We’re passionate about data and technology, and we are strong advocates for open-source principles. Throughout our career, we’ve developed a high sense of scientific integrity and rigor in dealing with data and product development. These values infuse all the work we do.
We have worked extensively with the pharmaceutical industry, the non-profit sector, and Swiss financial services and have a foot in the sustainable development field. Our founders have international experience and have occupied senior executive positions leading data and technology portfolios.
Rooted in the name of your company is the idea that any product idea must start with the question Why?. A product can be a customer facing technology or simply an internal tool. The question is the same: Why is such a product needed? What is the problem you are trying to solve and for whom? Making sure that the problem is well defined and understood is the first step in any product development process. It will eventually guide the definition of meaningful technical requirements needed for a fast and efficient development pipeline. Great ideas start with the question Why?. That’s how The Y Company was born.
Pierre Saouter
Chief Executive Officer
Pierre is a senior professional in the field of data science. He holds a PhD in Physics from the University of Geneva and has worked during his academic career with institutions such as CERN and NASA. He obtained an Executive Master in Global Leadership from the World Economic Forum.
For the past 13 years, he has worked as a full-stack data scientist and data and technology manager, building end-to-end data pipelines, models, and visualizations for basic research, the non-profit sector, or the banking industry. Before joining The Y Company, Pierre led the data and technology mandate for a young Swiss-based startup in the fintech industry.
Pierre loves to dig deep into the code and analyze data. He is a fan of the R scripting language which he has used to build from scratch small-scale business intelligence platforms and automate various operational processes (data ingestion, emailing, presentation production, etc.). He is also passionate about leadership, management, and helping organizations leverage technology and data-driven operations.
John Coene
Chief Technology Officer
John is a senior developer and data analytics professional. He is an expert in the R scripting language and has developed hundreds of R packages. He is also an expert in JavaScript while for demanding back-end tasks, John's goto is GoLang.
John has 9 years of working experience in the realm of data analytics, 5 in tech companies in China and 3 in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum in Geneva.
John has two shiny applications on RStudio's shiny gallery: Chirp, an application to visualise and analyse Twitter networks, and Freedom of Press a runner up to the second Shiny contest (2020).
John has given numerous talks and workshops, at WhyR 2020 using NPM and webpack with R, a workshop on building htmlwidgets at eRum 2020, as a guest on the Shiny dev series podcast discussing user experience, and many more.
John is also the author of the book JavaScript for R published by CRC Press as part of the R series.