Camilla Hessellund Lastein: The 24-year-old taking on the global publishing industry

If you search for the name Camilla Hessellund Lastein online, you will find a TED talk called “What I want to be when I die”.

In it Hessellund Lastein, a slight 24-year old from Denmark, confesses she is already terrified of dying: “I am terrified of leaving this world without making an impression.”

Hessellund Lastein needn’t be so worried. Her education startup, Lix, is taking on the elephantine academic publishing industry by building an e-learning platform that is safe from piracy.

Lix claims to have acquired up to 50 per cent of UK textbooks for digitisation, despite only just having launched in the UK. With the advent of digital textbooks, Lix is on a mission to end students carrying heavy materials between classes and spending a fortune on textbooks when they really only need one chapter.

The idea has proved popular with investors. Lix has just closed a $5.4m (£3.9m) round of investment led by Danish entrepreneurs David Helgason, founder of games engine Unity, cloud-computing innovator Tommy Ahlers, and Anders Holch Povlsen of Bestseller, a multibillion dollar global retail company, and the second biggest private landowner in the UK. That brings its total funding to $7.5m – a lot of cash behind what Camilla herself admits is not a very sexy business.

The idea for Lix came to Hessellund Lastein when she was studying business and economics at university. She remembers the frustration of trying to find a formula she had forgotten the name of in a textbook during an exam.

“I was so frustrated because I knew the answer but I couldn’t find it,” she says. “I use Spotify and Netflix and I thought, ‘Why isn’t there one for textbooks?’ It’s very simple. I later found out that many people had tried and failed.”

The “Spotify for textbooks” has been a harder sell for publishers. A few companies have gained traction. In the UK, Bournemouth-based Kortext has contracts with universities including Leeds and Plymouth to provide students with access to thousands of textbooks and universities with data to see how students are interacting with the text. In the US, VitalSource provides e-textbooks from 500 global academic publishers.

These platforms must compete for rights from academic publishers that hold the keys to educational texts. Streaming has been accused of destroying the music publishing industry’s ability to make money out of its catalogue. It’s hard to see how a similar platform could appeal to publishers in a different sector.

It took Hessellund Lastein two and a half years to sign up Lix’s first publishing partner, the UK publisher SAGE, in 2015.

Huw Alexander, digital sales manager, says right from the start, SAGE could see Lix’s potential: “The enthusiasm and intelligence of the founders, Camilla and Kasper, was impressive, persuasive and refreshing. Lix have always been focused on both the needs of their publishing partners and the user experience of students.

"Through their platform, SAGE has been able support an interactive community to enhance learning.”

Once SAGE was on board, Lix benefited from a ripple effect. It now hosts more than 7,000 publishers including giant companies like Pearson and McGraw-Hill. In some cases, Lix is the only platform to get the rights to material apart from Apple, which has long had an interest in digital learning, and VitalSource.

Yet Hessellund Lastein stresses that the path hasn’t always run smooth. “All the media write about is young people who are worth this much money,” she says. “But people don’t understand when they read an article how much work this takes.”

After her mid-exam brainwave in 2014, Hessellund Lastein dropped out of university, moved back in with her parents, and started saving money from a full-time office job and a part-time waitressing job. She convinced a bank to loan her around £20,000 and put this, plus her savings, towards the development of her first digital publishing platform.

Within a year, she was bankrupt. The company she had commissioned to build the platform invoiced her for all the money that she had put into the company and left her with a PowerPoint presentation. “They took advantage of me being young and stupid,” Hessellund Lastein says. Her mother, a pilot who had sold one helicopter business and started another serving windmills and oil rigs, told her it was an experience she could learn from.

Not long afterwards, Hessellund Lastein met her co-founder, Kasper Krog, assembled a small team of developers and closed a small six-figure investment to get Lix 2.0 off the ground. But she isn’t afraid to talk about the early days.

“It’s been three years with this company,” Hessellund Lastein says. “During such a long period of time you have a lot of ups and downs. I have experienced that the hard way. Sometimes you get in a period where everything sucks and it’s super important to stop, take the time to rest and be with your family and your friends. The people who said they worked five years with no breaks are lying. You will get ill and feel terrible.”

She never lost faith in the business opportunity of digitising learning materials for millennials. She saw a generation born with iPhones, but still going through university learning with heavy, expensive textbooks or scanned PDFs. “You wouldn’t believe that this is an industry that exists,” Hessellund Lastein says. “The publishing industry is broken.”

Lix’s offers publishers a new fix. It collects data on the kind of textbooks used by universities to show gaps in the market for certain textbooks. “We gather data on the reading lists so they know if universities have adopted their products. This saves them so much money in sales,” she says. Students, meanwhile, get books for between 20 and 60 per cent cheaper than the hard copy price.

Unsurprisingly for Hessellund Lastein, this is just the start. Lix currently allows iPad and iPhone users to search across books, highlight passages and take notes. The company has immediate plans to launch on Android and introduce new features to allow users to collaborate across study groups.

“The long-term goal is to personalised education,” Hessellund Lastein says. “People have different ways of learning: some like to read, some like to listen, some like videos. We are looking at how to make the learning process as effective as possible.”