The Pioneer of the Cloud

What does it take to ask one question — *how do you free software from hardware?* — and end up reshaping the entire computing industry? In this episode of Decoded, Dr. Jurgi Camblong speaks with Edouard Bugnion, co-founder of VMware and Vice President for Innovation and Impact at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. VMware didn't just build a product. It built the foundation on which the modern cloud was built — and was acquired by Broadcom in 2023 for $69 billion. From a childhood in Neuchâtel to a PhD at Stanford, from research lab to billion-dollar company, and back to Switzerland as a professor and public advisor, Edouard has spent his career at the precise intersection of deep science and real-world impact. You'll hear how a single idea about separating software from hardware gave birth to an industry, what the dot-com crash taught him about building through uncertainty, the three factors he believes determine whether a company succeeds or fails, why the energy cost of AI is a problem that can't be wished away, and what it actually means to be responsible when innovation moves faster than society can keep up. This episode is about what happens when a scientist becomes a builder, and why the most important question in technology right now may not be *what can AI do* — but *what should it do.*