EP #424 - Marcel Salathé: Universities Are the Key to Switzerland’s Success

Timestamps:

6:59 - Being humbled by Y Combinator

12:20 - EPFL’s extension school

15:47 - What needs fixing in Switzerland

29:25 - Budget cuts for Swiss universities

39:40 - EPFL AI center

This episode was sponsored by NordPass. Use code “swisspreneur” at checkout to get 30% off Business and Teams plans.

About Marcel Salathé:

Marcel Salathé is a professor at EPFL, startup founder and investor, as well as a digital epidemiologist. He holds a PhD in Biology and Environmental Sciences from ETH, and has taught at Stanford and Penn State. He is the founder of the EPFL Extension School and AIcrowd, an AI challenge platform at EPFL.

When founding the EPFL Extension School, Marcel’s goal was to fulfill EPFL’s mandate of not only educating its students but the Swiss population at large — he believes the current educational system, which restricts education to childhood and adolescence, is outdated, and that Swiss people need to be learning continuously, especially considering the rapid acceleration of technological development. Self-learning has played a big role in Marcel’s career, who originally studied Biology but has since branched out to machine learning and generative AI.

During his chat with Silvan, he further argues that although Switzerland has done a great job in connecting innovation centers (such as universities) with the private sector, it’s done terribly at channeling this innovation towards the public sector as well, which is why this sphere seems to be 20 years behind the curve. Marcel thinks there must be a structural push towards this, just as there was a concerted political effort before to connect universities with the private sector. He is strongly against the recent budget cuts for education and innovation, because he considers this to be the “magic sauce” of Switzerland’s prosperity.