Cut a day to learn how to run effective meetings: Holger Seim of Blinkist

Every leader knows how to run effective meetings in theory. Holger Seim's argument is that theory changes nothing, and that the only reliable way to make people examine their own calendars is to take a day away and leave the targets where they are.

Seim is co-founder and CEO of Blinkist, which turns more than 5,000 nonfiction books into 15 minute summaries and has since added podcasts. Started in Berlin roughly a decade before this conversation, it now reaches 21 million users on nearly $40 million raised from investors including Insight Partners and Greycroft. The company had around 170 employees at the time of recording.

A student consultancy that still exists

Seim's entrepreneurial habit started early. Trading CDs at twelve, organizing school proms, entering business plan competitions.

At university he found friends with the same instinct and they started a student consultancy, offering companies consulting services at student rates. It went from four people with an idea to fifty students winning real projects in twelve months.

That is when he recognized something beyond enthusiasm. Starting from nothing and getting people to build it with him was a skill he had. The consultancy still runs, handed down from cohort to cohort.

The group agreed they should do it at larger scale after university, and were conservative enough to actually finish their degrees. Without the right idea they took separate jobs, Seim going to Deutsche Telekom in Germany and Seattle, while continuing to meet and work on ideas.

The idea, and its working title

The insight came in 2011, from two observations sitting next to each other.

Smartphones were becoming ubiquitous, and consumption was shifting from print and laptops to a small screen people checked constantly.

And they had a personal problem. At university their job had been to learn. Once they started work, their job was to work, and learning moved off the clock and steadily got squeezed. They wanted to keep reading and it was getting harder.

So the question became whether the time already going into phones could carry something meaningful. The working title was WaitMate, a companion for filling waiting time with something worthwhile.

They quit, moved to Berlin because it was already Germany's startup hub, and started the company.

The audio decision

Asked what actually changed the trajectory, Seim names one thing: moving from text to audio.

The story is worth telling because of how the signal arrived. In summer 2014 the team went to TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco and pitched the idea to investors, angels and operators for feedback. Nine out of ten said some version of: good idea, is it available in audio.

This was before the podcast boom, which began later that year. Their reasoning was that if Silicon Valley tends to run slightly ahead, and nine in ten people there are asking the same question, the answer is to build it.

The strategic effect was the part he emphasizes. When someone's eyes are free, you compete with video and everything else. When their eyes are occupied and they can only listen, the competitive set shrinks dramatically to podcasts and a handful of audio services.

It moved three numbers at once. Marketing relevance, because audio gave them something to say. Conversion, because more trial users stayed. And engagement.

Everything else from that period was learning the basics: digital marketing, tracking, and a stack that let them build, measure and learn quickly.

His observation about that is the most self-aware moment in the episode. A company whose entire product is the key insights from books, run by people who read those books, still made all the standard mistakes, including not following lean startup properly. Some things you can read ten times and still have to get wrong yourself before they land.

By the end of 2014 they had audio, a working technical and analytics stack, an understanding of their marketing, and the right business model and pricing. Growth followed.

The mistake of launching small

Blinkist's US market position was deliberate, but it started with an error Seim describes plainly.

They launched in German only, reasoning that a smaller market was a safer place to learn. Underneath that was the familiar advice that if you are not embarrassed by your first launch you launched too late, combined with a fear of damaging the brand in a big market.

His retrospective is blunt. That thinking was wrong, because nobody cares. Even with a hundred thousand users you are a rounding error, and nothing happens.

The cost was real, because at that stage the product was text only. Launching in two languages would have meant translating text and choosing some titles for a US audience, not narrating in another language.

They corrected in late 2013 with English content, and reversed the priority to English first. The reasoning holds: people who read nonfiction and take learning seriously tend to read English regardless of where they live, so English content reaches far beyond the US.

Growth came through paid acquisition, run from Berlin, which works because Berlin has deep international talent including many English speakers. He notes that at their current scale it matters more to have people on the ground in the US for the finer adjustments from a large niche toward mainstream, but for years Berlin was sufficient.

The eat-your-vegetables problem

The challenge Seim is most candid about is retention, and his framing applies to any product people believe they should use.

The top of the funnel works. They attract the right people and convert them to subscriptions, and the first month is genuinely engaged as new users work through everything they always meant to read.

Then a share of them drop off, and when asked why, they cannot say. No bad experience, nothing specific, just distraction and life.

His diagnosis is honest about the category. Blinkist is not a lean-back product. It is easier to watch something entertaining, and a social feed pays out faster. Learning content is lean-forward, and that is a fact about human psychology rather than a competitor problem.

The answer, in his view, is content that produces an actual moment. Something that makes you stop, or that you want to share with a partner, or that you bring up at dinner. Real-world application is what converts passive listening into value.

