Books, essays, studies, frameworks, tools and concepts mentioned in our conversations.
6 resources
Podcast
Y Combinator
Benedict was watching YC podcasts before Knowunity existed. It's also where the first team took their job titles from, which he now describes as fairly random. Max and his co-founders were doing the same thing from the other side of the batch list, until friends of theirs got in and it stopped being an abstraction.
Framework
Alexander Osterwalder
One of the first things Benedict did in his grandfather's basement. He had read somewhere that you were supposed to make one. His parents, who had no idea about the market, sat down and worked through it with him.
Program
CODE Berlin
Max found out CODE existed three days before the application deadline and calls the Software Engineering degree the life-changing one, because he could chase his own ideas early. His claim is a strong one: the only university ready for the age of AI, and the only one where you work exclusively on things that matter. He also names the flip side. The place runs on whatever the students happen to be doing that year, which is why he ended up taking over the student council to fix the marketing.
Concept
Deutsche Telekom and partners
Max names it as the thing that shaped him most, because it got him talking to founders while he was still at school. What stayed with him was not the pitches. It was that these people were simply going after what they wanted, and how much fun they had with a world that takes itself extremely seriously.
Stanford Summer Session
Max went in 2024 and helped put the CODE partnership together while he was there, which is why up to twenty CODE students a year now go on a scholarship. His description of the appeal is unromantic: everyone is on campus, so anyone is reachable at any hour, and if they aren't eating or sleeping they will build with you.
kein Abseits! e.V., Berlin
Max ran robotics and model-aircraft workshops there for seven years, starting as a school social internship. He now watches the first generation of those kids start their own initiatives, and treats it as the earliest evidence of the thing people credit him with: getting groups of people to do something together.