FounderFuel: AMA with Holger Seim, cofounder of Blinkist

At a recent FounderFuel LIVE event, we sat down with Holger Seim who co-founded Blinkist with three university friends in 2012 and led the business as CEO through to exit. Blinkist is one of Europe’s most formidable startup stories; they successfully grew to over 31m subscribers across B2C and B2B, raised over $35m in investment, and achieved their goal of being acquired by Go1 in 2023.

Holger is humble and refreshingly honest about the realities of founderhood and the tough, personal and professional, choices he had to make along the way. That made for a conversation filled with stark home truths and invaluable insights on everything from:

• The M&A – the process and the truth of how it feels
• Surviving co-founder breakups
• The founder resilience needed through scaling

Tell us the Blinkist startup story and about life in the early days…

We met in university and discovered we shared an entrepreneurial spirit so we started our first little thing; a student consultancy to apply our knowledge and earn some money during our studies. That confirmed our passion for entrepreneurship and we learned that if you have a good idea and a good team, and you can rally people around it, then you can start something. And that kind of glued us together and set a habit in motion where we would brainstorm ideas and ask ourselves; what are the problems out there that could be solved that justify starting a company around? 

By the time we finished university, we didn’t have great ideas, but we kept in touch and continued the brainstorming habit. Eventually, in late 2011, when I was working in Seattle, one of my future co-founders was visiting me, and we developed the idea for Blinkist.

Back then, smartphones were booming, so a lot of our ideas were focused on what was missing on that small screen. With a passion for learning and knowledge management, a lot of ideas gravitated in the education field. Everyone was just playing Angry Birds or doom-scrolling on social media, so we wanted to do something meaningful – which is where the idea for “blinks” was born. The working title was Wait Mate – to help you fill your waiting times with something meaningful. 

Eventually, we went from that broad proposition to something more narrow: produce key insights from non-fiction books. Our original vision around ‘lifelong learning’ was too untenable. No one wakes up and thinks, “I want to do some lifelong learning today”. But a lot of us wake up and think, I have so many books that I get recommended that I want to read and don’t find the time. So we narrowed it down in the early months and then developed enough conviction through some user research that we decided to quit our jobs, move to Berlin and get started.  

Give us a quick overview of the different life-stages in the Blinkist journey…

For the first two and a half years, we made all the mistakes you could imagine and were lucky to still be alive. We started in German only, which was a stupid mistake and twice, at the very last minute, found someone to bridge us because we were running out of money.

By mid-2014 we had product-market fit. We’d translated all our stuff to English to give us a much bigger market, we locked in the subscription business model instead of single purchase, we started to understand performance marketing, specifically on Facebook, and we added audio.

All these ingredients came together in a year and created that perfect storm where eventually we had a recipe to spend $1,000 on Facebook and get more than $1,000 back within a month. We secured Series A in mid-2015, then scaled for the next few years, raising Series B and Series C.

The first real dip in the growth journey happened through Covid after Series C, where you would assume that people have more time and then they can spend more time with Blinkist. But in reality, Blinkist had become a product that a lot of people used on their commute, and then all of a sudden, no one was commuting anymore. We still grew, but growth went from 70% year-on-year to just 20%. 

It’s obvious in hindsight that this just accelerated what would have always happened. We’d reached a ceiling of what we could achieve with paid acquisition as a growth engine because as a consumer subscription service, you have a certain kind of churn that is really hard to reduce. You need to bring in more business to just stay flat. We got closer to that ceiling, so growth rates wore down. Eventually, we realised this and added B2B as a new distribution channel. 

This got us back into a more exciting growth journey. By the time that took off, we were into conversations with Go1, who ultimately decided to make an offer to acquire Blinkist. We’re now part of Go1 and still on a journey to make lifelong learning and professional and personal development easier. Go1’s roots are in B2B. Our roots are in B2C. We both wanted what the other company had built, and so it was a perfect match.

The quick fire round:

Which stage was the most fun for you? Pre-Series A – because I still had the capacity to learn, teach myself things and do them.

When did you learn the hardest lessons? Basically twice. I had two founder breakups in that journey which I needed to navigate and try and understand. Where did it all go wrong? What did I do wrong? What did they do wrong? These were the hardest lessons because it’s like a marriage, and then that felt like a divorce. I learned a lot about myself, and how I contributed, and also about others. The hardest lesson is that sometimes it’s better to divorce instead of trying to make it work for too long. 

And what keeps you at it on the bad days? I love to build! I’m privileged to be in a position where I can solve problems every day, and I love to solve problems. I love having some tangible measurable impact every day of every week too. We don’t change the world that significantly, but every now and then, I hear user stories where we actually changed something in someone’s life or hear it referred to as a “Blink” or “blinking” something (liking Googling) just like our original idea.

Let’s talk about the exit – how did it feel on the day when you signed the document and Blinkist was no longer your baby?

Great question! So, I feel like this sounds sadder than it is, but I felt nothing. 

“For twelve or so years, I worked towards this big, audacious, golden exit, and I just felt nothing.”

I don’t know about you, but for us as founders, the exit was the ultimate goal. Get there and you’re financially independent and you have some kind of external proof. Someone built something that is big and someone bought it. It was a goal we always had in mind. 

And then eventually it happened. 

It was nine months of negotiation back and forth. The deal nearly dead twice – for example when Silicon Valley bank crashed it had an impact. Eventually I just wanted the process to be over. And I wanted to focus on the business again and not have this ambiguity. So it was really just a big relief. I felt numb for a couple of days and it took me a while to realise what we had created and what had happened.

What advice do you have for others on negotiating the deal?

Interestingly, none of the really important things to me were the things that were negotiated. The most important thing to me was; do I like the people; do I trust the people that I’m joining? For me, Go1 was still founder-led. I’d known the CEO for three years, and they had a similar vision. Now I’m here, I still somehow feel like a co-founder because it’s a founder-led business. 

One of the first things our independent board member told us, is that having a bad cop can be a very good thing. I need to have a relationship with them so I should be the good cop and work on the relationship, but have someone else as a bad cop for all the big asks. We positioned one of our board members from the biggest investor and it worked really well for us.

To hear the specifics on deal break-up fees and negotiating founder pay-out terms – members can watch the recording of the session here.

At Go1 you’ve stepped into the CPO role, in a bigger company, what have you learned about yourself in navigating the change of role from CEO to CPO and founder to employee?

I was always the founder and CEO, so in the end I was making the decisions or being the tiebreaker when things were discussed. Now there is a CEO on top of me and even though there’s a lot of agreement, every now and then there’s also disagreement and I need to learn to disagree and commit, which I didn’t need to do as a CEO previously. That’s a big lesson; when you think you know better, you still can’t change it and just need to accept the decision and roll with it.

I underestimated how much autonomy means to me. I always thought I don’t need to be a CEO, I don’t need to be the ultimate decision-maker, I just want the best decisions to win. But it is more challenging than I thought. It’s not about the title, but about having the ultimate chance to say, no, we do it this way. Obviously, that’s opinionated of me – but it’s what we get used to as founders – and it feels different now.

What tips would you give a founder who is planning to go through a merger and acquisition? 

You have to really question, is an exit the ultimate goal? If venture capital is invested, then there’s probably no way around it, and regardless for us, it was always the plan. We realised Blinkist was unlikely to go public as consolidation makes most sense in our industry. But it may not be right for you. Sometimes independence, autonomy, going it on your own, may be better, so question whether an exit is the right thing for you, ideally early on, before you bring in any venture capital. And once you decide an exit is the way to go, then make it happen, and learn from it. 

Let’s talk about scaling. For context, how did the team size change as you grew? 

We started with four, grew to probably 15-ish pre-Series A. To 40 post-Series B then 100 post-Series C – 170 was the max we had. Through Covid, I think we got it back to 150 which was our happy place. Fortunately we never had to do mass layoffs. We were lucky enough to churn naturally and just not rehire.

What challenges did you face with the headcount growth?

I actually think we grew too fast: We put the first managers in place – people who can own a team -and it’s a natural instinct for senior hires to ask for more budget and hire a team because that’s how a lot of people define themselves. Now, I’m an investor in a company, and they are so rigorous when they hire. It’s so beautiful because it makes it much easier to scale and you don’t have a lot of the hassle of keeping everyone aligned. So I’ve learned that we did it too fast. 

On the plus side, we invested in the people-team early on to make sure we had streamlined recruiting and onboarding processes. It really helped new people get set up and performing, and that paid out a lot. We were very conscious about behaviours and values too and made them clear to candidates early on which helped. My biggest advice is to be really intentional – really ask yourself, do I need that additional position? 

It sounds like culture was an important focus for you?

Every time you bring five new people in, it changes the dynamics

I love ‘What you do is who you are’ by Ben Horowitz, it’s one of the best books I’ve read about the practical aspects of building a culture. I think it starts with being explicit about who you want to be – values, behaviours, etc. Plus, less is more – what are the three or four core things that define your culture? Make sure everyone understands them. Make sure they’re part of the recruiting and onboarding processes. Make sure you have rituals or something tangible to bring them to life every week in your all-hands meetings. And be ruthless when it comes to hiring and firing. People have to live up to those behaviours.

That said, we actually faced the opposite problem, we couldn’t evolve our culture and I learned a lot about how my individual traits eventually got systemic in the company, which is super interesting. To learn more about this – members can watch the recording of the session here.

Which was the biggest challenge for you personally when it came to leading?

Holding people accountable and learning to be the bad cop. I had to learn to really be tough on the topics, while remaining soft on people and then trying to strike that balance. It doesn’t come naturally to me. I have people pleasing tendencies, so really holding people accountable, and sharing feedback early on instead of when it’s too late, can be hard and I’m still on a journey. 

