Why I left a Swiss multinational company for Leapfrog - Part 1

Written by: Matteo Raviglione, Vice President, Customer Engagements

It was a Saturday evening, near the end of September 2024. After a pretty uneventful flydubai flight, and after having been lucky enough to get a second platter of food, the captain told us that he got clearance to land in Kathmandu Airport at a little past 6pm local time. 

The sky was dark already. The plane just avoided the usual hill to its right on the landing path of the Boeing 737 and the lights of the Valley started to be visible from my window seat, on the left of the plane. While I was enjoying the view of Kirtipur and Lalitpur, I was also thinking about how to prioritize my limited time in Kathmandu. I would have two weeks here to be exact—weekends included.

My calendar showed a list of 20+ to-do items that I already tried to prioritize by putting them on different days at different hours all across the first week. Some items were from late 2023, waiting to be addressed—others from last week. Some were pretty straightforward, such as reviewing the list of accounts assigned to my AM team. Others were more complex, such as finding a way to present my "Brown Papers" process mapping expertise to the right audience.

One item was to find some time for my TikTok fanbase. I have a “Dhanga Maru Guy” reputation to keep and nurture, after all!

More on that at the very end because, sorry, this is a professional blog post!

As the plane went down more and more into the clouds of Kathmandu (not to say smog), I also wondered: why?

Why was I doing all of this while I could be sitting comfortably at a good Swiss job like I had been before?

When I first contacted Himal Karmacharya, President of Leapfrog, with a cold email back in July 2017, I had no idea where this was going to go.

I had my first experience in Management Consulting in Geneva, just out of university. Those two years were rough. Very rough. I had been good at university—at learning, anticipating what topics would be part of the final exams, understanding how grades were given, and even at how I could leverage pencil notes written on my exam copies to try and get a better grade from the doctoral students correcting the exam.

But it was actually that I had just gotten good at doing things that had a correction. I likely got too good at that and forgot that other things, like a job in the so called “industry,” would work with different paradigms.

Before my first real job, I had done a few jobs already—though they were mainly small things that almost all ended up being research-heavy. Doing research was something that I got involuntarily trained to do because of all the assignments at school. Even the work in group assignments ended up being about research with a simple report to be done at the end.

The leadership aspect of it was never really leadership because, most times, the bulk of the work ended up being done by just a fraction of the team, including myself. I always wanted to lead for the sake of control and to make sure I would end up having good grades.

And even more than all of that, nothing really involved the sales aspect of things, nor the fact that things need to sometimes be quick and dirty, for the sake of delivery, and can be improved later. I knew that in theory, but hadn’t really done it myself. And while yes, I needed to “sell” my work to the people correcting it, I never went much beyond that. There was a whole new world that I needed to uncover.

So, you can imagine how difficult it was for me to transition into the productivity-based world. Research didn’t matter much anymore. Taking notes and keeping track of the work done was rarely necessary beyond the current week’s worklogs. Sure, I knew how to manage a to-do list and how to listen and understand highly complex topics. But while I did those, the amount of actual work to be done just kept piling up. While I was documenting it like nobody did, nothing really got done from my end.

I also always tried very hard to reinvent the wheel because that was what I learned was a way to impress people. I wanted to solve all the client’s problems single-handedly—even in their far-future, even before doing what they actually wanted me to do (and what they paid for) in the near-future. You can imagine how the seniors in my project struggled to manage me.

The first few projects (many projects, to be honest) were hard for me. This was even more so because the industry I was in commonly sold people to clients above their skillsets in order to make money from day one. So, I couldn’t even play the “I’m still learning” card with clients. Far from it.

Fast-forward two years and I had probably my first positive experience in what must have been my seventh or eighth project. This came after lots of learning about corporate organization, client dynamics, templates and contracts. After I burned too many jokers in that company, learning at a tremendous speed but compromising my ability to keep growing in it, I found myself looking for my next step.

So, I had to look elsewhere. I needed a bowl of fresh air. And maybe even a completely different work culture. Why not even a completely different life culture, with a different vision of everything, not just work?

The choice ended up being either Latin America (Colombia) or Buddhist Asia (Bhutan or Nepal).

Long story short, it ended up being Nepal!

They are, indeed, very different life and work cultures. While I didn’t get that much of a bowl of fresh air, nor that much of the Buddhist culture in Kathmandu—apart from a brain-cleaning ten-day Buddhist retreat (no technology allowed, among other rules) with three days of full-silence at the end—luckily, in hindsight (or must I say hindu-sight, to make a dad joke), that didn’t matter.

Stay tuned for part two of why I left a Swiss multinational company for Leapfrog.

What are your thoughts on this piece? Let us know in the comments, or reach out to Matteo Raviglione via LinkedIn.