5:43 - Organizing tours to North Korea
10:37 - Generating revenue from the start
19:38 - Being a chairman
24:13 - Taxfix makes taxes easy
41:33 - Time to leave
Mathis Büchi is the co-founder and chairman at the pdf software company smallpdf and the digital tax accountant Taxfix. His background is in International Business and Global Management and he previously ran a tour company organizing trips to North Korea together with an NGO. His university studies, as well, took place in Asia: he frequented the University of Hong Kong and Korea University (in South Korea).
When the political climate in North Korea intensified, his tour company came to an end and he took the trans Siberian railway train back to Switzerland, where he would go on to found smallpdf in2013. Smallpdf was bootstrapped from the very beginning, as their business model allowed them to generate enough revenue from day one to pay themselves a salary and keep things afloat.
In 2016 he co-founded Taxfix and became itsCEO, not because he had a background in taxes or any particular expertise on it, but due to the fact that he himself found taxes an aggravating an confusing task. Taxfix got started in Germany because tax filing is even more complex there, so much so that 25% of Germans don't even file their taxes, thereby losing out on an average of 1000€.
Taxfix tackles this issue by radically simplifying the process: an automated questionnaire on your phone simulates the conversation you would have with a tax accountant and the tax relevancy of your replies is then analyzed by the app.
"Building something out of nothing is what excites me the most."
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer
