Just acquired Blinkist Founder on life-changing books, mistakes & finding your ikigai - Holger Seim

0:04If I look back, there were earlier hints that I love to do business, but that was probably the moment when I realized I want to become an entrepreneur. I want to organize things. That's for me, you know, as an entrepreneur, you just make things out of nothing. You organize, you orchestrate and eventually create an event, a product, a service, whatever it is.

0:28Holger Sein is the co-founder and former CEO of Blinkist. If you're not familiar with Blinkist, they're a subscription service that summarizes non-fiction books in 15-minute explainers. The company was founded as a solution to that age-old problem. So much to do, so little time. Holger and his fellow co-founders Tobias Balling, Nicholas Janssen and Sebastian Klein wanted to find a way to read more books in less time while together in college in 2012. Inspired by the note-taking methods they were using in their studies, they created an app that essentially made these notes available to all. Blinkist went public the following year, and since then, the app has been downloaded 26 million times.

1:12They were acquired by GoOne in May 2023, with Holger staying on as Chief Operating Officer. We don't know how much they were bought for, but GoOne CEO Andrew Barnes has implied it was significantly bigger than the company's previous$160 million valuation. So, how did they do it? It's a classic tale of good business practices being put to use wherever possible. His calm, modest and thoughtful nature made him instantly likable and clearly played a huge part in the company's journey. You can tell he's taken a lot from the right influences he's read from. There's a lot to learn here. And what lit the fire that drove Holger to succeed?

1:51Well, it starts all the way back in childhood. I grew up in a small village in the middle of Germany with 500 inhabitants. When we onboard new employees and I talk to them, I always make it a little challenge who grew up in a village, in a smaller village than I did and haven't found many in team Blinkist that can beat that. Grew up in a small village with 500 habitants. My mother is a teacher. My dad studied physics and worked in an IT company. I'm the third out of four siblings. So I have an older sister, an older brother and a younger brother. Grew up in an old farmhouse. My grandparents, So the parents of my dad were living there with us when I was really young.

2:34We still had a lot of animals, pigs and chicken and rabbits. Pretty good childhood. I was able to play on the streets without having to worry to be hit by a car. Now that I have two kids myself, I'm wondering whether I want to continue to live in the city or want to move a little bit to the suburbs to give them something similar while they're young. So my closest friends are the friends that I met in kindergarten, elementary school. So one of the big advantages for me growing up in that village was that life was pretty stable. I didn't, you know, we didn't move places. No one moved places. It was a small, boring village that certainly came with some disadvantages.

3:17But the big advantage is that I really was able to grow roots, to grow very deep friendships early on that I can still rely on. We still have like I have a group of five very close friends we meet once a year. And we've been with each other since fifth grade in school, basically. I like that part of my childhood a lot. Any parts of your childhood you didn't enjoy so much? When I grew up, I had a weird thing on my ear. My right ear wasn't really didn't look like an ear. It wasn't wasn't fully developed. That can happen spontaneously while you're while the little baby grows. that's probably the the one thing that made my childhood little tough because kids are cruel they don't uh you know they go where it hurts um find your weakest spot basically so i had some some challenges being called names people called that out whenever i got into a new group i felt insecure i wanted that kind of created some insecurities for me and made a little harder for me to feel at ease and feel safe in new groups um still have to i mean we all have things that still haunt us in life.

4:22So I think there are a lot of my personality or some traits of my personality probably go back to that. To a certain extent, having this condition and having this inner child in me that got bullied because of that probably is also one reason of my drive to show to others what I can accomplish. So I have a really strong drive to be successful, to do great things. That drive helped me in my journey to become an entrepreneur and entrepreneur and keep pushing and keep going when things are tough. And look, who knows, maybe if I hadn't grown up with that condition or had grown up in a big city, I would want my kids now to also grow up in a big city.

5:01So it's, yeah, but it's wherever it came from, it's, I really think whatever I experienced shaped me to who I am today and I'm happy with who I am today. And it's all right. I've certainly made peace with that part of my history and I'm not that, I don't feel hurt by it or think like I still have to prove the world something or I was very close with my, in terms of age difference, my older brother is just one year older than I am. And so we had a really love-hate relationship when we were younger. We were really competitive because we were so close. So my mom used to tell a story and I still remember that story.

5:39We were doing a swim class together and then there was, you know, in Germany, you have to, you can get certain medals that proves how good you can swim. So we're going for that gold medal for kids in Germany. And I think you need to prove that you can swim 600 meters, something like that. And my brother and I were doing it at the same time. And then the guy who was taking the time and the closer we got to the last stretch, the faster we would get because we both wanted to win. And the guy who was taking the time, was just shaking his head he had never seen something like that that kids get faster um the longer it goes certainly being um so close in age to my brother maybe um gave me some sort of the competitive edge that is certainly helpful in all this competitiveness is wanting to to be better than the rest or this ambition to to to be uh better and and achieve something something great maybe that's also something that that helped as i said my my mom was a teacher my dad studied physics so they didn't i didn't have an entrepreneur in my family and no one who really showed me what i'm capable of and that i that all that i'm passionate and capable of being an entrepreneur and doing things um but that came in school i was lucky enough to have a teacher and in certain certain situations in school that helped me to really find that skill and realize where where my ikigai is if you will and there was this one moment in 12th grade and in my school um every year students from the 12th grade organize a prom like an event where grade 11 12 13 come together with teachers some parents and have a good good night with some entertainment and when it was our turn I showed up to organize it or to take the lead on it because I love to organize things and thought that's that's a cool project you know did my thing previous years there was always a pretty a similar recipe to doing these things and people would just do it again and again and my group so I with my leadership and with a lot of people were involved in that, we thought, let's do something different.

7:41Let's do something new. Let's do something that we like, an event that is entertaining. So we just put it together and it felt like we're just doing our thing. We're having fun. We got some inspiration from back then. MTV Music Awards were a big thing in Germany, so we took some inspiration from that event. We took some others and created a nice event with some videos where we did stunts. Back then, Jackass was a big thing it's a long time ago i don't know whether whether it was also big in the uk so we did some jackass videos um do you still do you still have them i feel like you need to send them to us so when we're cutting together some edits i can i i can i can dig them out um they are certainly uh they're certainly uh well conserved so we put this together and it felt like like nothing's right it felt just like you know we're having fun we're organizing something um on the night of the event teachers started to come to me and say this is this is so special we haven't seen such a thing in the past 20 years that we've been at this school and you know that night it felt like yeah of course you're saying this every year you you want to make students happy but since then every year you know we had set the new standard of how these proms were organized since then everything changed and teachers lay you know sometimes when i got back to school teachers told me what you did back then it's set a complete new standard and it was so so unseen of that that people from 12th grade can do can put something like that together so i felt always like it wasn't something special i mean um um don't don't make such a big fuss out of it but it's the amount of feedback i got really helped me understand because i'm i'm a humble person i'm not a like my parents didn't raise us or you know they didn't give us a lot of recognition saying are you doing this great and that great so i i don't believe that i'm great at anything i'm rather um a little imposter imposter if you will but this feedback really showed me well if if everyone says says it maybe onto something here that may be a skill that i'm that i'm really good at i also knew i'm really passionate about it i had so much fun doing this and i took so much pride in putting that together i didn't know what ikigai is back then but when i read about it later i thought this is maybe the moment where i where i um found my ikigai where i found what i'm good at and what i'm passionate about and what the world needs basically what i what i can also put to to work and this is if i look back there were earlier hints that i uh that i you know love to do business but that was probably the moment um when i realized i want to become an entrepreneur i want to organize things that's for me the you know as an entrepreneur you just make things out of nothing you organize you orchestrate and eventually create an event a product a service um whatever it is two things really matter when of doing entrepreneurship.

10:21Number one, the category, because you're going to have to become a sector expert to some extent. So you better enjoy learning about it because it's basically going to become your reality. You're going to become super knowledgeable by osmosis. And if you don't care, that's actually quite a disappointing way to spend your time. And the second is who you spend your time with. So picking a good team and actually enjoying who you work with. These two things are essentially going to shape your entire reality of entrepreneurship. I was working with people that I quite liked, but it was in a category I didn't like.

