Name:
Evelyn Haslinger
Project:
Symflower GmbH
Founding date - How long have you been working on your idea?
2018-04-19
Founding trigger: How did you get the idea?
My co-founder and I have seen the same problems in software development time and time again: It is important for manufacturers to develop high-quality software, but they often don't have the time for extensive testing, which is why errors keep slipping through.
Founding moment: How did you know that you wanted to realize your idea?
It wasn't a concrete moment, but rather a gradual process. Symflower went from being a leisure project to my main job at some point :-)
Elevator pitch of your project:
We test software without humans. In other words, we teach machines how to read and understand program code. And how to find errors in these programs, such as program crashes and security vulnerabilities. In principle, it's the same procedure as a human tester. The big difference, however, is that machines do not overlook errors.
Elevator pitch about yourself:
Evelyn Haslinger is co-founder and COO of the software testing start-up Symflower. Her company uses mathematical models and artificial intelligence to fully automate the entire software quality assurance process. Before founding Symflower, she worked as a Senior Developer and Scrum Master at Sophos in the field of encryption. After completing her MSc in Computer Science, she worked as a researcher in the field of software product lines at Johannes Kepler University.
How many of you are in the founding team and how did you come together?
I founded the company together with Markus Zimmermann. We got to know each other in our first lecture at university. But the company wasn't founded until 8 years later.
University:
Johannes Kepler Universität Linz
How did your university support you when it came to founding and entrepreneurship?
A number of startup events were held to provide information on the topic of startups.
Do's: What would you recommend to any founder, or what would you do again?
In any case, set up as a team and not alone.
Don`ts: What would you do differently? What was your biggest learning?
Don't rush into hiring your first full-time employee. It is difficult to find people at the beginning. Even if the search takes a long time, only hire people who convince you 100%.
How to start? - What would you recommend to anyone interested in starting a business?
Visiting an incubator. We went to tech2be and that helped enormously, especially at the very beginning.
