Blinkist founder on inequality and his way to combat it

Blinkist founder on inequality and his way to combat it

Sebastian Klein is the founder of the book app Blinkist and became a millionaire with it. But the great inequality worries him. When making his investments today, he pays attention to the common good rather than returns

Mister Smalldon’t you like reading, or why did you invent an app that summarizes non-fiction books in a concise manner?
I always had at least three books lying around at the same time, but rarely managed to finish one. And I knew that others felt the same way. In 2009 I started sending book summaries via email as a hobby. It was then that I dreamed of simply being able to read for a job for five years.

Nevertheless, you founded Blinkist not immediately.
No, after graduating I worked as a management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. The exciting thing was that you could work directly with the DAX executives and help shape things. But after three months at the latest I wanted to quit. It was a nightmare and just as you would imagine: far too much work and pressure, the only thing that mattered was performance, material things, money. I was 100 percent controlled by others, I belonged to the company. No freedom, no autonomy. One of my superiors was severely depressed, he took pills at work and often seemed as if he was about to collapse. I didn’t want to be as unhappy as the colleagues around me. After 15 months I quit.

To person

Sebastian Klein, 41, grew up in an academic household, in a house with a garden in the Allgäu. It took him almost 30 years to understand that this was not a given. While studying psychology in Marburg, he founded a student management consultancy with fellow students. Even then, he developed the idea for the company that would one day make him rich: Blinkist, an app that summarizes the most important things from non-fiction books.

With what hope?
I thought, now I’ll get started, become rich and successful. A friend and I were thinking about how we could make a lot of money with little effort and came up with cooling scarves. We thought, one summer and we’ll be millionaires. After all, we came up with a product in three months, had it manufactured and built a website. But we forgot about marketing. After a year we had a turnover of less than 5000 euros. I realized that scarves weren’t going to be a passion project. So I continued working on the book idea.

How did this become a business idea?
We started developing an initial prototype, which was called Wait Mate at the time and was intended to deliver small, clever texts to the smartphone for waiting times. When the third co-founder came along, the idea arose to develop it further into book summaries. We looked for investors in the spring of 2012 and founded our company in the summer.

So how did you make money with the Blinkist app?
Blinkist works with a subscription model: users pay for a premium version. Quite a few people use it now.

And when did the first million come?
That took time. At first we paid ourselves such low salaries that I was permanently in debt and broke. In 2017, when I had already left the company, I was able to sell company shares for the first time. That was a great feeling: going from zeros and minuses in the account to a few hundred thousand. Finally out of the lack of freedom and heteronomy. I bought an expensive bike, a hi-fi system and a suit. The million was then a gradual step: in 2018 I was able to sell shares again, and in 2023 we sold the entire company with the exit, so I then had around five million. I kept ten percent as retirement security and gave the rest to a non-profit GmbH.

Why didn’t you keep your millions?

Source: Stern

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