10:49And I went to a talk and this guy got up there and he started talking about Ikigai and this chart went on the screen and it just said, you know, it was the classic Venn diagrammy thing of Ikigai, do what you love, that makes an impact to other people, that you're really good at and all of these things. And I was just like, oh my God, I can't tick any of those things. Not like I could tick two of them so I'm close to my purpose I was like not even one of them wow that's actually really powerful and I committed there and then seeing this diagram for the first time I committed to find a way out of that job out of that business that I was the founder of which as you know isn't just like quitting a job it's super complicated um and that whenever I would focus on the next business whatever it might be I put that in front of me and make sure that I was working towards it It's amazing how a simple idea can genuinely change your life.

11:42Absolutely. Yeah. Early on in my Blinkist career, I was reading Growth Mindset from Carol Dweck and a book I absolutely love. And only when I read it did I realize that I was raised with a fixed mindset. Early on, you know, early days as a leader, I would judge people with a fixed mindset. Like I would make my mind up about someone, are you not good at this or you're good at that? And then I had my picture of people and eventually reading this book and realizing, well, I got it all wrong. My mom got it all wrong. And I need to change. That was a really, really big impact for me personally to, you know, to be a little easier on me and give me more time and to learn new things.

12:24And also, but also for others, for my colleagues, for the people that worked at Blinkist. And another book I absolutely love is Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. oh it's so good so good please uh summarize it for us in under three minutes holger yeah blinker style it basically i mean it it shows uh um what makes a team an either high performing or dysfunctional team it all starts with trust you need the the core basically if you don't have high trust in a team you can you can have a group of exceptional individuals if they don't trust each other they will never become a high performing team and then it builds on top based on trust you need to be able to have courageous conversations uh to lean into conflict instead of having artificial harmony you to hold each other accountable you need to speak with one voice etc etc and um it shifted my focus from judging individuals on their capability and hiring individuals and trying to manage them to do their job to looking at the team um because i So back then when I got introduced to this topic, we had some issues in the founder team where we realized we were not very clear on where we want to take the business, how we want to work, what are our ways of working, what values do we want to uphold, etc, etc.

13:42And we're always fighting about tactical stuff, but we are not getting to the root of things because we're just fighting about stupid stuff. That book helped me to understand the root. It starts with trust. It starts with alignment on values. How does the team work? How does my leadership team work? Do we have a functional team? If not, what's missing? I'm a really vulnerable leader. Sometimes maybe even too much, but I try to lead by example to set the tone and getting naked early on in a metaphorical sense to make it easier for people to also share their challenges so we have trust and then can help each other and become really team one.

14:20Yeah, it's a constant journey. five dysfunctions of the team might be the perfect example book to unpack and find out a is that a blinkist and b the reason five dysfunctions of a team is actually such a good book because it's a fiction which is super unusual for a business book there's something about being carried by the narrative that the message really lands and i find with blinkist when i'm trying to learn the stuff that works so well for me is where there's there's lessons to be learned like like pure lessons I really didn't you know could this have been a blog post is the perfect example of most most books and it's like I don't know it's too long for a blog post perfect for a blinkist and I feel like endless business books fall into that area five dysfunctions of a team love to just side debate this with you for a moment better as a whole book or better as a blinkist and do you kind of know what I'm talking about when I say you kind of lose the narrative by miss by going straight to the lessons.

15:16I absolutely know what you're talking about with five dysfunctions in particular, because it has this fictional approach, but also in general. And I would say, in general, it's always better to read the full book than to just read the blinks. Like there's, I mean, obviously, there are better books and worse books. And maybe you could argue some books are so bad that it's actually better to just read the blinks and not the full book. But in general, if you really want to dig deep into a topic, we need to hear a lot of anecdotes, hear different perspectives, we need to have some repetition business books have a certain length to make them books so there are certain economic you know commercial reasons by the publishers but then also there's also a minimum number of pages you know maybe a business book doesn't need to have 300 pages but it certainly also just 10 pages would be too little in general if you want to dig deep into a topic it's always good to read or listen to the full book our intention with Blinkist has never been and still isn't to replace the full book.

16:15The problem with books is there are so many, you don't know where to start and ultimately you want to create a habit and then you don't. When you have maybe 15 minutes to kill, you don't pick up a book. You turn to your smartphone. In the best case, you listen to a podcast. In the worst case, you scroll on social media or check your inbox for the 15th time. Just see that nothing new is there. And we created Blinkist to help you fill these times with something more meaningful, let you dip your toes into a topic. And I think there's a reason why we have healthy snacks. And there's a reason why we have three course dinners.