He extends that into a defense of something Blinkist gets criticized for. Some feedback frames the product as a way for people to sound well read without doing the reading. Seim's response is to reject the premise. Being better informed and more interesting to talk to is not bragging, and wanting to be liked and to have real conversations is close to a universal desire. Helping with that is a legitimate thing to sell.

His positioning is careful. Blinkist is an informal learning tool. It cannot teach you to code or replace a course or a full book if you want depth. What it can do is create relevance and start a path, which sometimes ends in the full book, sometimes in a talk by the author, and sometimes in a conversation with a friend that produces the actual reflection.

Publishers, and the discoverability argument

Early relationships with publishers were an uphill battle, driven by a fear of cannibalized book sales.

Seim's response is data plus intent. They have evidence it does not happen, and it was never the aim, since the founders are readers themselves.

The argument he makes to publishers is about two real problems. Discoverability, because people do not know what to read. And time, because nobody can go deep on everything they are curious about.

What the data shows is complementary use. People discover broadly, dip into many topics, identify the few worth eight hours, and then buy the book. Authors, he notes, increasingly see the upside, since wider distribution of their ideas and their names is what they want.

Every reason a VC said no

Seim's account of fundraising is a useful catalogue, because the objections changed as the market did.

His baseline expectation is that you hear no roughly 95% of the time and need one yes per round.

They doubted digital content could be monetized. Hard to remember now, but in 2012 and 2013 subscriptions and paywalls were not established, and people expected content to be free.

They doubted the unit economics. Specifically whether customers could be acquired cheaply enough.

They doubted the market existed. This was the hardest. Language learning has an obvious addressable market, so a company like Babbel or Duolingo can describe taking an existing behavior online. Bite-sized learning was not a category, so Blinkist's argument had to be about avid readers as a proxy.

And they asked what happens if Amazon builds it. Seim's answer to this is the most useful thing in the section, and he gives the honest version: then we have a problem, and so do you, which is why it is called venture capital.

His substantive point is that large companies do not chase seed-stage opportunities. They have bigger problems and wait until something has grown into a mainstream opportunity, at which point they are more likely acquirers than copycats.

Growing into the CEO job

Seim's description of how his role changed will be familiar to any founder.

For a long time he kept functions reporting to him, having personally built the marketing organization, run the first campaigns, designed banners and built the business intelligence stack because the marketing required it.

Two things ended that. Capacity, because you cannot be CEO and a functional leader at once. And role conflict, because holding yourself accountable while being both the CEO and a peer to other function heads caused real trouble.

His job now is the classic list: lead the leadership team, build trust and clear direction, fill gaps when people leave, set the longer-term vision, keep the company funded.

And he is honest that this alone does not satisfy him. He is practical, enjoys working in the business, and describes it as an ongoing journey to work on the business instead. Finding places to go deep enough to feel like he is doing something tangible is a live problem.

The structure he has built is deliberately flat: VPs across marketing, product, content, engineering, partnerships, finance operations, and people and culture, rather than a small C-suite. He built it that way consciously, wanting flat hierarchy and noting that a senior C-level tier brings its own difficulties.

The co-CTO arrangement is a transition mechanism worth noting. His co-founder built the engineering organization and then wanted the B2B challenge, so he promoted a long-tenured engineer into the CTO role and they ran as co-CTOs while the new person grew into it. With B2B now growing quickly, the founder is fully focused there.

Chief reminding officer

An audience question asked how he keeps the vision intact across the company.

His methods are conventional and he is refreshingly unsure whether he does enough of them. Write the vision down and codify it somewhere accessible. Lead the monthly all hands with it. Connect individual decisions back to strategy so people hear the context rather than the conclusion.

The framing he borrows from Patrick Lencioni is that a CEO is really a chief reminding officer, whose job is constant repetition of the vision.

He is candid about the scaling problem. Aligning thirty people around one vision is far easier than aligning a hundred and seventy, and they are still working on it.

His hesitation about OKRs is one many pragmatic operators share. He knows the systems exist and work. He is reluctant to introduce formality that becomes bureaucracy, and does not want to spend the company's time in alignment meetings and documents when he would rather they build. He says finding a system that cascades goals without that cost is unfinished work.

Cutting a day to fix the calendar

Blinkist announced a pilot four day week for June, July and August the day this conversation was recorded.

The reason was talent competition. Remote work means Blinkist competes with companies worldwide rather than companies in Berlin, and its people get approached with large offers. Seim's position is that they cannot and do not want to compete on salary alone, and that anyone optimizing purely for pay is better off elsewhere.

The existing package was already strong: competitive pay, equity for every employee, lunch, events, coaching and learning budgets, and 35 vacation days against a German norm of 30.

So the question became what else you can offer, and his answer is that time is the new currency.

The hypothesis is where it gets interesting for operators.

His belief is that with the right people, removing a day causes them to deprioritize what does not matter, decline unnecessary meetings, and concentrate. He acknowledges it does not work for everyone, requires real organization and time management, and might make some people uncomfortable enough to leave.