It was also a big challenge to let go of the ‘doing’ and really only build the systems for others to do things and do things well. It’s a transition from direct impact to meta impact, if you will. For a long time, it felt less tangible to me and less fulfilling because the feedback loops are just longer. I’m pretty sure I led marketing and data, while also being the CEO, for probably six months too long.

You talked about co-founder breakups earlier – when did you know it was going wrong?

I knew it was going wrong when someone introduced me to Patrick Lencioni, an author who wrote the book ‘The five dysfunctions of a team’. I read this book, and then I immediately knew we couldn’t be four co-founders anymore because trust – the base of the pyramid – wasn’t working at all and there was a fundamental mismatch on where we wanted to go. That book was very helpful and it really started the process of making changes. 

You have to ask a lot of questions to see if you have the foundations for a high performing team or not. Do you have trust in the leadership team? Do people talk openly? Do you have the honest conversations about the things that matter, in the team or one-to-one behind people’s back? Do you have common goals in the team? And is everyone rowing in the same direction for those goals or is everyone just optimising for themselves? You feel it, you hear it, you see it in the discussions. I think these are things that I would watch out for now.

Founderhood is a difficult ride and you’ve been through two co-founders breakups. What made you decide to keep going?

The second co-founder breakup happened on the same day that my second son was born. At the same time, I moved three execs out of the team, so I had to rebuild an executive team while somehow supporting my wife and also trying to appreciate becoming a dad for the second time. And obviously that was not possible. Everyone suffered in that situation. So yes, there’s been a lot of tough times. What kept me going? I don’t know, to be honest. Probably two things: 

1. I always believed in what we can achieve with Blinkist, and I really wanted to ride that horse till the end to see if we can achieve it. So I had a lot of conviction.
2. I also had a strong team who supported me and I felt loyalty to the team to say, look, we’ve got this far and we can still go further. 

There was probably also a little bit of a godfather complex too: “if I don’t do it, then no one else will”. Maybe if I had seen someone internally who could have stepped up, then at some point I would have said, I’m done here. I’m out of energy. I can’t be the perfect CEO for this company anymore. So please someone else do it. But since that wasn’t available,

I just told myself, look, you need to keep going and it will get better eventually.

Obviously, I had lots of support from family and friends, plus I’d try to do a little bit of sport or vacationing every now and then to find a balance. Somehow that kept going, when it was really tough. I think this is the honest answer. I don’t know how. Probably life has given me enough resilience to somehow keep going. 

Parenthood as a founder brings its own challenges to founderhood – how did you navigate it?

You know, the textbook thing right now would be to say, “spend more time with your kids because they grow up so fast” and “the business, will work out and you will regret it in hindsight”. But I can’t tell you that. 

I still think, if I had to go through it again, I probably would have to lean into it again. A business takes its toll and I think it’s a lie if someone says, you’ve just got to balance it better. 

I think the trade off is real. You can’t have kids and a partner and a business and make all of them happy and make yourself happy and have a hobby or something. 

I think the trade off is real and we all need to acknowledge that as entrepreneurs. We choose that, and we need partners that are very understanding and know that this is part of us – we can’t just kill that part. And we can’t just magically become better CEO’s and then do it all in 20 hours a week. I think acknowledging that and not being too hard on yourself is important. 

I’m not saying you don’t make changes. Maybe things can be delegated, maybe some things are not as important. I stopped going to events and also told myself consciously, I don’t need hobbies for the next three years when I have young kids and a business to run. So I did less sports. 

I’ve had a really boring life – family and work – for the past four years, but I made peace with it and I said consciously, this is the trade off I choose. I want this business and I want this family, and I want to be a good dad for my kids, so I do less of the fun stuff for myself. Just acknowledging that and then making peace with it helped me. I don’t have a better solution for how to manage that trade off? No magic recipe here, unfortunately. 

What routines or habits have you developed to help you navigate founderhood and be resilient? 

I tried to be very rigid with my boundaries: For me, weekends are for family (aside from perhaps a few emails). I do breakfast with the kids, I do dinner with the kids – religiously. I protect these routines with the family to make sure there’s something else in life that I see, and tangibly feel. That has helped me. I also believe in vacations (I mean, I’m German and we love our vacations!). It’s important for me to travel – I love to see the world. And actually getting out of the business every now and then, and seeing there’s something else in this world, helped me a lot to stay sane in my mind. 

Opening up, talking about the challenges with others makes a huge difference too. You meet a group of founders once a month, and you just get naked. Not literally, but you just share openly what is going on in business and family. And you help each other and you realise that all of us founders are struggling and none of us are just hitting it out of the park every time. They challenge me, and I can tap into their experience. That helps to rationalise the situation, makes it feel quite normal, and it just makes it less heavy. 

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