16:45I like to think of Blinkist as the healthy snack for in between. It gives you an idea. It nudges you with something interesting. And that's what we hear from a lot of our users. That they, thanks to us, they have discovered a new title. They have discovered a topic. And then dig deeper into it by reading the full book. And so we have been the entry point, the gateway track to learning, if you will. And then it's not an either or. it's a both end that's how i use blinkist that's how most customers use blinkist and by now also publishers and authors have realized it it's been a long a long journey to to turn that industry around and make them turn them from thinking that this is cannibalizing book sales and something bad towards this is great this gives me a better audience to people who are who otherwise i would not reach interesting do you know what percentage of your audience are using it as entry point and I think I'm asking that question because I've never used Blinkist as an entry point to a book ever.

17:44I've only ever used it and I use it all the time for this reason as the, oh, you know what? I don't even remember like the key lesson. I've read so many business books. I'm like, I read about a book a week. Listen to, it's worth saying. Listen to a book a week. That's where I find Blinkist so useful because I think the old model is I was like, oh, actually Ray Dalio principles what what i mean i feel like that was such an impactful book for me and yet kind of embarrassed to say i don't even remember a single principle in there so was it good i'm like i actually blink is perfect because the information's in there it just needs like rejigging so how many of your like what kind of proportion roughly of your audience do you reckon use blink is like me versus for discovery yeah so we know in general that round about two-thirds of our audience are avid book readers.

18:32So they use us either as an entry point to discover what they want to read next or as a recap as you described. I don't know how that splits. Most people use it for both. So they use it both before and after. And then one third of the audience roughly does engage with books. They learn through YouTube, through podcasts, through blinks. They have other different information diet. Occasionally pick up a book when they discover something with blinkers, but in general say they get their information from other sources. So was Blinkist your first business idea? It was the first real business. I did during studies with two of my three co-founders, we started a student consultancy.

19:12So we were in university, we met each other, we realized we love being entrepreneurs. And then we jumped at the first thing that came to our mind, which was let's start a student consultancy to sell projects to companies, to put our skills to use, earn some money. and we realized, so we had the idea, we thought of a name, we gave it a, you know, made a small business plan and then we presented it to other students. So we just went into lectures, said, hey, can we have five minutes we want to present the thing? And all of a sudden had a not-for-profit organization of almost 100 students that wanted to work with us on that and that it still exists.

19:52So, you know, attended from generation to generation. So it's still students are still using it to practice their skills to work with companies. So that was the first organization that I started. And another confirmation that somehow like I don't seem to be completely stupid when it comes to that. Because it worked. People followed and it was successful. And then Blinkist was the first commercial organization we started. It was after studies. We were still I mean I that village you know I grew up conservatively. So somehow I wasn't bold enough to say to quit my university before I graduated. So I graduated to make my parents happy, to also make me my inner, you know, to check that box.

20:33We didn't have a great idea right after graduation. So all of us started other jobs. So I was in a corporate job for one and a half years and then started Blinkist. Because then, you know, we were constantly meeting to brainstorm ideas, to think what are problems that I was solving and worth starting a company around. Eventually after one, one and a half years in the job, we had the idea for Blinkist and then jumped into the cold water. That was early 2012 when we, like the initial idea, the first time I discussed with Niklas with one of my co-founders, the idea was when he visited me in Seattle.

21:06I was working for T-Mobile US in Seattle and we talked about it and then kind of make a business plan, think deeper about it, talk to potential customers, et cetera, et cetera. but it still took until April before I quit my job. It still took me a while to really say, okay, am I quitting my job now? Am I saying no to a pretty safe, straightforward corporate career? I remember I was really afraid back then. I was not afraid to fail because I think only every 10 startup makes it. I was afraid to fail fast. I didn't want to quit my job and tell everyone I'm becoming an entrepreneur now and then after six months running out of money and being a failure.

