Kandou Bus CEO Amin Shokrollahi: ‘Leaving home at 16 made me learn to trust my instincts and abilities’

02.02.2021 08:05, Isabelle Mitchell

Amin Shokrollahi, the founder and CEO of Kandou Bus, gave us a glimpse of his life as one of Switzerland’s most inspiring entrepreneurs and founders. Kandou Bus’ solutions enable smaller, more energy-efficient, and cost-effective electronic devices: Amin and his team develop high-speed and energy-efficient chip-chip link solutions that advance the evolution of the electronics industry and revolutionize wired connectivity.

Switzerland boasts countless world-class startups, and our series puts the spotlight on some of the best and most inspiring entrepreneurs and founders to find out what motivates them, what they have learned, and what they do when they are not transforming the world with their innovations. To get this behind-the-scenes perspective, we ask each entrepreneur to complete a short profile and choose at least 10 questions from a questionnaire about their personal and professional life. This week, we learn more about Amin Shokrollahi, founder and CEO of Kandou Bus, a Venture Kick winner in 2011, a TOP 100 Swiss startup from 2011 to 2016, and one of the most promising scale-ups in Switzerland.  

Name: Amin Shokrollahi
Location: Lausanne
Born: 1964 in Tehran (Iran)
Graduated from: University of Bonn, habilitation, in 1997
Job title: CEO of Kandou Bus
Number of employees: 125 (as of 12/2020)
Money raised: USD 130 million (as of 12/2020)
First touchpoint with Venturelab: In 2010, for Venture Kick

“We create new electronic components to reduce the power and increase the speed of all electronic devices you see and work with, and will ever work with.”

What is one thing people do not know about you?
I am impatient.

What are you most proud of?
The development of Raptor Codes, which are a method of transmitting data over massively impaired network connections. The original data is subdivided into packets, which are then transmitted through a “digital fountain.” The fountain creates a potential limitless stream of packets with the property that if you receive any set of packets that, in aggregate, is of the same size as the original file, we can reconstruct the file very efficiently. Think of a regular fountain from which you want to fill a glass of water: The individual drops don’t matter to you. What matters is that the glass is filled with any of the drops you can catch. 

What did you want to do with your life at age 12?
I wanted to be a world-class mathematician.

What are you most excited about at this time in your life?
Making my company successful.

What is your morning routine?
I usually get up at around 7 a.m. and go straight to my computer to check emails and news.

What is your evening routine?
I usually go to bed between 11 p.m. and midnight. I have either worked until that time or watched a movie, which is one of my favorite pastimes. You can see that through my profile picture above. Do you know which movie used this location?* 

What is your lunch routine?
A quick lunch in front of my computer at work.

What is your favorite movie or TV show?
My favorite movie: Blade Runner (the original). It broke a lot of stereotypes in science fiction. My favorite TV series: Breaking Bad. Extremely good actors, superb plot, and a lot of surprises.

What is your favorite book?
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter. I like books that explore unknown connections, and I love mathematics. This book combines both. 

What are your three favorite apps?
Sudoku, Sudoku, and Sudoku. I like the mental challenge.

How much time do you spend on social media?
My only social media presence is LinkedIn. I spend, maybe, three to four hours on it per month.

What is always in your fridge?
Yogurt butter: a special type of butter I got to know here in Switzerland. Can’t live without it.

What is one thing you had to learn the hard way?
Trusting my instincts and my abilities. I left my parental home at a very young age (16 years) to go to Germany to finish high school and start university. The first years were tough, and I learned that I could stand on my own two feet if I listen to myself. 

How did you come up with the name for your startup?
Actually, my wife came up with the name—she is great at that. Once she understood the technical details behind our approach, she suggested the name HIVE, as an abbreviation for High Impact VEcter signaling. That name is trademarked by Philips. She asked me what the Farsi word for Hive was, and I said Kandou. She felt that this was a great name, but since I had a different association with the word Kandou, I didn’t at first. Until I saw it through her eyes. Great name indeed.

Where and when are you most productive?
I am definitely a morning person and have my peak performance between 8 a.m. and noon. This makes jet lag hell when I travel west, but I have almost no issues going east (unlike many other people).

What do you do while commuting?
I listen to music. (My commute is only 10 minutes long.)

What is always on your desk?
Some type of computing device connected to the internet.




*The photo was taken where the so-called “staircase shootout” or “Union Station scene” of the movie The Untouchables was filmed. The iconic scene is an homage to the Odessa steps scene of the classic silent movie Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein.