Those Who Have Both Have Everything‪.‬

Las Vegas, 1986. A windowless basement room beneath a casino.

1412 surveillance cameras. Four hundred VHS machines. Twelve men working in four shifts. And still: when something happens, no one finds the right footage in time. A young Swiss engineer stands in this room and thinks a single sentence: There has to be a more elegant way.

That night, he sketches on a paper napkin the idea that will change his life.

Paul Müller is not a born entrepreneur. He is a boy from Bern who, at seven, takes apart his parents’ tube radio—and puts it back together again. Who, against his family’s wishes, does not become a doctor but an electrical installer. Who finishes his apprenticeship a year early and becomes a construction manager as a teenager, because he understands: authority doesn’t come from age, but from taking action.

Beat W. Meier tells the true story of a man who acts out of curiosity, not calculation. From a workshop in Bern to the brutal training with the mountain grenadiers in Ticino, all the way to MIT in Boston, where Müller earns his doctorate alongside his job. From a carpenter who teaches him radio technology to a nuclear power plant engineer who gives him the defining sentence: Anything that isn’t documented does not exist.

What follows is not a textbook hero story. It is the unvarnished chronicle of a company being founded as it really happens: nine employees who go months without pay. A first contract made at a highway rest stop. A wooden box holding the family’s last savings as startup capital. And then: September 11, 2001—Mohamed Atta, filmed by a camera based on Müller’s technology. In the end: an exit worth over 23 million Swiss francs.

This book is both an adventure novel and a practical handbook:

38 chapters—from the first soldering iron to the million-dollar exit
38 key lessons that distill an entire entrepreneurial life
A concrete eight-step path from vision to company
Lessons on leadership, innovation, contribution margin, and perseverance

Three key takeaways from the book:
“Me too” is a no-go. Create what does not yet exist.
Don’t sell hours. Sell a product that works while you sleep.
Innovation is not a project. It is a state.

For anyone who senses there is an idea within them that is bigger than their current job. Who wants to know how to build a company out of curiosity without losing themselves in the process. And who wants to understand why the common thread of a fulfilled life is not made of success alone—but of the connection between craftsmanship and vision.