Ep 98 | Discipline Is a Transferable Skill (w/ Camilla Mazzoleni)

Camilla Mazzoleni is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of FORGIS, a Zurich-based startup building an AI operating layer for industrial automation:

In this episode, Camilla shares a founder journey shaped long before robotics.

She grew up as a competitive alpine skier, leaving home early to train at elite level. Discipline, pressure, and repetition defined her daily life. Losing was normal. Learning how to reset and keep going became second nature.

After an injury ended her professional sports career, that same intensity moved into engineering. Camilla talks about discovering robotics through building, not theory. Working on factory floors, programming robots across vendors, and seeing firsthand how slow and fragmented industrial automation really is.

We talk about how Forgis came to life at ETH Zurich. Why hardware is not the bottleneck in factories. Why software fragmentation is. And how Forgis sits on top of existing systems as a hardware-agnostic, edge-based AI layer that upgrades how factories operate instead of tearing them apart.

A great conversation about discipline, switching paths, and why Europe’s manufacturing future depends on intelligence, not replacement.