Andreas Widmer was a Swiss Guard for Pope John Paul II before moving to the U.S. and working in tech startups. He was part of a $600M company sale that left him with nothing, then spent years figuring out how to run a business according to Catholic principles, eventually helping build a business school at Catholic University.
Questions this video answers
Pope John Paul II.
FTP Software — ported TCP/IP (the Internet Protocol) to the PC.
Circa 1989–1990 (he references "89, 90").
Dragon Systems.
The Pope and the CEO.
Chapters
I, I'm from Switzerland. Sort of struggled to figure out what to do with my life or, you know, find my center. Eventually went to the military, found out that I could become a bodyguard and go into the special. In these kind of special forces. Then joined that and found out I ended up being a bodyguard for the Pope in the Swiss Guards. And kind of that led. At first I wanted to leave again, but you couldn't. And then I actually did meet. I. I protected John Paul ii. And I did meet him. While I met, you know, if you. It's like the Secret Service, you're with the person 24 7. So that had a huge change in my life. A pivotal inflection point in my life was to meet him, and him, in a sense, ministering to me like he evangelized me, quite frankly. And I, I found my faith in Jesus Christ through John Paul II by him introducing me and teaching me to pray and so on. And then I also, I sort of had big questions in my life during those very pivotal years. Met my wife in Rome, who was American or is American, and that I didn't speak a word of English. I was 23. I didn't speak a word of English. And I'm like, well, I do the thing that you ought to do. And I actually introduced her to John Paul ii and he thought she was a great young lady. And so I left the garden, I moved to. I pursued her to America and started. The only way in was to study. But a school gave me a break so I could start studying without even speaking English. But they just let me in and gave me a semester. I learned English. Then I went to Boston, Massachusetts, and I started to, aside from going to school, get involved with software startups. We're talking about 89, 90. And my first company that I was privileged to be in was called FTP Software. And we ported TCP ip, the Internet Protocol, to the PC. It was, I mean, amazing. Success is an understatement. Like, we brought the Internet to the PC. And before that, I've never, I had never used an Internet, a computer, never mind the Internet. And we brought them public and I sort of lost. Yeah, I kind of lost the joy of it. And met another couple in Boston, Jim and Janet Baker, and they invented speech recognition. So then I was part of Dragon Systems, and again, a rocket ship going through. We ended up selling the company in 2012, I think it was 2000. Had mixed experience with that because the company we sold it to was fraudulent. And so we saw you sell a company for $600 million and you find out that the company's fraudulent, and you get back exactly zero. That's a big hit in terms of you're questioning the free market economy, all that kind of stuff. That gave me a point to go back and sort of say, okay, what am I not understanding? Is the economy, Is capitalism, Is this evil or not? And I went back to two sources. On the one hand, I went back to John Paul ii, and on the other hand, I decided to run a. I didn't want to go to MBA anymore, but I. I ended up running one of Harvard Business School, has a consulting firm called Monitor Group or called Monitor Group. And I ran one of their subsidiaries. I actually spun it out. And I felt like if I'm running this company and with, you know, it's. That's what. That was my mba. If you. I wanted to go and find out, am I misunderstanding something here? Like, am I playing the wrong game? And on the spiritual side, I want a moral side. I wanted to find out from my church, from Christianity, from Catholicism, is this intrinsically evil? Right. I brought the two. So I did both of this. I got a master's degree in ministry, and I did this MBA by running this company called on the Frontier OTF Group. And the. The whole thing came back together in a book that I wrote called the Pope and the CEO with my answers in it that led to the Pope's University here in D.C. in the Pope has a university in every country, pretty much every country in the world. And the Pope's university saying, hey, this is very interesting. We'd love to build a business school around that idea, or, you know, me along other people. And I actually moved to D.C. to help build this business school at the Catholic University of America. And that's what I've been doing for the last 10 years. And I followed that up with. With the Art of Principled Entrepreneurship, which is what I'm teaching. You know, sort of the development. And the reason why I'm sitting in this seat is also because when I came out with this book, there were two other people who, who came out with books at the same time. And one of these books I read, and it was exactly saying what I'm saying, but from another person's perspective. And that other person was Randy Heim. And so I always felt this kinship with Randy because we're saying the same thing and we found the same thing through our respective experiences in life.
