I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. Here’s what I had to unlearn to build a $1 billion business

Family-business instincts are invaluable — until they become limiting. They teach resilience, loyalty, pragmatism, and financial discipline. But they do not necessarily teach you how to scale leadership beyond yourself, build for global markets, or invest aggressively ahead of returns. This is further amplified in Switzerland, where there is a cultural bias to stay humble and focus on what’s realistic. These are clear strengths. Yet global technology markets often reward – and require – a different posture: global ambition, rapid growth and the willingness to invest ahead of certain returns.

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I grew up in Switzerland surrounded by entrepreneurs: my grandfather in construction, my father in surveying, my uncles in packaging and construction. That heritage came with a distinctly Swiss mindset to stay humble, build practical solutions, and prove yourself locally before daring to look abroad. Those lessons shaped Scandit in our early days to bootstrap, experiment, and find initial product-market fit.

But as Scandit grew, I realized that what had made us strong could also hold us back. To grow globally, I had to unlearn some of the traits essential in a small-to-medium family business – the instinct to improvise and solve problems yourself, to treat cash flow as the key measure of financial health, and to nurture a local community of stakeholders. Global growth required the ability to scale an organization, to invest ahead of revenue, and reach a global community you hadn’t yet met.

What I’ve come to learn is that if you’re leading a company beyond traditional business models ( that is, offering tangible products or in-person services that customers can directly experience), the mindset that can make a small-to-medium business entrepreneur successful can eventually hold you back. Not because that mindset is wrong, but because it’s optimized for a world without venture-style economics.

With that in mind, here are are four skills that I had to unlearn to scale our business to where we are today – with seven global offices and more than 2,100 customers, including seven of the top 10 retailers worldwide

Resilience and improvisation: From superpower to bottleneck

Growing up in a family of SMB entrepreneurs, problem-solving wasn’t a task you clocked into. It was simply how life worked. At dinner, you’d talk through challenges and solutions. On weekends, you’d troubleshoot whatever popped up. As a result, you don’t perceive challenges as interruptions – you see challenges as puzzles. You learn to stay calm, work with imperfect information, and keep moving.

As our company scaled, though, I quickly realized I couldn’t be the main person improvising and solving problems. In order to grow, you need to build a scalable organization, bringing in people you trust, giving them real ownership, and letting them solve problems autonomously. My role shifted from solving problems myself to building an organization where great problem-solving can happen without me.

There was also something unexpected in that shift. Once we had kids, I was able to protect evenings for dinner and put my kids to bed most nights. And once the house is quiet, I’ll sometimes go back to work – something I recognize from childhood: sitting nearby while my father worked through a tough issue late into the night. The difference now is I’m choosing where my attention matters most, and I’m building a team I can rely on for the rest.

What I’ve learned is that resilience helps you survive uncertainty. But it can also disguise organizational inefficiency. Growth requires organization and systems, not just resilience. If your team’s success still depends on your ability to improvise, you’re scaling effort, not impact.

The Cash-Flow Prison: When discipline becomes an anchor

Growing up, I absorbed a deep respect for building businesses on what you have, not on what you may have someday. My family’s companies were mainly built on cash flow – growing by delivering value, collecting payment and investing back into the business. This instilled in me a strong sense of responsibility that every investment should be rooted in results, and progress should be tangible.

That mindset served me well when starting Scandit. Coming straight from academia, my co‑founders and I bootstrapped the business during the early years. We ran lean, funded ourselves through early customers and competitive grants, and thought twice before spending extra. We’d share hotel rooms on business trips because it felt sensible.

But at some point, that instinct became an anchor. You raise capital, and the ground shifts – scaling requires deploying capital ahead of returns, not after. Learning to spend significant amounts of money proactively to unlock future growth was one of the essential mindset shifts in taking Scandit from a promising deep tech startup to a global company.

With early investments and subsequent Series B, C, and D rounds that brought our total funding t