"Software development is rigid and slow"

Christoph and Ralf Dyllick-Brenzinger are not only brothers, they also founded the company together. In the interview, Christoph tells us how they want to simplify programming for employees.

In most cases, it takes your own IT department, a lot of time and a large budget to develop a software solution in your own company. The founders of Seatable want to change that and provide their customers with a "Lego construction kit". With it, employees or even self-employed people without programming skills should be able to develop solutions on their own.

Mr. Dyllick-Brenzinger, you want to simplify programming with Seatable, how does that work?

Seatable is a solution for everyone worldwide, regardless of whether it's a one-man team or a large Dax corporation. Depending on who we have in front of us, we also get into the topic differently. For an average private customer who has already worked with Excel, we can easily explain that Seatable works like Excel. At the beginning there are classic rows and columns, but with much more functions. You can edit it on the web, with multiple people at the same time, you can insert documents, images, URLS and much more. Actually, we see Seatable as a no-code-low-code solution, that is, as a construction kit with which people can assemble and program IT workflows themselves. Because software development has been rigid and slow until now.

How did you come up with the idea?

My brother Ralf and I didn't come up with the idea for Seatable ourselves. It originally came from the Chinese company Seafile. The company wanted us on board because we are exclusive distributors for Seafile software worldwide, excluding China. Therefore we have known the Chinese developers for years and since the cooperation went well from the beginning we decided to establish a joint venture. Meanwhile SeaTable GmbH is 50% in German and 50% in Chinese hands.

How did you come to found the company together as brothers?

We have a similar history. We both started with a degree in economics, he in business administration and I in economics. After that, we both worked as management consultants. He worked in finance, especially in the Arab world, and I was an IT consultant, working on SAP projects throughout Europe. We come from an entrepreneurial household; our father is the fourth generation to own a construction company. That's why both of us have always flirted with the idea of self-employment. In 2014, we founded our first joint company. We like working together and we work well together. We also have a clear division of tasks. We discuss everything down to the smallest detail, but when it comes to technology, I have the final say, and when it comes to questions about strategy and numbers, my brother does.

You describe Seatable as "the Excel of the future", why?

Most of our users first need a few days and weeks to get beyond the level where they just enter numbers or formulas, like in Excel. Only then does the huge world of Seatable open up. The first step in any process is to collect information, bring it together and then work with it. Only in the second step is it about visualization and automation. The challenge is to pick people up quickly and explain it in a way that's easy to understand, which is where our proximity to Excel helps us.

What difficulties have you had to deal with so far?

There are three challenges that keep coming up for us. The first is the issue of finding good employees. For us, they should have the IT knowledge we need as well as be communicative. We don't have the classic division into sales, IT, etc. Instead, in the best case scenario, one employee looks after one or more customers, who then accompanies the entire process within the company. The second is the issue of reach. It is not easy to achieve reach, especially with hard-fought terms such as project management or HR topics. The third is the cultural difference between China and Germany. The Chinese are very focused on innovation speed and new features, while we as Europeans prefer to play it safe and only publish something when it is 100 percent certain. These cultural contradictions are not always easy to manage, but on the whole, the advantages definitely outweigh the disadvantages.

What would you do differently today?

What would have helped me is if someone had told me eight years ago, when we first started up, "don't always think that the others are smarter than you and that you can't manage some of the things yourself." We often handed over tasks to external service providers without thinking about what we expected and wanted. For example, we handed over the topic of search engine optimization to an agency because we had no idea about it and got to hear so much nonsense afterwards because we thought they could do it. In the meantime, I deal with the subject beforehand, try it myself and delegate the tasks only when I myself have understood how the rabbit runs, so that I can understand the results.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

My personal goal is for us to be seen as a valid solution on the European market, also in terms of data protection and data sovereignty. We want to be perceived as an active player.

What advice do you give to other founders?

Trust your own abilities and gut feeling and don't let resistance get you down. Today, many are only concerned with the amount of funding rounds and the external perception, and that's completely different with us. We are completely self-financed from the beginning. My work is fun when I feel like I'm making a difference and that I'm learning something every day.

Thank you very much for the interview.

Personal details:

Christoph Dyllick-Brenzinger is one of the founders and Chief Product Officer of Seatable. After several years as a management consultant in the SAP environment for major European corporations, he founded the first joint company Datamate with his brother in 2014.