Interview with Christoph Dyllick – CEO, SeaTable [2023]

Excel very much restricts its users from combining all kinds of information and working in teams in real-time. The focus is very strongly driven by numbers and formulas. It was therefore important to us to give people a possibility to work flexibly and without any restrictions and technical knowledge. To develop a tool with which not only numbers and formulas can be recorded and processed, but also to bundle all kinds of information in one place.

With SeaTable, we have managed to create a completely new and efficient way of working together. More than 100,000 downloads of our software and several thousand happy cloud users show me that we have been able to create enormous added value with our spreadsheet solution SeaTable.

I always love to be faced with new challenges and to develop together with SeaTable. What I don’t like at all is when everything stands still. That doesn’t happen with SeaTable. We develop so rapidly and get new ideas every day, also from our customers, on how we can make our product even better.

It’s really a great feeling to develop and market a product that supports people in all kinds of industries and fields and helps them work more efficiently on ideas, tasks, or projects. That makes me really proud.

The primary focus should be on automation. You should always ask yourself how you can automate as many manual processes as possible. Today’s people have neither the desire nor the time to spend a lot of time on manual processes. 

This challenge will become increasingly important in the coming years. Therefore, as a future app developer, you should deal with this topic at an early stage.

We are not affected by this as a company. I think the reason for this was that many workers had a lot of time to reflect on their jobs during the Corona pandemic and may have uncovered many negative aspects that led them to quit. In my eyes, of course, the main responsibility still lies with the managers. They have to create an environment for their employees in which they feel at home and at the same time recognized. It is no longer enough to just offer coffee.

Moreover, you cannot introduce a standard for all employees. This means that what is relevant for one employee may be totally irrelevant for another. That’s why it’s also very important for us at SeaTable to maintain a very familiar atmosphere and to respond to the needs of each individual employee. So far, this has always paid off. We always get positive feedback on this in our staff appraisals.

Of course, being a CEO and CTO has more than just a 40-hour week. Still, I manage not to let my family slip into the background. As a husband and father of three, it is important for me to be there for my family and also to experience the development of my children. I think there is nothing worse than having to admit at some point that you have missed out on something.

Nowadays you have to be curious and just try out new things, tools, or possibilities. But you also have to be cheeky and positively stand out from the crowd. You should also develop self-confidence and believe in what you are doing. And the last point: perseverance.

Everything doesn’t always work from one day to the next. Many of the actions we take and the successes they bring are visible in the short and medium term. But there are also enough that are only really visible after a longer period of time. Here you also have to learn to persevere.

Either you stay small and do everything on your own or you become big and scale up!

I used to deal more with technical topics only. In the meantime, my horizons go far beyond that and I was also able to acquire a lot in the areas of sales and marketing, for example. In retrospect, I would have preferred to do this earlier and it would definitely have helped me better with some of my earlier decisions.

In the next two years, our goal is European market leadership. Our primary goal, however, is to take SeaTable public within the next 5 years.