Built By Us: Bettina Hein of Pixability
For Bettina Hein entrepreneurship runs in the blood. A West Berlin native, she grew up in a family where entrepreneurship was the norm: her parents were self-employed professionals and all four of her grandparents owned their own businesses. This environment fostered Bettina’s entrepreneurial spirit and made it hard for her to imagine being an employee with a 9-to-5 job.
She started her first company, SVOX, after the dot-com bubble burst in 2001. A speech technology software company, SVOX was founded out of the Swiss Federal Institute, and became profitable within a few years. This gave Bettina and her husband the chance to become Sloan Fellows as a part of the school’s one-year, mid-career Management of Technology master’s program. Seizing this opportunity, they came to the U.S. in 2006 to enter the big leagues. Later, SVOX’s text-to-speech solution would be included in Google’s Android 1.6. In 2011 the company was acquired by Nuance Communications for $125M, enabling Bettina to pour the profits into a venture she had started in 2008 — Pixability.
Pixability helps hundreds of the world’s largest brands and their agencies with video advertising, and specializes in advertising on large social media platforms, such as YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram. Bettina notes that she’s not the only immigrant in the company; in fact, a third of her team is foreign-born. The company just signed onto an amicus brief against the recent travel ban, citing the fact that most large, innovative tech companies were founded by immigrants. Bettina’s activism doesn’t stop there. A recipient of Boston Business Journal’s “40 under 40” award and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, she is concerned about the gender gap in tech. That’s why she founded the SheEOS, a networking organization for female entrepreneurs and CEOs in technology and life sciences.
Bettina believes that her entrepreneurial success can be attributed to her international background. She first came to the US at the age of six, and would live here for five years before moving back to Germany. “When you grow up on two different continents, you don’t ever quite belong in one place or the other, which leaves you in between,” she says. While in the United States the pressure to conform is not as high, and it’s more accepted to experiment with things, she also thinks that people are less bound to what they do and to their word. “In general there’s a lot less social cohesion, and what that leads to is that people are somewhat less reliable and less committed to following through on everything that they promise to do. I guess I have been able to take the best of both worlds, and that’s what makes me fairly successful as a technology entrepreneur.”
According to Bettina, anybody can be an entrepreneur, as long as they have three things: naivety to get started, chutzpah to put themselves out there and perseverance to see their goals through. She points out that if founders knew how hard building a company is, they would never get started. They need to be bold enough to tell people what their idea is, why it’s great, and convince them to join and make it materialize. She knows first-hand that, as an entrepreneur, one needs to overcome new hurdles every day, and that there are different challenges at each stage of a company’s growth.
She believes that all of this also applies to immigrants who usually find themselves in an environment that is foreign to them, and need to build a new life from scratch. Having had the courage to move to another country, immigrants want to prove themselves and often don’t have a plan B. This lack of alternatives and desire to demonstrate their ability enables foreign-born entrepreneurs to persevere and succeed despite the odds.
Written by: Maria Grigorova of The Ellis Project
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