AI is most powerful when it amplifies human decision-making and not replace human decision-making. Building a startup is a marathon, not a sprint, and resilience is such an important part of building your own startup because there will be deals that fall through that are of no fault of your own, and you have to be able to handle the emotional ups and downs without getting too high or too low.
Practice a lot and work on translating technical concepts into something easy so that people who are not in data science can grasp it; you really need to be in data science itself to understand the full process of collecting data, aggregating it, cleaning it, standardizing it, and applying algorithms to find patterns and insights that lead to behavior change.
Become so obsessed about something you love and just share with people. The moment you own your obsession and you just drive it, you attract people and you realize suddenly you're not alone. Dare to be obsessed for the things that you love and dare to share them.
Appreciate life, catch moments, try things—don't ask maybe this is good if I do or not, just do it. When I speak with terminally ill patients they have a big list of stuff that they never done and a lot of regrets too.
Our message is really just to be open to try something new and be open to inviting your friends to try something new. A lot of what we do is education because people don't really understand what they're going to be drinking and tasting, and through that we reach so many people who realize this is actually very approachable and very understandable.
Once you know it's so much easier—there's not mystery there. We approach our blends very much from a culinary background to make sure that they're layered like a cocktail and that there's something you want to drink socially.
Talk to customers and show an honest interest about the topic; don't start selling from day one, start asking questions instead. If you have found a customer audience, you need to be intrinsically motivated to make that solution succeed and stick to that problem.
Be happy and don't care about what anybody says. If you fail in life you can always go back—you can work for somebody else or travel to another country, and there's always a way to come back. Enjoy life because you only have one. Don't wait until pension because there's so much beauty around. Break free from autopilot by challenging yourself, challenging people, and challenging systems instead of doing things the same way just because that's how they've always been done. The right person in the right place doing work they love will do it with passion and do it correctly. Listen to feedback, stay close to customers, and keep iterating—it doesn't have to be perfect; just start and improve as you go.
When you do business, you follow the opportunity. If the opportunity says that you have to pivot to take company, you follow that one.
When you do business you follow the opportunity. If the opportunity says that you have to go pivot to tech company you follow that one. It takes time—you have to be patient as a founder and your team have to be patient, but at the same time you have to be very disciplined with your money.
It has to be a product market fit. Just because your product was successful in the Netherlands doesn't mean it's going to be successful in Germany. It takes a little bit longer to establish business relationships on the German market. You have to be a bit more patient.
Not giving up, the learning, having a vision. You have to have a vision without a vision you know somebody once upon a time said if there is a ship leaving the shore if the ship doesn't know where it's going it's going to go into circle you need to know where you're going so then you can build based on on on that.
Fast revenue, work fast, doing fast and talking fast, learn fast is so very important.
Never stop building. You will fail all the time. We're currently failing in our designs, but this is part of the process and you have to just refine it, refine it, refine it until you become successful.
If you are a founder, you absolutely have to look at what is the EIC. If you have a breakthrough technology, it's your chance. For investors, come and invest with the EIC because we are derisking your operation. For corporates, if you have a challenge, look at amazing companies and solutions that we have in our portfolio.
Working with marketing in deep tech is super fascinating and interesting and you learn something new every day because you work with such a talented team. The importance of explaining something complex in a way that it's easy to understand is always a challenge but really important.
Never give up.
We've always done things which we enjoy. We're a small company and we like it that way but we have fun every day. We take the assignments which we like, we strive to have the best possible experience for players, and that makes our clients happy. If you start a company, you need to find your way, try experiment a little bit with what you like and then go for what your motive is.
Everything that we did was a wish from a customer. We never thought well we simply want this feature to exist without really knowing that someone needs it. So everything that we built was a wish from a customer, and I think that is very important because otherwise you are maybe building something that people don't want.
Make sure that you have fun today, because it might still be a long time before this becomes mainstream. If you don't have fun today, then you will never have the stamina to keep up doing it.
Stay as stupid and naive as when you started — it is the energy that keeps you going and resilient.
Technical founders should start with the problem.
Stick with your vision.
Paid traffic is just fuel: don't buy ads on a vague hypothesis. Niche down, get the positioning as clear as daylight, and only pay for traffic once clients already find you organically.
Start with co-founders if you can — completely different angles make much richer decisions than building alone.
It will be much harder and take longer than you think — and you only fail if you quit: take feedback, adjust, keep going.
Take risks while you can — don't get so comfortable that you stop; and keep your energy and curiosity beyond work.
Never play safe.
Every day an entrepreneur has three reasons to quit but four reasons to go on.
Talk to your customers, and find both the reason to buy and the reason to use — they are two different things.
Dare to do things, and talk to your lawyers for legal confidence.
Channel disappointment into 'what next' — the connections made in those moments can beat the original plan.
