Getting to know you: Samuel Mueller

What do you currently do?
I am the CEO and co-founder of Scandit, the developer of the leading software-based barcode scanning and data capture platform for smartphones, tablets and wearable devices. We enable retail, manufacturing and logistics businesses to maximise operational performance and drive new revenue streams via innovative mobile commerce solutions.

What is your inspiration in the business?
I am inspired by the possibility of leveraging technology to enable a radically different way of doing business or serving a certain need. In the case of Scandit, we realised that trends such as the ongoing miniaturisation and commoditisation of consumer-grade computing hardware and the continuous improvements in smartphone battery life and consumer camera modules would allow us to emulate different kinds of dedicated identification and data capture hardware—such as handheld barcode scanners—via consumer-grade devices such as smartphones by deploying very smart algorithms on highly commoditised hardware and camera modules. This triggered the development of our first early prototypes and algorithms, and included several additional ‘aha’ moments and breakthroughs during the development of all our different algorithms. Supported by trends like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) and the consumerisation of IT, we found we can revolutionise the Auto Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) industry by providing enterprise-grade performance on commodity hardware; something nobody had done before.

Who do you admire?
Anybody who challenges the status quo and passionately works towards achieving a greater good.

Looking back are there things you would have done differently?
Absolutely. For example, we could have been more open about our ideas early on and could have validated them with potential customers even more rapidly.

What defines your way of doing business?
At Scandit, we focus on three key goals:
(1) To maximise the value our customers get from our technology solutions
(2) To hire the best and most innovative people
(3) To maintain our agile and fun startup spirit

What advice would you give to someone just starting out?
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and fail. Instead, build prototypes, validate these early, and leverage the market feedback to keep improving over time. Go out, play and have fun.