21:45That was my biggest fear back then. As I say, the rest is history. I mean, it's been a long and windy road the last 10 years, but I'm really glad that I jumped into the cold water back then. Where did the idea come from? So it was one of the serendipitous processes. So one of my co-founders read and summarized books while we were studying. So he had a habit of sometimes sending emails with his notes to his friends for books he read. And we thought about can that become a business back then, but then didn't pursue the idea further. And then when we were brainstorming ideas in 2011, that was when smartphones were booming or starting to boom, where the first app-focused businesses or the first apps became businesses, basically.

22:30So a lot of our brainstorms were focused around, OK, there's this new device. What can we do on this device? This is a big playing field, a big canvas to paint on. So we're thinking of what can we do? And one idea we had was to build an app that helps you learn something in between. We were always, a lot of our ideas centered around learning because that was always a passion to learn. Also something we did, this whole student consultancy project was also ultimately not about earning money. It was about learning, like putting our skills to use in companies. And so yeah, we had this idea, we called it waitmate, a mate that helps you fill your waiting times with something meaningful.

23:07But eventually thought, if it's just a random thing to learn in between, you could go to Wikipedia. It's not tangible enough. It's not valuable enough. And then we thought, well, there were these book summaries back then. Sebastian, you took these notes and sent them around. And that was a mobile format. That was a format that people can read on the go on a smartphone. And then we combined these two things and said an app that, you know, a format that fits into waiting times that fits on a smartphone screen, but the book as a starting point, as a foundation because that's tangible to people. People want to read more books.

23:43People have a willingness to pay for books, etc. And when we had these two combined, we thought we have it. There's a need, there's a problem, a desire to read more, to learn more. There's a window of opportunity because consumption patterns were shifting with the rise of smartphones. there's uh for dudes who desperately want to start a company and become entrepreneurs so so let's do it interesting so did you did you basically think that the initial audience that you're targeting are other people like you and me entrepreneurs specifically is that who you had in mind yes that that's what we implicitly had in mind we were ultimately building a product for us for young professionals you know people after university starting their first jobs make a progress in their career, learn more professionally, personally, et cetera.

24:33That was the initial audience we had in mind. We weren't really, didn't have a structured process where we thought let's make a deep market study. Let's look at the different audiences and then look who's the best audience. But we're really pragmatic. We thought people like us are probably the early adopters of smartphones. They have a certain willingness to pay. They have a desire and a need to learn. Let's just start there and see where this takes us. and entrepreneurs and young professionals in general, also non-entrepreneurs, but people who are starting their careers. We're our early adopters.

25:04And I mean, we still have a lot of entrepreneurs using Blinkist, but also it's such a broad audience by now. We have people who want to get smarter about history and just, you know, want to improve their general knowledge, just learn from curiosity. We have people who are first-time parents and want to dig into parenting literature in the little time they have. Oh, I've just realized I've missed an opportunity. I read the parenting books my wife asked me to read and that would have been the perfect blinks. Absolutely. Oh my god, so many of those really don't need to be whole books. I mean, I read one on sleep training.

25:43Which one did you? yeah I this is one that I really remember whatever sleep training book that everyone recommends and I read it and it's like eight hours and you're like oh like one chapter in you're like oh okay yeah that seems like the right thing to do but I guess that there's another seven hours and 50 minutes maybe they're going to say something else eight hours later I just got into this ridiculous situation my wife is very much like I don't want to read it this was your thing like you you sorted out anyway I told her exactly what the book said and she was like there's no way I'm doing that i'm like well what i mean i definitely want the eight hours back i could have read anything else this was the most dry book ever and we're not even using it yeah that is a perfect example so blinkers journey all straight up and to the right right no no problems no mistakes everything was easy and then you sold one day and here you are of course that's it podcast done thank you for getting naked in true german style and being vulnerable with us um okay talk to me about your challenges in the early years.

26:45What kind of challenges did you face? We've made so many mistakes early on and I'm still making mistakes these days. One of the biggest, we were initially building a rocket ship. We were not focusing on what is the MVP? What is the core value that, what is our core hypothesis around the value? I think in hindsight, we could have started Blinkist as an email newsletter to create the content and then send you a Blink every day or every week for a small subscription. We would have not needed all these developers all these designers, all this long process to develop an app. And we could have still gotten to our first 1 ,000 customers to validate, do people want to pay for this content?

