Friend and cofounders of Solar Impulse

“I worked a lot with other people before but never people who were as brilliant as André. Which means that I was always leading before and with André I had to always be better. And each time I was good in something, he became good also, so I had to push myself to be better. André also. So at the end it’s a stimulation where both of us are winning. The goal is not to be better than the other and make a competition; the goal is to be better than what we were before.”

Bertrand Piccard

“I think the great moment in the end is when the other one also achieves his goal, because that’s when you feel that the partnership is extremely strong and flourishing. And it’s at its best, in fact, in terms of quality… ah so that’s part of the values that we have – to make sure that we move forward together, that not one is left behind in some situation. It happens for a while, but I think we both try to correct it then. We want to come together to a destination, I think that’s clear, despite the risk, despite the difficulty, the goal is to get to the end of this project together.”

André Borschberg

“You see, when you… when you create a friendship, a couple, a partnership, a human relation[ship], what directly happens between two people is not so important, because very often it creates more problems than anything else. What is important is to understand what brought each person to be what he is. So what we think is almost useless. Why we think it is extremely useful. So if André tells me something that is really against everything I want to do or to believe, and I tell him I don’t agree, it’s finished. If I ask him, what do you have in your experience of life that explains that you think like this today, and he asks me the same question, then suddenly we start to speak about why we are what we are.”

Bertrand Piccard