Why I work with startups

Today I'd like to share a personal story with you. Yesterday the Belgian financial daily De Tijd had a full page story about Loop Earplugs, a Belgian startup that realised sales of Euro 42 million last year all the way from 1.1million in 2020 and now employs 90 people. A company openly expressing its unicorn ambitions. You can find the article here (in Dutch):

The story of Loop and its success today touches me a lot as we brought them the main new investors in an investment round at a crucial time when they were still very small and when Covid hit in the first quarter of 2020.

There is sometimes a bit of a hype in the press about startups that can give the wrong impression. Believe me, daily reality is far from what you see in the press or on a conference.?Behind the fancy pitch deck there is a daily rollercoaster of ups and down, a lot of stress and statistically the odds of success are stacked against you.?But with perseverance, a bit of luck and years of hard work, some will get there and become really successful.?And Loop is one of these.

It gives great satisfaction to feel you are having a positive impact and help ambitious people realise their own dreams.?

It also made me think about why I started my own entrepreneurial journey.?

When I decided to leave the golden corporate cage in 2016 many of my friends or colleagues did not understand.?In general people don’t give up Swiss salaries voluntarily for the uncertain life of the startup entrepreneur,?especially not when they have a family with three teenagers to feed.

I had been working for quite some years in the financial sector in different countries as an expat and I will always be grateful to online broker Keytrade Bank for giving me the chance (yes in Sept 2008!) to set up a new Swiss office and get the first taste of entrepreneurship.

At the beginning we had no banking license yet, nor staff, let alone clients. It was a great adventure, a sometimes bumpy ride that I very much enjoyed. It taught me a lot and it gave me much sympathy for the daily challenges of starting from scratch and the complexity of scaling a new business.

By 2016 I felt I had gone as far one could go within the corporate environment and did not want to regret later not to have at least tried to stand on my own feet.?

So I decided for me the freedom was more important than stability and income.

From intrapreneurship to entrepreneurship it was. And this way Finwise was born in August 2016. I was very proud. Except that I had only a vague idea what I was going to do.

When you start to work for yourself and already mid career, do realise that you start again on the first step of the ladder.?Yes you are free now but nobody cares about you anymore either. No more fancy title nor the respect you automatically had before because of your position or your company. Nobody to delegate things to. You just have to do everything yourself or it doesn’t happen. It is a rude awakening.?Nothing really prepares you for this.

To get through this period and to avoid you give up before you get there, you need to have a strong “why.”? A big reason why you do all this and why it is all worth it.?

For me the reason was that I wanted to be able to decide myself what to do on a daily basis, who I work with, have full control over the values that were important for me.?And I wanted to do something that I felt has a positive impact on society. My wife is a nurse and a teacher and nobody will question how good and important that is for society. In the financial sector it’s sometimes a bit more difficult to see your contribution.

So after initially trying different startup ideas I eventually settled down and decided to focus on tech startups in fundraising. Personally I think nothing is nicer than helping startups and their ambitious people realise their dreams.

Startups create the jobs of the future, they realise the products and services we will be using in the next years. Startups need to think internationally by definition and as I lived and worked outside my native Belgium for most of my career it felt like my natural habitat.

Coming from the banking sector and having been on the investment side before in capital markets I was surprised to discover how inefficient the early stage market functions. On the one hand you have the startups who are supposed to find their investors spontaneously by developing trust and friendly relations with investors over time. On the other hand you have early stage investors such as angels, family offices and VCs, most of whom proudly say only to invest in one out of a hundred deals that they are being pitched to them.

But how can a startup develop friendly relations with a hundred investors and have a hit rate of 1 out of a 100? There would not be any time left to grow the business, that same business where investors want to see traction first.

So I believed there is a role for a specialist like us. Someone who does some of the hard work of selection and finds the best startups that are attractive from an investor's point of view. Who understands the investment thesis of each investor so you only show them what is relevant and good and so you don't waste their time. So you can get to a more realistic success ratio whereby startups can still focus on business as well while fundraising. And so it becomes more fair for the startup to have support behind the screens when they are up against someone who professionally invests and has a lot more experience than the startup who does a fundraising once or twice.

It is a great feeling today to feel that I do something that positively contributes to society. It's my personal definition of success.

Everyone has their own personal story. What is yours? What is your reason to do what you do? ?I'd love to hear your experience.