The Story of getAbstract

The company of getAbstract began in 1999, when Rolf Dobelli (Chairman), Thomas Bergen (CEO) and Patrick Brigger (CTO) joined to build a business around an idea.

The story of getAbstract began much earlier. The three founders have been friends since high school and had always dreamed of working together. The inspiration behind getAbstract was planted during the founders' time at university. Like many students, the three learned by writing their own summaries of academic texts – and others would often borrow these as study aids. After spending a number of years in the global business arena, Rolf noticed that many other executives faced the same dilemma as his schoolmates: They were confronted with an ever-increasing amount of information and a limited time to absorb it. He hoped to provide them with a "compressed knowledge" solution. Rolf had the initial idea, and immediately contacted Thomas. The two of them optimistically took an HTML course. They tried to build the first Web site, contemplated the result, and realized they needed a real computer science expert. Pat joined as the chief technology officer shortly thereafter.

getAbstract was founded upon five values, which reflect the goals of the founders and the spirit of the company:

1. "World class standards – in all that we do."
2. "Fairness – amongst ourselves, with our employees, clients and partners."
3. "Fun – we only have an average of 28,000 days on this planet. We better make it fun."
4. "Profit – we strive for higher than average returns on invested capital."
5. "Explicitness – clarity and openness in all our dealings – internal and external."

In 1999, the company made an agreement with its first publishing partner, Bloomberg Press. After writing the first abstract (appropriately, Bill Gates's Business @ the Speed of Thought), Rolf recognized the need for professional writing and editorial teams and began recruiting. In the meantime, Thomas was busily marketing the company, hiring a sales team, and establishing sound procedures and policies. Patrick was setting up the IT infrastructure, recruiting technical engineers, establishing security procedures and starting to encode the Web site, programming the library database and defining all of the back-office applications.


getAbstract went live on January 15, 2000, with fewer than 100 summaries. After all of the planning, phone calls and preparation, the entire getAbstract team had high expectations of that first day's sales. Early in the morning, they turned on the switch and eagerly watched the screen, waiting for their first customers. They waited, and waited, and waited. It was a bitter surprise, when at the end of the day, sales were exactly zero. They opened a bottle of champagne and celebrated that memorable first day. However, once the wait was over, the next stage of work began. Business picked up almost immediately and the company has consistently grown ever since. There have now been more than four million licenses sold worldwide, granting access to a library of 5,000-plus summaries. The company currently has more than 300 publishing partners, and employs 120 writers.

Soon after going online, getAbstract was approached by the media with requests for book reviews, because "no other company reads as many books as getAbstract." This was just the beginning of a number of initiatives expanding getAbstract's core focus:

• In 2000, getAbstract signed a joint venture agreement with Ringier, and produced the first Chinese summaries.
• In 2002, a weekly book show on Bloomberg TV Germany was launched.
• The company started abstracting speeches in 2003, for the ISC symposium at the University of St. Gallen, and now also does this for the World Business Forum.
• In 2005, getAbstract started producing audio recordings of summaries in response to client demand.
• Also in 2005, the company began creating a library of German summaries of Western classic books.

Throughout growth and change, getAbstract has remained devoted to its original mission of providing clients with essential information from the best business books.
The company remains privately held by the three founders.


In 2000, the management team welcomed Arnhild Walz-Rasilier as the vice president of rights. Two years later, Manuela Nieth joined the team as the vice president of marketing and public relations. Simultaneously, the team strove to hire a force of the "best of the best": a group of highly dedicated, motivated, knowledgeable, bright, experienced individuals — who were also nice, fun, interesting and joyful human beings. They wanted to preserve the positive spirit of getAbstract, in keeping with its five core values.

From the beginning, getAbstract was an international company, with offices in the United States and in Switzerland. At first, these offices were located in the living rooms of the founders' homes. As the company grew, it proceeded through a series of office spaces in Miami, Manhattan and Luzern. Currently, the American headquarters are in Aventura, Florida, and the Swiss headquarters are in Luzern.


The growth of the company was indicated not just by the numbers, but by increasing worldwide familiarity with the getAbstract product. In 2003, for example, Thomas and Rolf were invited to discuss entrepreneurship at a university in Ecuador. After the talk, a student came up, showed them an abstract and explained that he had been a client since getAbstract's beginning.

getAbstract customers, pleased with the product, are eager to spread the news. In 2005, Thomas was at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he was approached by another participant, a Fortune 500 executive who expressed his delight at a book-summarizing resource on the Internet that his personal assistant had just found. And in 2007, Pat was on an airplane from New York to Phoenix when his neighbor in the next seat started to tell him about how he'd "just found this wonderful service on the Web that summarizes books" and pulled a summary from his briefcase to show him. These delightful encounters provide a driving force for the entire getAbstract team by reminding them of the value they bring to the world.