Arne Schepker, CEO of popular Berlin-based language learning platform Babbel, will step down from his role, and the company's co-founder and former CEO Markus Witte will return to lead the company. into a new phase while patiently searching for Arne's successor,” the company said. This new phase, as expected, will involve AI.
Witte will not assume the role of CEO for the time being, but will instead assume the role of CEO and CEO.
After almost exactly five years as sole CEO (and a few months earlier as co-CEO along with Witte, who had held the position in the previous years), Schepker decided not to renew his contract, he told me. Witte will continue in his role as CEO and will now also assume the role of CEO.
“I just couldn't come up with a strong enough 'yes' and, as CEO, I don't think you can do the job with just 100 percent commitment. It has to be 180 percent, no matter what. And I couldn't get there, and I didn't feel like that was enough, right and enough for the team, for the company, for our shareholders, so I decided not to extend my contract,” he said.
Schepker joined Babbel as CMO in 2015. At this point, he said, he's seeing repeating patterns. He couldn't get excited about another round of creating an annual budget and setting OKRs for the team.
“That's reason number one. Reason number two is that the timing is actually quite good, because we are entering a new phase as a company anyway,” he said. Additionally, he also wants to take more time to travel with his family at least for the next year. “Don't expect anything on my LinkedIn feed until next winter.”
He also noted that he was happy to be able to conduct our interview together with Witte. “I think that a founder who built the company, who built our first products, who built our culture, who built all the foundations that I was able to work on and someone who I trust deeply and have a strong alignment with is a fantastic person. transition,” he said.
During Schepker's tenure, Babbel's revenue grew six-fold to about $300 million, with a team of nearly 1,000 people.
“We have achieved what we wanted to achieve,” he said. But what he is perhaps most proud of is that the company was able to help students during the pandemic and now Ukrainian refugees with their language learning needs for free.
“That has no monetary value. I can't even show you a return on investment. To this day I can't, but there is no conversation in which that topic is not mentioned, whether it is a press interview, an interview with a candidate or simply a dinner with friends.
So what will the next phase of Babbel look like? Witte told me that he believes that as technology changes, AI can now play a more direct role in helping people learn a new language. Babbel was already using machine learning internally, but it never presented itself as an “AI company.” Instead, it always placed emphasis on the teachers and experts it worked with to create its courses (largely to differentiate itself from competitors like Duolingo).
However, with technology advancing so quickly, Witte also acknowledged that it is difficult to even think about a strategy beyond the next half year.
“We're in a phase where even the people who create great language models don't know what the next generation will be able to do,” he said. “That's why I think even companies our size, meaning those that are not early-stage startups, need to be more agile than ever.”
And at this stage, he believes, having a founder back at the helm of the company may actually be an advantage because it is easier for him, as the founder (and one of the company's largest shareholders), to make risky changes to the strategy. of the company.
In Witte's view, we have reached a point where the combination of large language models, which tend to excel at language-related tasks, and Babbel's deep experience in language learning, will change the way the company teaches his clients. Before, the technology simply didn't exist. “We have reached the point where what we said before is no longer true,” he said.
Schepker also noted that, at its core, Babbel's mission and the problem it is trying to solve is a human one.
“The problem to be solved continues to be the learning of human language. You still want to talk to someone in another language. “You want to have a conversation with a loved one, an acquaintance, whatever,” he said. “There is a current opportunity here for Babbel to use all the teaching knowledge we have, use all the data we have, use this new technology and mix it up and create a current, personalized and powerful language learning journey that finally becomes a reality . really solve the problem. Because we have made language learning easier, but it still works.”
In addition to addressing the change brought about by AI, Witte also noted that he wants to focus on creating more “moments of delight” for the company's employees and users. “These things that make you smile, on all different levels, are what I'm heading toward,” he told me. “That's my mental model right now. I don't think we have to excel at everything. “I don't think we have to polish everything, but I want these moments of delight in all dimensions, on all levels.”