Hannes here, with an announcement. I'll be switching to the role of a non-executive board member at Liip (see also liip.to/hgvr). While I keep a large stake in the company, I won't be working at Liip from May onwards. So while I'll still be jointly responsible for the strategic direction of the company. My co-founders, the executive partners Nadja Perroulaz, Gerhard Andrey and Christian Stocker, the business development I worked with over the last months â Fabienne Steiner, Tonio Zemp for Corporate Clients, Matthias StĂŒrmer for Public Sector Clients and Jonas Vonlanthen for Strategic Projects Romandie â and of course the Liip teams in ZĂŒrich, Fribourg and Bern will continue to implement Liip's mission in delivering high-quality Agile Web Development services, creating sustainable value for our clients' strategic innovation projects using open source and open standards. And Liip will no doubt continue to rock and roll.
Professionally, the last couple of years have been enormously successful. I've seen this company grow from the start to soon sixty people. In the beginning there was an idea of a company that is not your ordinary web agency and not your boring software systems house either, but a web tech team that goes where other don't. And while we certainly improvised quite a bit along the way, we built it all around a core notion of sustainability, leading to an agile, human-centered, family-friendly, zero-emission company that continues not only to work for some of Switzerland most prestigious clients, but also has so much fun in the process that it continues to win awards over awards.
Personally.. it has been an amazing journey. I'm very thankful for all I learned here â the years of hard-core coding as well as from staying somewhat authentic in the sales and business development work. For the leadership experience. For everything I learned from our amazing clients, from powerful partners and from our usually much bigger competitors. And certainly from the community efforts with Webtuesday, with Netzzunft, /ch/open and many others. And I'm certainly most grateful for the experience of having been able to work with the Liipers â some of the best minds in the business, and many of them very good friends indeed. You guys are seriously awesome.
Next, I'll be traveling. And writing. I have a book contract with O'Reilly, and I might do some smaller projects here and there before .. the next big thing. If you'd like to keep in touch just drop me a line at hannes@gassert.ch or subscribe to the (currently empty) RSS feed at http://gassert.ch/feed/.
And as I know for sure that some of the next announcements here on this blog will be great fun, and that Liip's currently working one some Switzerland's most exciting web projects: stay tuned, and be assured: the work on the web has only just begun â and so has Liip :)