Interview with BTU Alumnus und Gründer Dr. Sebastian Selka (E-Business)
Dr. Sebastian Selka studied e-business at the BTU and earned his doctorate in economics (Chair of Marketing and Innovation Management). As managing director and founder of Symbiolab GmbH, he and his experienced colleagues have built up a team of IT experts that offers everything to do with software engineering, digital product development and consulting in the IT sector. No matter what the complexity, the IT experts solve the problems, work perfectly coordinated as a team and build software products in a convincing quality and speed. Sebastian Selka himself already looks back on several and several years of freelance and startup experience in his resume, which reads like the story of an entrepreneur who is always moving forward and developing himself as well.
Hello Sebastian, how did you come to study and do your doctorate at the BTU?
I grew up in Cottbus. I went to kindergarten, elementary school and Humboldt Gymnasium here. Since I was already very interested in computers and economics/business when I was in school, and the BTU offered a degree program in e-business, the decision was clear for me: I can stay at home, my friends are close by, and I get a university degree that is perfectly tailored to me. The doctorate was more by chance and luck. During my master's thesis, Prof. Dr. Daniel Baier pointed out to me the ForMaT research project that he had recently acquired and offered me the opportunity to work there. However, only under the condition to do a PhD. So I got a well-paid job in my hometown without any significant application process. The condition of a doctorate was okay for me, although not planned. Fortunately, I had made a conscious decision at the beginning to study at a university in order to keep the door of a doctorate open, at least in principle, even though I had never planned to do so myself and certainly would not have done so without the offer. But I like to take the simple, pragmatic route. For me, that meant simply accepting and I was in the job. I was able to stay in my hometown without a marathon application process. The only thing I had underestimated at the time was the dissertation.
You have already gained a lot of experience as a freelancer and founder. With the LEET Group, you even had an EXIST start-up grant. You were certainly able to learn at every station, which now also helps you at SymbioLab. What can you say to people interested in founding a company who might be afraid of the career path, where you also have to learn from mistakes and constantly motivate and develop yourself?
We all make mistakes and you can learn from every mistake. Our first mistake, for example, was the choice of name: You can only call a company Group if it has at least five subsidiaries. We didn't know that and as a result the local court rejected the company name and we had to go to the notary again, including the notary fee. And of course, mistakes just kept on coming. Without going into details, our mistakes were choosing the wrong target market (way too niche), being sales-inexperienced, building a product without talking to users, and simply trying something that was not close to cash flow. Meaning: we had to invest a lot first to maybe earn something with it. The fact that this doesn't work for me was also my biggest learning. In this respect, I can advise all people interested in founding a company not to let mistakes stop them, but to learn from them and not to repeat them. As long as you make the right decisions and avoid mistakes, the motivation will come all by itself.
What is your main motivation to become self-employed or start a business instead of being employed? How would you describe the difference for students who may not yet have a concrete idea of working life?
I think you have to differentiate. Self-employment, where the responsibility is only on you, or entrepreneurship, where there is also the responsibility for employees. In both cases, for me it is the high degree of freedom to be my own boss, whereby the degree of freedom differs between self-employment and entrepreneurship: in the latter, it is somewhat more limited, because the needs and wishes of the employees have to be taken into account accordingly. I don't really know what life is like as an employee. Except for my employment as a research assistant during my doctoral studies, which felt more like studying, and my employment as an intern during my master's studies, I have never been employed. During this, however, I realized very early on that my heart beats for entrepreneurship and that I have a hard time giving in to politics in (large) companies. Rather, I want to create and build something myself.
You have a lot of experience with short pitches, where you have to explain to people and potential customers in a nutshell what you can do, what you want and what you offer. Do you have any tips on how best to approach and practice pitches?
A pitch in the context of software engineering is not difficult to summarize. You have to know that we are in a market where software engineers are very rare. In particular, the exceptional talents are once again especially rare. And since we have really great people who have been working together as a team for many years, it's like the proverbial "sliced bread". Our biggest challenge is to build a name and awareness, because in the end it all comes down to our own network in this business. You simply have to know us. We may offer Champions League class, but we are still only a "small town club" in terms of name recognition. But whenever I have the chance to pitch, it's important not to overload the potential customer with too much information. Keeping it short without forgetting anything is the art. Otherwise, the best tip is simply to "make it easy". Practice, practice, practice. In your studies with lectures, taking responsibility in a hobby club or in any other possibility to get into conversation with strangers. It's harder at first, but it gets better every time you do it.
You are a team of seven software engineers at Symbiolab, what do you offer your customers and what is your daily work routine like as Managing Director in the company? What are your tasks and how do you organize and motivate the employees?
We offer our customers a perfectly coordinated software engineering team. This saves the customers the ramp-up and storming phase. The engineers work directly in their established processes, have been very familiar with the different focal points and competencies of the team for many years, and rely on jointly learned best practices and experience. This is also our unique selling point: we get started from day one and avoid friction losses. In the end, all you need is a product idea or a software product and the will to implement it. Starting on the "green field" or in the already existing environment of the customer, we then build a maintainable and secure quality software as required. Thereby we support to put the product idea into words, i.e. the requirement management, to build what the client wants to have, question technologically what makes sense and is maintainable for the clientele in the future, if no maintenance is desired. Or we support well-known companies in their own software development processes, such as Deutsche Post IT Services GmbH or Zalando SE. When I'm not working as an IT consultant myself, as Managing Director I take care of building up a network to find potential customers and keep the company running. This then includes working on our internal software products (invoicing, resumes, bonus calculator) or maintaining our infrastructure. This includes updates to the servers, the cloud solution we use (Nextcloud), our self-hosted VideoConferencing solution (Jitsi) or even writing emergency plans and dealing with legal issues. For the latter, my experience from law lectures at BTU actually helps me a bit as well. I organize myself with nextcloud's calendar/task feature, which I sync in Thunderbird and on my smartphones, with Markdown files that are also synced via nextcloud, and with my colleagues via an end-to-end encrypted messenger (element.io). For client projects, we optionally use the client's services (e.g. Jira). When we work for ourselves, we use GitLab issues. The motivation of the employees comes all by itself: Through exciting challenges and through our bonus model.
What is this bonus model?
Well, the bonus system is a core component of our business model. Specifically, it is a model in which employees are paid 70% of the revenue they generate, after deducting business costs such as hotels and training. That means basic salary plus bonus. In this way, employees act like freelancers or self-employed persons, but do not have the typical problems such as tax issues. There is a basic salary, no acquisition, no sales, and from a formal legal point of view, they are also regular employees with social insurance, pension fund, and so on. Especially the security is important for many employees, but also simply the outsourcing of the annoying business matters to someone else, so to me :-).
What do you remember most fondly from your student and doctoral days?
The best time was definitely the time at the Chair of Marketing and Innovation Management together with my colleagues. We had great times at the campus festival, the student parties, and also doing research. I fondly remember how we had dinner together in the Brasserie and then continued to write our dissertations together and yet each separately in LG10. Here it was quite clear that a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved. Thanks for the great time to Eva Stüber, Matthias Kaiser, Sascha Vökler, Alexander Sänn and Nicolai Sand, among others. When studying, I like to think back to our programming evenings with Robert Naundorf and Norman Erck, to my time at jalta Consultants and of course to the lecture hall parties.
