15-minutes of Martijn Rutten

Hello Martijn! You have a super impressive background; tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into engineering.

I was hacking electronics in primary school, not having a clue what I was doing. My whole room was filled with electronics. I then studied electrical engineering (which I barely use), and eventually went to Phillips Research. I wanted to be a system architect, which I did for a while - car radio, mobile phones etc. The rest of my life has been centred around software.

In high school, I did my first piece of code - I wrote an astronaut game. My first serious coding was in University when I created a program to analyse brain activity. It created videos of internal brain activity showing how the brain anticipates action. This was super interesting.

Professionally, I started in embedded space, lots of C++. I then Founded a startup (Vector Fabrics) with two former colleagues, where we developed analysis technology to detect critical errors and opportunities for parallelism in large embedded software. ?We hired rocket science level programmers to help us, real computer scientists. I ran that company for 10 years before we went bankrupt.?

What have been your career highlights?

My company Vector Fabrics, even though it went bankrupt!? The team we built there is one of the things I am most proud of, really incredible talent - very diverse, from all over the world working together to crack a very difficult problem.?

Later on, I coached 60-70 startups in an accelerator program in Eindhoven and I realised you learn more from a bankrupt company than a successful one. I coached them on investors, marketing strategies, building teams and everything in between. Standing on the sidelines, I found myself itching to do it all again, so I did!?That's when Othera came about (an Australian company in the blockchain/ fintech space).

And lowlights?

Twice telling teams I built up, to go home, we were done - that was hard. Families depending on the job they're in, and me telling them it’s over. However, seeing the careers they landed afterwards softened the blow! They all went on to do some amazing things.

What was your biggest learning?

90% of startups fail, you need grit!! This is one of Insify’s values - don’t give up! To me, this determines the success of a startup. The biggest role as a founder is to make sure their startup lives long enough (financially) to have the opportunity to get lucky! Stars need to align, so you need to make sure you’re still around for that.

I like it - we are very lucky to have you! How did you come to join Insify as the CTO??

I found them (Insify founders) through the startups I coached. You develop a feel for the startups that have the right ingredients. I’ve learnt you have to have a lot of the ingredients right to be successful. Market timing has to be right - there has to be a real need in the market; then the right team, with the right diverse expertise. You need all the elements to make the right soup! Also, the VCs have to be right for the mission. With Insify every checkbox was ticked, which is why I joined them. The founders have diverse skill sets, an experienced team, powerful VCs that understand the mission, and most importantly a very strong market need.

What makes Insify’s technology different from other insurers?

When starting Insify we spoke with the market leader in insurance systems in the Netherlands - it’s written in cobol, a lot of old financial systems are. They told us they would take 5-7 years to move to the cloud! We started fully digital, with a modern tech stack. What we're doing is fully serverless - a cloud native approach. I am going in detail here, but we have a fully serverless back-end with event sourcing. This gives a powerful, very flexible and dynamic onboarding funnel for our customers. We show different examples if you are a hairdresser than an IT consultant, which is a pattern you don’t see a lot.?

What's your vision on technical depth vs building features?

Typically something developers can be frustrated by is that they constantly have to build the next best feature for a company, while in the background creating a total mess that they don’t like to work with anymore and they’re not proud of. What we've been doing, is going in waves. We’d have a wave where we build the next onboarding funnel for a new insurance in a new country - very concentrated, with a tough deadline, super ambitious and going very fast to build functionality. To meet these deadlines, you’d have to cut some corners.?

Once that is delivered, in the next wave we would stop, sit down and resolve technical depth. We’d spend multiple sprints refactoring, adding tests, cleaning up and generalising the architecture. The team has mentioned they are surprised that we would allocate so much time to do that. It works well - when the next wave of building functionality would come, all of a sudden new features would be done in a very short time, because the architecture was so sound. That’s why we keep going in these kinds of phases.

Sounds like a developer's dream! What do you look for in future Insies*??

I always look for people who are smart and can get things done. The combination of both is important. You can’t have one without the other.?

Rather than purely focusing on years of experience, I'd rather people who can learn fast and grow. Potential to learn and grow is much more important than where you have worked or for how long, and our interviewing is catered to that. We do some scary live programming in the first interview. I’ll also spend time giving constructive feedback - I want them to walk away from the interview having learned something too.

I’m also a sucker for having diversity in my team - people from all over the world, all ages, genders and backgrounds. We also need more women! This is something we are working on not only in my team, but company wide.?

What kind of culture are you looking to create on your team??

I always tell candidates who join- if you have a great initiative that you think has value for the company (it could be anything, from organising a lab day, or karaoke - it doesn’t have to be technical related) - ask yourself two questions:?

#1 Will this be good for the company??

#2 If I do this, will I get fired??

If the answer is yes to #1 and no to #2, then go do it. If it turns out to be a bad idea, don’t do it twice. This is the culture I like to see in the team. We need people who are willing to take a risk, for the greater good.?

In a startup you have opportunities to grow in all sorts of directions. I like to encourage my team to try new things; partner with people with the skill set they want to grow. This not only benefits the employee, but also the company as you have a team with broader skill sets (and better retention!).

I like to challenge people to find what they want to do, how they want to grow - and try to find that for them at Insify. Of course it isn’t always possible within Insify, and in that case I’d help them to find what they are looking for outside of Insify.?

What’s the best part about working at Insify?

Every startup says they are disrupting an industry, but if you look at how broken this industry is - how they avoid risk at all costs, to avoid paying out a claim, you can see it really is broken. Isn’t insurance about taking a risk? And spreading the risk so you can afford taking on the risk in the first place? Entrepreneurs take risks every day, they need a safety net. We can change the industry, we actually care. We don’t want to avoid paying a claim at all costs. I see this first hand in the response of our customer ops team - we want to fix the problem, and change a broken industry. I couldn’t be prouder of the work we are doing.?

It’s great working in a team that cares so deeply about the problem they're solving!

So Martijn, what do you do when you’re not building world-class tech and leading a team at Insify??

That is something I am not allowed to talk about. The team recognises that once they let me start talking about my biggest hobby I don't stop. So I am not allowed to talk about it normally..but here it goes.. kayaking!

I go all over the world to do this, in very remote places, and kayak down pretty extreme rivers. From Nepal, to Uganda, the US, South America and locally, in the Alps. Unfortunately due to covid I am left dreaming of when I can go again, and have had to resort to watching Youtube videos of kayaking instead!

Thanks Martijn! A little over 15 minutes, but you did get to talk about your favourite hobby :)

*Insie = Employee of Insify

To learn more about kayaking (and working at Insify) check out our live roles here.