The condition that makes it a genuine experiment is that the business ambitions did not move. He says nobody needed persuading of this. They are in a competitive market with hungrier competitors, so taking it easy was never the offer.

His argument for why the constraint works better than exhortation is the sharpest point in the episode. He could give speeches about working smarter, or make everyone read a book about bad meetings, and behavior would not change. Removing a day while holding the target constant forces every individual to ask whether a meeting is necessary and whether it needs forty five minutes or twenty.

They framed it as a three month experiment on purpose, with an explicit downside: at worst people feel stressed or fall behind for a quarter, and then you correct.

Michael's postscript, recorded later, reports how it went. The team hit all of its goals on four days a week, employee engagement rose significantly, they returned to five days in the autumn as planned, and were strongly considering repeating it the following summer.

The walk that turned into a shakedown

Seim's answer to the standing question starts from his own instinct to handle departures well.

Someone was leaving on terms that were not mutual and asked for a meeting to negotiate. Seim, wanting to avoid burnt bridges, suggested a walk.

The person brought a friend who said he was a lawyer. During the walk, they claimed to have an audio transcript of one of Seim's internal question and answer sessions containing something usable against him in court, and suggested he accept their settlement figure.

His reaction was that this felt like a legal drama rather than his actual life. Confident he had never said anything of the kind, he concluded they were bluffing.

So he changed approach, and the company cut its settlement offer in half from what it had originally proposed. The offer was accepted, and the friend turned out not to be a lawyer.

He is careful to put it in context. People who leave Blinkist find work quickly, the company does not throw anyone under the bus, and German employment law is protective. His framing of the underlying tension is one every growing company faces: building something large sometimes requires hard decisions about the team, and you should still be able to be proud of how you made them.

The 5 things I took away from this conversation

1. Constraints change behavior, speeches do not. This is the transferable idea. If your meetings are bad, telling people so will not fix it. Removing capacity while holding the target constant makes every person audit their own calendar, because it is now their problem.

2. Ask what the competitive set looks like when attention is partial. The audio insight was not about format, it was about who else can reach someone whose eyes are busy. That is a genuinely different market with far fewer competitors, and it is worth asking of any product.

3. Launching small to protect the brand is usually a mistake. Seim's version, that nobody cares and even a hundred thousand users is a rounding error, is a useful corrective. Fear of embarrassment cost them roughly a year in their largest market.

4. Answer the Amazon question honestly. If a large company builds your product, you have a problem and so does your investor. That is what the risk premium is for. Pretending otherwise is less credible than saying it plainly.

5. Watch for the role conflict, not just the capacity limit. Founders usually notice they cannot do two jobs. The subtler problem Seim names is being simultaneously the CEO and a functional peer, which makes accountability incoherent. That is the better reason to hand the function over.

FAQ

How do you get a company to run effective meetings? Seim's answer is a constraint rather than a policy. Remove a day from the working week while keeping business goals unchanged, and individuals will decline unnecessary meetings, shorten the ones they keep, and cut low-value work themselves. His view is that speeches and reading recommendations do not change behavior, but a real limit does.

Does a four day week reduce output? In Blinkist's three month summer pilot it did not. The team met all of its goals on four days, and employee engagement rose noticeably. Seim's precondition was that ambitions stay high, because the experiment depends on people cutting waste rather than lowering the bar.

How should a startup answer the what-if-Amazon-builds-it question? Honestly. Seim's position is that if a large incumbent builds your product, both you and your investor have a problem, and that is inherent to venture risk. He also notes large companies rarely pursue seed-stage opportunities, and typically arrive as potential acquirers once a category is proven.

How do you keep a vision consistent as a company scales? Codify it somewhere everyone can reach, lead every all hands with it, and connect individual decisions back to it so people hear the reasoning rather than only the outcome. Seim invokes the idea of the CEO as chief reminding officer, and admits that aligning 170 people is considerably harder than aligning 30.

When should a founder stop running a function directly? When capacity forces it, and before role conflict does damage. Seim ran marketing and business intelligence for years alongside being CEO, and stepped back both because the workload was unsustainable and because being a functional peer while being everyone's CEO made accountability incoherent.

Also mentioned

• Blinkist, its book and podcast summaries, and its growing enterprise business
• Insight Partners and Greycroft, and a board that includes operators from Weight Watchers and Shutterstock
• Babbel and Duolingo, the language learning comparison investors found easier to size
• TechCrunch Disrupt, where nine out of ten conversations pointed toward audio
• Entrepreneurs' Organization, the confidential peer forum Seim uses for support
• Patrick Lencioni, source of the chief reminding officer idea and of Death by Meeting
• Apple's App Tracking Transparency, one reason paid acquisition got harder

Listen to the full episode

Holger Seim on Between Two COO's

Between Two COO's is hosted by Michael Koenig. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.