Boris Bogaert

Boris Bogaert speaks with the fluency of someone who has been on both sides of the table, and that dual vantage point shapes almost everything he says. He does not talk about venture capital as an abstract allocator of money but as a partnership forged in discomfort. The story he returns to, about Harald McPike putting €5M into Xpenditure on common shares with no preferred rights or vetoes, is not just an anecdote but a thesis: sometimes the investor should sit in exactly the same boat as the founder, no safety net, no structural advantage. That instinct runs through Pitchdrive's own design. Bogaert has deliberately capped the fund at around €50M, pushing back oversubscribed money, because the model is built to hit 4x through a healthy middle of solid exits rather than betting everything on one unicorn to save the portfolio. It is a quieter, more founder-aligned version of venture math, and he says it plainly: "Wij willen het liefst aan de kitchen table zitten" ².

His read on markets is blunt and unsentimental. He does not hedge when he says SaaS as a category is finished: "Saas is weg. Kijk eens naar de beurskoers van Monday, van HubSpot de laatste weken en maanden. SaaS, voor ons bestaat dat bijna niet meer" ². For him the opportunity has migrated from crowded sales-and-marketing tooling to business process automation, where AI can save companies real money rather than just organize their pipelines. Layered onto that is his observation that the AI wave is spreading faster than any previous technology shift, a claim he makes in almost identical language across two different conversations a year apart: "de snelheid waarop het verandert is ook echt een factor vier tegenover alle andere revoluties" ³, and later, more viscerally, "Geen enkele CEO die zegt: je moet nu ChatGPT beginnen gebruiken. Mensen zijn dat beginnen gebruiken. Dat maakt een ongeziene virale speed die je nog nooit gezien hebt" ². The consistency of this point across sources suggests it is not a talking point but a genuine, evolving conviction about how adoption now happens from the bottom up, unmandated, almost viral.

He is equally clear-eyed about how funding itself has changed shape. The old ladder of pre-seed, seed and angel rounds has, in his view, simply collapsed into one continuous negotiation: "Pre, seed, angel round — it's all one round. Die rounds zijn een beetje broken. Dat bestaat eigenlijk niet meer" ². At the same time, round sizes have grown roughly fivefold in a decade, because investors want longer runway and are chasing fewer, stronger teams. Paradoxically, he notes that building has never been cheaper, since experiments that once needed five developers can now be run by two people in days, yet raising that first seed round has become harder, not easier. This tension, cheaper building set against tougher fundraising, is one of the sharper insights he offers about the current moment.

On founders themselves, Bogaert is almost clinical about the limits of human intensity. He puts a number on it, more than once: "Voor mij is de maximum leeftijd van de founder die dat aan kan, dat zelfde craziness, is 10 jaar" ², echoed in his observation that "een gemiddelde startup founder houdt het 10 jaar vol en dat is lang, vooral de stress, en dan moet je vooral heel goed voor jezelf zorgen" ³. He compares the eventual exhaustion to an athlete or manager stepping away at the peak, and he is unromantic about salaried life as the alternative, comparing a paycheck to a drug: "Voor mij is de loon hetzelfde dan heroïne. Dat is dezelfde verslaging. Ene keer als je loon hebt, moet je dat loon elke keer hebben" ². His advice to graduates follows directly from this: join an early-stage startup rather than a corporate, because the first ten employees are effectively entrepreneurs themselves, while corporate life traps most people in a cage they never leave.

What makes a founder worth backing, in his telling, is restlessness rather than satisfaction. He describes teams that hit €1M ARR and immediately ask how to reach €3M, celebrating only briefly before moving on, summed up in his own shorthand: "Succes maar niet te lang. En dan next" ². This same restlessness explains his skepticism toward manufactured ecosystems. He has seen attempts to engineer the next Silicon Valley with buildings, perks and public money, and dismisses them flatly: "Wat pingpongtafels en wat zotte mensen — doesn't work. Ik kan u zeggen: dat werkt niet. Veel overheidsgeld daarin pompen: doesn't work. Dat moet vanuit een buik komen" ². For him, ecosystems like the so-called Netlog mafia only emerge organically, over fifteen years, from a core of companies that actually succeed and then seed new founders themselves.

That belief in earned, first-hand experience also shapes how Pitchdrive selects mentors: only people who have founded and scaled a company themselves are allowed near portfolio founders, because authenticity, "feeling the pain," is non-negotiable and book-learned advice is rejected outright. It connects to his broader origin story about building Netlog from Ghent with a mindset that anything was possible internationally, "die cultuur was wel van: alles is mogelijk. Vanuit Gent kunnen wij hier internationaal denken" ², and his pointed reminder that the data advantage platforms like Meta enjoy today, Netlog effectively had back then, "de data die vandaag de Meta heeft, hè, die hadden wij toen" ². Running through all of this is a final, practical takeaway he repeats to founders: valuation on paper means nothing until an outside party actually pays, so the real number is cash on the account at exit, and every founder should be thinking about their exit plan from day one, not as a sale of the whole company necessarily, but as a clear-eyed answer to the question of what winning actually looks like.