Jacqueline Amable, Serial Entrepreneur, NAT 2008
Jacqueline Amable
Campus des Nations, 2008
Serial Entrepreneur
Switzerland
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Ecolint was my first real international experience. Up until then, I had lived in a bubble. It was eye-opening and I knew from then on I wanted my work and life to reflect my global community of friends.
My family and I recently moved back to Switzerland. We live in the Canton of Vaud. I am a serial entrepreneur. In my current work, I am the CEO and co-founder of Matereal, a company on a mission to decarbonise and detoxify the plastics supply chain, starting with polyurethane in textiles. I was at Nations Campus and while I did not graduate from there as we moved back to the United States, I attended parts of high school there.
My best memory of Ecolint: Jamie Williams assigned us a very cool geography project in which we got to figure out and choose from solutions on land erosion and combine that with taxes needed to fund the work. It was the first time in my academic career that I was really ever asked to figure out a solution for a real problem and all the interdisciplinary aspects of it. I still mention it to people to this day. Most of my schooling had been in the US before then, so it was a really fun project for me. I also loved when we went to the ILO and spent a day getting to choose from different lectures and I learned about the power of biology, which in many ways applies to my work today.
Ecolint was my first real international experience. Up until then, I had lived in a bubble. It was eye-opening and I knew from then on I wanted my work and life to reflect my global community of friends.
I really love my life as it is today. I'm not sure there is anything I would do differently. Of course, I have regrets, but they're what shape me, and you learn more from failures than successes. However, I do hope one day to go to law school. This may seem like a funny thing to say when I've been a founder and investor and truly enjoy my work, but the law impacts every aspect of my work, and it has always been a passion of mine.
My words of wisdom to students: be endlessly curious. Don't let anyone tell you you are too young, or you don't have the right experience, or that a problem you see clearly doesn't exist. As the saying goes, the ones saying it can't be done, should get out of the way of the ones doing it.
My legacy: I want my children to inherit a planet where biodiversity and the modern world thrive in balanced ecosystems. I truly believe technology is a tool like any other and can create the type of world we've always dreamed of.