Bert Marievoet

Across three conversations spanning 2023 to 2025, Bert Marievoet tells essentially one story with different chapters: he keeps building things from nothing, keeps losing money and time doing it, and keeps insisting that the discomfort of starting over is the actual point. "Ik wil eigenlijk niet blijven een groot bedrijf groter maken. Ik wil iets creëren, iets maken from scratch. Dat was echt de drang om te gaan ondernemen" ², he says, and that line explains why he left a well-paid, secure job at Twitter to found Native Nation, and later walked away from a successful agency exit to gamble on web3 and then on a knowledge-monetization platform. He is explicit that the safety of a corporate role, however golden, felt like being reduced to "a number among 4,000 people" ², and that real entrepreneurial "eindverantwoordelijkheid" cannot be compared to failing safely inside someone else's company ³.

A recurring mechanical theme is that opportunity often comes from one uncomfortable, proactive act rather than from credentials. He got the Twitter Belgium job by cold-emailing the VP Europe while he was simultaneously being courted by Facebook, effectively inventing his own opening ²³; he calls the email itself the hinge point, "een gewegd mailtje dat heel veel in beweging heeft gezet" ². The same restlessness shows up in how Native Nation grew: the agency scaled to €3M in recurring revenue by selling ambitious campaigns first and only figuring out execution afterward, a controlled version of fake-it-till-you-make-it he sums up as "toffe campagnes bedenken, die verkopen en dan eigenlijk naar elkaar intern zeggen: hoe gaan we deze doen? Was elke keer gelukt" ². It worked until it didn't: the punishing pace of the early solo-founder phase meant he "echt kapot gewerkt, sliep drie uur per nacht" ³, and he leaned on twice-daily transcendental meditation as a literal survival mechanism, describing his alternative to consulting ChatGPT as sitting at the window and simply trying to feel what's next ².

Marievoet is unusually candid about failure and about reframing it as data rather than identity. "Ik heb fantastisch veel geld verloren," he says flatly ², and he treats Wagmi Beer's collapse (blocked by state-by-state US alcohol licensing) as a straightforward lesson to research regulatory constraints before launching, not as a wound to nurse ². His broader philosophy of risk is almost Buddhist in its symmetry: "Niks is nooit zo erg dan dat je het inschat. En omgekeerde is niks vaak zo fantastisch als dat je het inschat" ². On the emotional cycle of founding companies he's equally direct, recalling that in 2021 people around him were paper millionaires and two years later the mood had reversed completely: "Uw slechtste dagen gaan voorbij en uw beste... daar moet je gewoon van bewust zijn dat er ook terug slechte dagen komen. Het is een oneindig iets" ³.

On selling a company, he draws a sharp distinction between legal terms and lived expectations. Negotiating the Native Nation sale to SBS/Telenet taught him that "verwachtingen staan niet in een juridisch document," and that even with lawyers on both sides, interpretation disputes surfaced months later because expectations hadn't been made "crystal clear" up front ³. The earnout structure itself became a cautionary tale: selling 100% of the shares but collecting only 70% of the cash upfront meant that when COVID crushed activation-driven revenue by 70-80%, the remaining earnout evaporated ². He's equally unsentimental about what happens after an exit: SBS, hemmed in by Telenet's oversight, never had real ambitions for the agency, and he eventually left after asking leadership why they'd even bought it ³. He's also clear that a successful exit buys no credibility elsewhere: pitching investors on a new tech startup, he found that his agency track record counted for nothing since nobody knew he could build or lead an actual product, making the seed round for One Of Us far harder than raising for Native Nation had been ³.

His theory of early-stage company-building centers on two sequenced concepts: founder-product fit before product-market fit, and team before product when it comes to investor conviction. He learned the first the hard way when his first two Beam co-founders quit a week after launching at Web Summit because they'd stopped feeling the product, forcing a restart: "Je hebt zoiets als een founder product fit ook. Nog voordat je product market fit hebt, de stap daarvoor is eigenlijk de founder product fit" ². The second belief, that investors bet on the team's ability to pivot rather than on the current product, is inseparable from his insistence that pivoting itself requires zero ego. "Er is geen plaats voor ego en twee: snel durven schakelen," he says, arguing the customer's signal is worth ten times more than the founder's own opinion, and that founders who wait years hoping a stale idea will click simply miss the window ². He applies the same logic to recruiting people without salary in the early days: you win them over by making the equity story credible and by refusing to be stingy with shares, on the principle that "je samen met goede mensen iets heel groot kunt maken als je daar niet gierig in zij in aandelen" ², preferring, in his words, a smaller slice of a much bigger pie.

His hiring philosophy sharpened painfully across ventures. At Native Nation, recruiting from his own media-world network based on past job titles rather than actual skills led to bad hires and constant turnover; he later concluded you have to hire for what people have actually done, not what they once were called ³. He also learned he personally lacked the temperament for operations and needed an early operational counterpart obsessed with timesheets and structure to balance his own visionary, business-development instincts ³. This self-diagnosis carries into how he frames Beam's core insight: platforms become victims of their own success, and once LinkedIn's user base swelled past a billion its signal-to-noise ratio collapsed, opening space for an algorithm-free, follower-first knowledge platform where experts monetize calls, webinars and PDFs directly ². He pitches it, only half-joking, in