Benedikt Brand had a job at Porsche and a problem with getting a message across. He was working in data analytics, inside a business capable of considerable technical precision. Yet communicating with colleagues in production and logistics was difficult. The people shared an employer. They did not share an easy digital meeting place.
For someone at a desk, company information can seem almost oppressively available. There are inboxes, calendars, portals and invitations to discuss the previous invitation. A colleague working on a production line inhabits a different information economy. Access depends on tools built around someone else’s working day. Brand’s starting point was the distance between those two experiences.
He began developing a solution with Giacomo Kenner, a friend from school. Porsche occupied the working week; the prototype occupied weekends. In 2018, they founded Flip in Stuttgart. The founding ambition was straightforward: employees should be able to receive company information and connect with each other without needing a permanent seat in front of a computer.
Today Brand is co-founder and CEO of a company that announced more than two million users in August 2026. Its October change of name to Flip AI reflects a widening product. But the original question still gives his career its shape: what happens to the people a company’s technology leaves outside?
When the first customer pressed pause
Porsche became Flip’s first customer. It also supplied an early lesson in how little a founder controls. After Brand left his job to work on the company, the customer paused the project during management changes. The reassuring sequence - leave secure employment, secure first customer, proceed - suddenly contained a rather large blank.
Brand had three other people working alongside him. That detail changes the emotional scale of the episode. A stalled purchase is one thing when an idea exists on a weekend. It feels different when colleagues are depending on the business. Over roughly six months, the team kept working to get Flip established. Porsche eventually returned.
The episode is useful precisely because it resists the tidy version of entrepreneurship. A problem can be real, a product can be wanted, and a decision can still stop moving. Brand’s account places persistence alongside an uncomfortable dependence on decisions elsewhere. The company had to survive the interval between interest and action.
His subsequent advice is admirably unadorned: “Look for the problem and when you find it, make sure you completely understand it.” There is an order of operations here. First encounter the obstruction. Then investigate it. Only after that does the software get its turn.
“Look for the problem and when you find it, make sure you completely understand it.”
Benedikt Brand
A neighbour with boardroom experience
An early co-working neighbour offered another kind of education. Martina Merz became a mentor, giving product feedback and helping the founders reach rooms where business decisions were made. Their young company’s immediate surroundings included someone with experience of running large industrial organizations. It was a useful antidote to talking only to other people building startups.
The connections around Flip came to include former Volkswagen CEO Matthias Müller and business consultant Roland Berger. Brand’s story therefore runs through an unusually industrial cast of characters: production employees at one end, senior corporate figures at the other. The product needed to make sense across that entire distance.
He has also named Ben Horowitz as someone he would like to have dinner with. What appealed to him was the author’s willingness to describe the difficult parts of building a company. It is a revealing reading preference from a founder whose first customer had already demonstrated how little protection a promising beginning offers.
In a 2020 account of Flip’s early culture, Brand described an onboarding ritual with considerably less ceremony: each new colleague chose a plant and became responsible for looking after it. Among discussions of growth, recruitment and investors, there was a small, living thing requiring regular attention. Startup ownership, with a watering can.
Coffee, colleagues and a phone full of notes
Brand’s descriptions of his own working day are more ordinary than the mythology of the permanently exceptional founder allows. In 2021, he described starting with a large coffee, reading messages in Flip and catching up on the day’s news. When possible, he went into the office because he valued speaking with colleagues in person.
Then came the familiar business of emails, meetings and lunch together. There is something pleasing about a communication-software founder continuing to make room for an actual conversation. Digital access solves the difficulty of reaching people in different places. A shared table still has its uses.
His phone offered another small portrait. He used one device for personal and business life, depended on the calendar to keep appointments straight, and treated notes as essential. Ideas arrived at night, when a notebook was rarely within reach. The mobile device in his own life was a place to catch thoughts before they disappeared.
