Anais De Boulle

Across her public commentary, Anais De Boulle returns again and again to the idea that Belgian and European scale-ups do not fail for lack of ideas but for lack of structure, discipline and community. Her LinkedIn presence is built around visible milestones in the Deloitte ecosystem, congratulating founders like those behind Kando Care and BrightAnalytics, where she singles out "Lode Bogaert, Olivier Seynhaeve & Merijn Demuynck" for "another great milestone within our Belgian scale-up ecoystem" . These posts are not incidental cheerleading; they reflect a consistent belief that individual company wins are proof points for a wider ecosystem she is trying to cultivate.

That ecosystem ambition becomes explicit around the first Deloitte #FounderSummit, which she frames as more than a networking event. Working alongside partners at SuperNova, Leen Anthuenis and Jürgen Ingels, she describes the goal plainly: "One of our ambitions at Deloitte is to build more than a network. We want to build a community where #founders inspire one another, learn from each other and create meaningful connections that last well beyond a single event" . The follow-through to Love Tomorrow, where she says the group "explored new ideas, discovered emerging technologies and reflected on how today's innovations are shaping the world of tomorrow" , shows this is a sustained project rather than a one-off gathering, with an explicit throughline from summit to festival to ongoing relationships.

The substantive core of her thinking shows up in the Ben's Mentors podcast with Omar Mohout, where she moves from celebration to diagnosis. The headline statistic she cites there is stark: only 5% of Belgian tech companies ever reach €10M revenue ⁴, and the conversation is essentially an attempt to explain why so many stall before that threshold. Her answer centers on product-market fit discipline, expressed through three concrete rules: roughly 40% retention, two to three cost-effective channels, and genuine readiness for the next order of magnitude ⁴. This is a deliberately unglamorous, checklist-style view of scaling, positioned against the more romantic founder narratives that dominate press coverage.

Alongside product discipline, she is emphatic about legal and governance discipline, particularly around founder relationships. Her clearest formulation is the analogy of prenuptial planning: "We drukken het in juristen vaak zo uit van regel al uw scheiding voordat je getrouwd bent" ⁴, meaning founders should settle their equivalent of a divorce before they marry. Concretely, that means shareholder agreements, IP anchoring and consistent contracts negotiated up front, because without them founder conflict becomes one of the most common startup killers and due diligence in seed rounds will simply fail ⁴. This is a recurring pattern in her thinking: the romantic stage of founding a company is exactly when the unromantic paperwork matters most.

She extends the same logic of self-respect and negotiating strength to commercial contracts. Startups that passively accept the terms enterprise customers hand them are, in her view, weakening their own position; even early-stage scale-ups can and should push back and negotiate from their own terms, which in practice shortens sales cycles and earns respect from bigger counterparties ⁴. This connects to her broader characterization of the strongest scale-up leaders as fundamentally commercial operators: "Voor mij zo de star scale-uppers, dat zijn de grootste sales guys die er zijn" ⁴. Sales capability, in her framing, is not a peripheral skill but close to the defining trait of the founders who actually break through.

Finally, she draws a link between personal discipline and long-term company performance. Fast 50 winners, in her account, share long-term passion and discipline, treating their bodies like top athletes, knowing when to say no, and deliberately surrounding themselves with people better than themselves ⁴. Taken together with her ecosystem-building work on LinkedIn, the throughline is consistent: sustainable scale-up success is less about a single breakthrough moment and more about structural rigor, in contracts, in commercial negotiation, in personal habits, and in the surrounding community, sustained over years rather than a single funding round or headline milestone.