27:22How do we find these people, et cetera, et cetera. But we built an app. We had ideas of building a knowledge graph that connects certain insights with each other. We had all these ideas and got lost in a very complex product and launched too late. And so we started in June 2012, like officially started. It took us until January 2013 to launch our first app. And then we had already hired developers, designers, et cetera. So we had already had increased our cost base that we were quickly running out of money. So by the end of 2013, our seed money was gone and we did not have product market fit. We did not have figured out how do we do pricing?

28:06Do we do single purchases? Do we do subscription? Where do we find those people? How does marketing work, et cetera? And we were bankrupt. We are technically running out of money. I was chasing investors. Everyone said no. And we had to stop paying salaries for two months. Then luckily, luckily found two investors who said they believe enough in us and who funded us. That was in early 2014. so there was a near death experience for us as a business uh and it was totally our fault we didn't think from the end back then we thought now we have this money let's let's hire people let's build our you know our dream let's not not think about what do customers want but let's build what we want what our vision is and um and we're pretty naive we we didn't think okay what do we with the money we've got what do we need to prove once the money is gone uh so we get the next checked uh that was an early lesson that we had and pretty low point um because i i thought we're not done yet we we um i believed in that idea and i i kind of uh realized what we've done wrong and i was like please give us another chance someone give us money we we figured it out now and luckily that happened another mistake we've made early on we started in german only we thought no that's just saying you know you need to be embarrassed by your by your first launch otherwise you've launched too late.

29:31And we thought, we don't want to embarrass ourselves, so let's launch in a small, let's only launch in the German market and not in English because then we don't embarrass ourselves in front of the world and we don't hurt our brand early on, etc. And that's bullshit because we didn't have a brand and no one cared. And as a matter of fact, Germans always take a year or two longer to jump onto new trends. So in hindsight, if we had launched an English-speaking world first we would have gotten early adopters much faster just because there are more uh in the world but then also um especially americans tend to be more progressive and and jump on digital subscription models paying for digital content was a thing and what was no thing in 2012 and spotify and netflix paved the way away eventually and especially not in germany right yeah absolutely uh but we choose we picked the um not the biggest and then rather probably one of the harder markets for our business to start.

30:29We had all this figured out by the end of 2013. Luckily, found another investor. And then starting in 2014, things started to move a little smoother. We then launched in English. We added audio in 2014. We started text only, but luckily so early on in 2014 that this podcast trend is coming up. So we should also add audio and learned how to do digital marketing. now you know Facebook and all these marketing platforms are a kind of commodity back then it was still early days and it took us a while to dig into it and learning how this works also daring to spend money on marketing and trusting that it will come back through through customers so 2014 was really the year where we've checked a lot of boxes figured a lot of things out we had a lot of breakthroughs in different things and since then it's been a for a couple of years under 2019 a pretty smooth up and to the right story where we tripled, tripled, doubled, doubled the business where things were a well-oiled growth engine through Facebook and other digital marketing channels.

31:36Things were good. Things were good on the business side, on the commercial side. In terms of team building, we had a lot of mess where there were these founder conflicts that I referred to and eventually one founder left. So we had that. That was a big hit for all four of us. We started this together. We always had that dream to bring it to a close together. But then we had to split up, basically. That was tough for us. Also tough for the team. It was a pretty, yeah, just a big moment, basically, for making three founders out of four. So when did that happen? That was in 2015. That was before Series A.

32:14We were still in seed stage, but things were starting to work on the commercial side. And how much had you raised by then? Do you mind my asking? I think by then we had raised maybe a million in seed funding. That was back back these days, a million was still a lot. Now it's a pre-seed check. Yeah, of course. So what happened? Why was the founder leaving? I think ultimately we realized that we weren't working well together anymore. We became, we moved from a high performing team to a rather dysfunctional leadership team. We were not aligned in regard to how to run the business. How much, how hard do we work?

32:51How much do we delegate versus getting our hands dirty ourselves? How do we take decisions? Do we give everyone their little area where they can decide freely? A lot of conflict around decision making and who ultimately takes the last decision. How do we ensure we move fast into a consistent direction? I think normal things that every team probably encounters. and in a founding team, my experience is it's even harder because you're married. If you hired someone, then it's a little easier to eventually say, well, I'm here to stay because I started the business, so you need to go. Also, that I found tough and had to learn, but that's a little easier.