He also described walks with Hazel and a habit of listening to podcasts or reading Handelsblatt when time allowed. LinkedIn was a regular stop for answering connection requests. These are modest details, but they locate Brand outside a funding announcement: someone reading, replying, keeping appointments and hoping the useful thought survives until morning.
The worker behind the software
The founders had a name for the person they were trying to understand: Werner. He was an imagined everyday worker, a way to ask concrete questions about instructions, colleagues and information. Brand and Kenner also spent time working inside customer businesses. The exercise pulled their attention toward the actual journey through a shift.
A fictional worker is useful only if real workers can contradict him. That is the value of leaving the product discussion and watching what people do. Where does an instruction arrive? Who explains a change? How does a question travel back? Those questions give the software a human scale, before anyone reaches for a diagram of corporate architecture.
Brand has repeatedly emphasized simplicity. In December 2021, he described an approach of continuing to improve the app while keeping the interface easy to understand. Adding functions creates a permanent temptation to make the product look as complicated as the organization buying it. The intended user still has work to do.
The early product also had to accommodate employee expectations and works councils. Its design included controls around notifications outside working time, and limits on supervisors’ access to employees’ chats. Putting company communication onto a phone brings questions about boundaries with it. Brand’s original access problem required attention to trust as well as convenience.
An app acquires more jobs
By May 2025, Flip was announcing a $28 million Series A extension and describing a broader set of ambitions for artificial intelligence. The work included knowledge management, onboarding and other recurring processes. Brand’s company was moving further into the practical exchanges between employees and their employers.
The acquisition of the UK’s The Bot Platform in 2024 had added low-code automation capabilities. International customers included Ben & Jerry’s Australia and the Australian Football League. The original problem had travelled well beyond the factory where Brand first encountered it. Different businesses could share the same awkward separation between central systems and people working away from desks.
In August 2026, another $25 million round brought L-Bank into the investor group, while HV Capital and Notion Capital increased their commitments. Flip reported more than 1,000 brands using the platform. These are company figures, dated to that announcement. They measure the reach of the business Brand and Kenner had built, rather than establish how every employee experiences it.
The two products at the centre of that announcement addressed different parts of the same access problem. Frontline Identity gives employees a digital identity without requiring a corporate email address. Fusion lets organizations build tailored frontline applications using AI. One concerns getting through the door; the other concerns what can be made available once inside.
On October 20, 2026, the company announced its rebrand to Flip AI. Its offering now combines identity, app building, workflow automation and an assistant called Ask AI. Brand described the new name as catching up with the product. The language had moved a long way from an employee messenger. The audience remained people working in stores, factories and logistics.
Taking the interviewer’s chair
Brand has also made himself the person asking the questions. His German-language podcast, Wo Wandel wirkt, examines how organizations change. He introduced the project with a joking announcement of a new role, then made clear he was keeping his existing one. The first guest was Petra Finke of DEKRA.
The guest list opens a window onto the questions occupying him. With Christoph Theis of P3, he discussed approaches to organizational design and employees’ role in choosing leadership. With former Bosch research chief Thomas Kropf, the conversation turned toward rules, decisions and responsibility. These are recognizable companions to the problem that started Flip.
Giving someone access to information changes what they can know. Letting them act on it involves another set of decisions: permission, responsibility, confidence in the people closest to the work. A founder selling digital tools has reason to care about both. The interview format gives Brand space to examine the management habits surrounding the software.
There is a lighter naming story, too. Brand previously appeared publicly as Benedikt Ilg. After marrying Maria, he took her surname and announced that he had become a Brand. He enjoyed the coincidence with the company-building vocabulary of his working life. Some corporate rebrands require a committee. This one began with a wedding.
The name changed; the old work remains visible. The weekends beside a school friend, the customer on pause, the coffee and notes, the questions about how a shift actually unfolds: they give the larger business a comprehensible beginning. Brand’s continuing task is to keep that beginning in view as the product gains more things to do. An employee standing beyond the office door still needs a way in.
Keep the conversation going
Read, watch and listen to Brand in his own working world.