My mother worked for EVVA in the 1970s, so I knew the company before I started here myself. Once I drove my mother to a company trip because she had missed the EVVA bus, and when we got there, the CEO Nikolaus Bujas immediately gave me a warm welcome and invited me to stay. I got to know the company's family values, which are still strong today, even before I joined EVVA. In 1978 I then started at EVVA – my plan was to only work at the company for a few months and pass my A-levels because I was very keen to study computer science. Well, those few months have now turned into 40 years! *Laughs* Although I wasn’t able to study on the side, EVVA gave me the unique opportunity to actively shape the computer era from the very beginning. EVVA has always been a leader in innovation as the Erfindungs-, Versuchs- und Verwertungs-Anstalt (Invention, Experimentation and Application Institute) and was the first company in the industry to use a computer to calculate access control system authorisations at the end of the 1970s. Before that, calculating manually was very tedious. The fact that I was amongst the first people in the world to have helped develop these programs and electronic calculations makes me very proud to this day.