Markus Witte and the art of changing your mind

The first thing to know about Markus Witte is that Babbel was a detour. In 2007, he and three colleagues were developing an online music platform. Then the conversation wandered toward learning Spanish. The music could wait. Here was a problem they might be able to solve, provided they were willing to become beginners themselves.

That proviso matters. Witte’s story is often told through the company he helped build, but its more interesting rhythm is personal: acquire a skill, discover its limits, make room for someone who knows more. Repeat as necessary. A founder can accumulate quite a collection of job titles this way. The difficult part is deciding which work to give away.

A music project takes a Spanish turn

Witte’s route into software ran through cultural studies. He studied communications and cultural subjects in Essen, Bremen and Berlin, spent time at New York University and worked in the cultural studies department at Humboldt University. He later led the online division at Native Instruments. Books, academic work and audio software were all part of the journey before language lessons became his business.

Babbel’s four founders were Witte, Thomas Holl, Lorenz Heine and Toine Diepstraten. They brought experience with digital products to a field where they had much to learn. A casual Spanish-learning discussion gave them a reason to investigate the market. It also gave them an awkward assignment: build something useful for people whose difficulties they did not yet fully understand.

In his later account, the early prototype looked attractive but did a poor job of teaching. The team had approached language learning as a technical problem. They brought in teachers and reconsidered the product. The admission is disarming because the mistake is so recognizable. When you know how to write software, many things begin to resemble software problems.

Teaching introduces a less obedient variable: the learner. A screen can work exactly as designed while the person looking at it remains puzzled. The founders had to understand how someone acquires a language, as well as how someone operates an interface. That gap between a working product and a useful experience would keep returning in Witte’s thinking.

The price of a useful lesson

The company also had to learn what sort of business it was. Its early approach combined a community, user contributions and free access supported by advertising. In 2009, Babbel moved toward subscriptions. For Witte, the question involved incentives: a learning product and an advertising business make different demands on the people building them.

Charging a customer establishes a rather direct conversation. Someone pays because they expect the product to help. If it fails to do so, an elegant explanation of the business model offers little consolation. That arrangement gives a language company a recurring question to answer: is the next lesson worth coming back for?

Witte’s own writing about learning gives this commercial decision a broader context. In a 2014 essay, he argued that people choosing to learn for themselves could drive change outside formal institutions. The buyer of a learning tool can decide whether it serves a personal goal, without waiting for a ministry or university to approve it.

There is an appealing modesty to that unit of progress. A person wants to understand something, tries a tool and decides whether to continue. No graduation ceremony is required. Language learning makes the test unusually concrete, because eventually another person speaks and you must answer. The app’s interface has to lead somewhere beyond the app.

“In school, a lot hinges on good teachers.”

Markus Witte

Witte has described loving learning while finding school less compelling. He responded better to academic environments where people cared deeply about their subjects. It is a useful detail in a founder’s biography: the enthusiasm preceded the company. Babbel gave that enthusiasm a business to inhabit, along with customers who could judge its results.

The founder learns to leave room

A growing company offers its founder a peculiar promotion. More people join, more work gets done, and less of that work can sensibly be done by the founder. The skills that once made a person indispensable become skills that other people must be allowed to exercise. Success starts rearranging the job.

Witte’s move into advising gives him a place to work on that problem. At Wachstumsbegleitung, alongside Katharina Zink, he helps startups navigate growth. The firm describes familiar symptoms: decisions slow down, roles change and teams struggle even when the product and market look promising. Its work includes operating models, leadership and organizational culture.

That is a revealing choice of second occupation. Growth can look wonderfully simple in a chart. In an organization, it requires people to change how they work with one another. Yesterday’s informal agreement becomes today’s bottleneck. A founder who was available for every decision becomes the person everyone is waiting for.

In his public writing, Witte breaks ownership into four requirements: permission, motivation, ability and accountability. Each asks something practical of a manager. Can the person act? Do they want the responsibility? Can they do the work? Will the results belong to them? A missing condition can make a supposedly delegated job surprisingly difficult to own.

The model also puts a burden on the person handing over the work. Giving someone a task while keeping every meaningful decision is an arrangement many employees will recognize. Witte argues for trust, sufficient authority and room to deal with the consequences. Support still has a place. Constant interference makes that place rather crowded.

His thinking about clarity has a similar texture. When someone asks a manager for clearer direction, he asks which specific question needs answering. He acknowledges the leader’s responsibility to help people make sense of their work, while accepting that the leader’s own understanding will always be incomplete.

The distinction is useful. A particular decision may need an answer today. A promise that uncertainty will disappear is harder to honour. Witte treats some of that uncertainty as room for people to act and create. He even adds a footnote to explain his use of “vagueness,” admitting an affection for footnotes. The cultural studies graduate remains visible beneath the executive vocabulary.

An experiment is allowed to disappoint

Witte’s account of Babbel includes experiments he later questioned. At a 2023 founders’ event, he looked back on the company’s Apple Watch work and said it had brought little practical benefit. Being present on a new device had been enticing. Vocabulary learning on the watch had proved less persuasive.

The interesting thing about this admission is its scale. A feature can generate recognition without becoming useful enough to justify the effort. The lesson he drew was to wait until a technology’s purpose becomes clearer, then build around that purpose. An invitation to join the future can arrive before anyone knows what the future needs.

That approach leaves room for ambition. It asks ambition to name its customer. For a language learner, the important improvement might be easier practice or a better explanation. Novelty alone cannot settle the question. The small, unglamorous test is whether somebody can do more after using the product.

Witte has also made purpose a subject of his own talks. In 2017, he wrote that purpose repeatedly helped Babbel refocus its attention. There is a practical connection here: when a company has many possible things to build, a shared reason for existing can help people decide which opportunities deserve their time.

Handing over, coming back, handing over

In November 2019, Witte moved from co-CEO to Executive Chairman. Arne Schepker became sole CEO. Babbel had finished 2018 with sales well above €100 million, and the United States had become its strongest sales market. The company had grown enough to require a different distribution of responsibilities at the top.

“As Babbel founders, we are used to changing roles within the company.”

Markus Witte, 2019

The handover was followed by a return. Witte stepped back into operational leadership during the search for Schepker’s successor. In June 2025, Babbel announced Tim Allen as its new CEO. Witte would concentrate again on strategic guidance and the company’s longer-term direction as Executive Chairman.

In his own announcement, he described the return to operational work as lasting almost a year. He expressed gratitude for the team and said he would step back into the chairman’s role in August. Those are different kinds of continuity: the founder remains connected to the business, while the day-to-day authority passes to someone else.

Outside the succession announcements, the smaller details make him easier to picture. A profile described his bicycle commute and the homemade herbal tea he brought to meetings. In an earlier interview, he named Thomas Pynchon as a literary hero. Asked about time travel, he chose ancient Rome, Renaissance Florence and early Mesopotamian cities, before imagining a relieved return to Berlin.

That itinerary suits a career interested in how people make sense of their surroundings. Witte has worked with culture, sound, software and language. Each field offers a different way of arranging an experience for another person. His public reflections suggest that the arrangement remains open to correction.

Babbel began with a question the founders had not planned to ask. Years later, Witte was still asking what learners needed and what his own role should become. A founder’s name can remain attached to a company while the work beneath it keeps changing. For Witte, that has meant leaving room for teachers, colleagues and successors to write parts of the next lesson.