A word from the founder
The drive behind Skile took shape back in 2012. My good friend Carl Jansson and I had released an iPad music making app, uPhase+. During that period, we dedicated quite a few evenings to recording crazy jams meant to showcase what the app was capable of. These were generally followed by hours of enthusiastic late-night discussions full of Big Ideas. The next day, all our Big Ideas had either entirely deflated, or ballooned way beyond plausible feasibility. Until one evening, for Reasons, we started drawing maps of our lives on large A3 sheets of paper. That's when my work on a personal knowledge graph app began.
Over the following 10 years, I returned to the project periodically, iterating through prototypes in my spare time. The 4th prototype was completed in December 2022, at which point I began hunting for a team of co-founders. 6 months later, Skile Ltd. was incorporated in Lausanne, Switzerland.
I met Gaël in 2013 in Lausanne. At the time, we both worked for the same web and mobile app dev shop, Bread and Butter. My work there mainly consisted in developing interactive concepts for music apps.
Today, Gaël is Skile’s graphic and interaction designer. His curiosity for productivity apps is invaluable - he practically knows all of them. He challenges our assumptions, pushes us to further refine our project, and designs inventive and precise UI.
From 2015 to 2022, I co-led DigiDNA, the indie developer behind leading iPhone manager app iMazing. In 2018, Ina applied to a Digital Marketing Specialist position. During our Zoom intro, she
expressed a strong drive to be in charge. We hired her immediately.
At Skile, Ina is responsible for market research, project management and marketing. Ina is versatile, highly motivated and abhors snakes - a perfect fit for our startup!
Summer 2019. Dave needs a ride to a common friend’s birthday bash. My wife and I pick him up on the way, just as an intense rainstorm is breaking. During our epically wet drive to the mountains, we bond over an uncanny overlap of common traits: we both are pianist-developers with a soft spot for Vietnamese Phò.
Dave is a beast of a developer. The harder the problem, the more eager he is to solve it. He’s built entire platforms largely by himself. He travels alone to functional programming conferences abroad. He also has a very personal and unapologetic sense of humor. I’m grateful he accepted the Skile challenge.
I’ve known my brother quite literally since he was a toddler. He’s now a partner at VI Partners, a Swiss venture capital fund that notably invests in med tech and SaaS firms.
Gaetano doesn’t just help us with the more corporate side of things – we also frequently discuss our app’s tech, features and positioning, as well as more general strategic considerations. Skile is our first project together.
It is a privilege to have such a competent team as co-founders. Our first app is ambitious, but grounded. Its implementation is challenging, yet achievable given our motivation and shared talent pool. Together, we’re doing this!