left Germany over three decades ago. Since then, I have been living in Switzerland and have since obtained Swiss citizenship. I appreciate this innovation-friendly country, which (despite cantonal differences) is overall less bureaucratized than Germany and has given me the opportunity to be entrepreneurial worldwide from the start. In a way, I didn't emigrate, but returned to the country from which I came from family-wise. But more on that later.”

“Switzerland, which I have known since my youth, is among the countries whose mentalities and lifestyles have particularly appealed to me. The long past familial origin was unknown to me and certainly not decisive for my decision to make the country my private and entrepreneurial focal point in the early 1990s. But the origin and what is passed on in family life in terms of traditions and lifestyle, some of it perhaps unconsciously in my case, are more formative than we often suspect. Perhaps the hidden Swiss roots have shaped my life path more than I have perceived myself, and my holistic thinking in the larger dimensions, the "big picture thinking" as the Anglo-Saxons call it, has been decisive. I did not emigrate to Switzerland, but in a sense I returned home.”