04. Transparency and holacracy to grow a team & teach kids to become tinkerers - Franziska Schmid (Junge Tueftler)

In this episode, our guest is Franziska Schmid, the CEO and co-founder of Junge Tüftler and the Tüftel Akademie. With her companies, Franzi and her team have taught technology through events, workshops, and webinars to more than 25 000 kids and teenagers in Germany, who have learned that way how to become young tinkerers and inventors. Franzi is a friend of mine, and I was very excited to learn more about the successful growth of her company, but also because she has an inspiring vision of education, and how her company should be developed in all transparency through a new organisation culture called holacracy. I was very curious to learn how they both share the CEO role with her co-founder and how she quit her job to found her company while being pregnant. I was also very keen to learn more about how they used that holacracy system to develop the companies to more than 25 employees, providing full transparency to the salaries, and using that system to give ownership and power in the decision making to all employees.

Together we discussed about:

the importance of educating people and kids on technology,
how she quit her job while being 5-month pregnant to co-found her company
how her mission helped them to attract developers who find a meaningful work at her company, even though they can’t afford to pay them as much as in the corporate world
how they are creative to find funding and support from third parties to be able to finance their projects and make them available for free to as many kids as possible
the importance of the state in the education system, and the possibility to involve companies to help finance this education system
the Open Badges system developed by Mozilla to show what people have learned
how they set up their recruiting system to be able to hire the right people fitting to their company culture and that holacracy system
How to have an efficient but flexible system for the team schedule, as most of their employees work with flexible hours and part-time contracts
Learning to let go as a CEO
Her learnings as a mother and entrepreneur
How they took advantage of covid to focus on their strategy and the accelerated digitalization of their company.