Christian Kroll learned early that there was money to be made on the internet. The difficulty was that much of it seemed to end up with Google.

While studying business administration at Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander University, he built a website comparing online banks and brokers. He had already started trading shares at sixteen. The website earned commissions, but getting people to visit meant paying search engines for advertising. As he later explained in an interview with his university, paying for traffic taught him the strength of Google’s business model.

Kroll would eventually build Ecosia, the search engine that uses its profits to fund climate action. He would also give up his right to sell it for personal profit. The two decisions belong to the same story, although neither was an obvious destination for a teenager interested in the stock market. Getting there involved travelling, several unsuccessful projects and learning how to run a company while already trying to run one.

He grew up in Wittenberg in the former East Germany. After the Berlin Wall fell, his parents responded to uncertainty about their jobs by starting businesses of their own. In a 2020 interview with Authority Magazine, Kroll described their example as an influence on his entrepreneurial outlook. He also drew a wider lesson from that background: economic systems could change. The arrangements people lived under were not necessarily permanent, even when they appeared to be.

After university, he spent an extended period travelling through Nepal and South America. In his account to the European Investment Bank, encountering poverty and the destruction of forests changed what he wanted to do with his business experience. He began connecting two things he had previously encountered separately: the money generated by internet searches and the money needed to support environmental work. The comparison website had shown him how advertising could finance a business. Travel gave him a reason to care about what that business financed in turn.

The first attempts did not neatly turn that idea into a company. In Nepal, Kroll started Xabbel, a search engine intended to support local development projects. It did not take off. He later described another search project, Forestle, and an online learning platform as ventures that also failed to work out. By the time he founded Ecosia in 2009, he had already spent time discovering that a worthwhile purpose was not enough to make people use a product.

Ecosia brought those earlier experiments into a proposition that was easy to understand. People could search the web, while the business used the money it made to support trees and forests. Today, its advertising income comes from clicks on ads supplied through Google and Microsoft networks, and its profit commitment extends to climate action more broadly. Kroll had found a way to connect a routine activity to something users might care about without asking them to make a separate donation each time.

Building a convincing alternative still took work. Kroll was a business graduate with some programming knowledge, and his own description of the early technology is refreshingly unpolished. On the Impact Podcast in 2021, he recalled a slow service that broke frequently and returned results that were not particularly good. He also admitted to spending considerable time trying to understand and improve the code himself. “I hope nobody will ever find the code that I wrote,” he joked. Eventually, he could hand that work over to people better qualified to do it.

The business developed slowly too. In a 2021 interview with Startup Guide, Kroll described the first few years as closer to a hobby project than an established company. He was learning through mistakes and relying on the business’s own cash flow, leaving little room for hiring or substantial investment. Independence appealed to him, but he was candid about its practical consequences. Having nobody pushing for an exit did not mean having the money to build everything he wanted.

One person who helped was Tim Schumacher, an experienced entrepreneur and investor. Kroll told Startup Guide that Schumacher brought both money and the knowledge of someone who had built businesses before. His description of their relationship emphasised their shared environmental aims. That support complicates the picture of a founder doing everything alone: Ecosia’s unusual path also depended on finding someone willing to back it on unusual terms.

In 2018, Kroll made that commitment permanent. He and Schumacher gave up the right to sell Ecosia for personal profit or receive dividends. Kroll’s announcement presented this as making his existing promises legally binding. He specifically thanked Schumacher for waiving the right to recover his investment. It was a commitment made by two people with different roles in the company, rather than a principle the founder could simply impose on everyone else.

Under Ecosia’s steward-ownership structure, the Purpose Foundation holds a veto share that protects the arrangement. The foundation does not decide how to run the search engine. Control remains with people involved in the business, with provisions for passing that responsibility to future stewards. Kroll kept the ability to help shape Ecosia while surrendering the familiar reward of selling his stake if it became highly valuable. He also accepted a constraint on his own future choices: changing his mind would no longer be enough.

That decision did not require him to stop earning a living. In the EIB interview, Kroll defended paying people properly for environmental work; he and Ecosia’s employees received salaries. This is a useful detail in a story that can otherwise become a little too saintly. He was building an organisation in which people could have careers. The sacrifice concerned the financial upside of ownership, with all the uncertainty about how large that upside might one day have been.

His ambitions for the product have continued to expand. In 2024, Ecosia announced a joint venture with French search engine Qwant to develop a European search index, the underlying database used to produce search results. By July 2026, Ecosia said the venture’s results were being served to users in Germany, following France the previous year. For a founder whose early comparison website had depended on paying Google for traffic, investing in more of the infrastructure behind search brings his career back to a familiar concern: who controls access to information, and on what terms?

The project also leaves him facing a thoroughly ordinary founder’s problem. Users still expect a search engine to find what they need, quickly and reliably. Protecting Ecosia’s purpose cannot compensate indefinitely for an inferior product, and its ownership arrangements cannot by themselves remove its dependence on large technology partners. Kroll has committed the company to a particular destination. He still has to build a service capable of getting there.

Asked by his university in 2020 whether he had been afraid of failing, Kroll said his greater concern was that progress was too slow. That answer helps explain why giving up an exit did not mean giving up ambition. The founder who began by comparing brokers still cares about how a business works and how much it can achieve. He has simply made it impossible for a lucrative sale to be the point at which he decides it has achieved enough.