Christophe Morbee

Christophe Morbee's public voice splits cleanly into two registers: the operator building Besox and the investor building NewSchool, and the throughline connecting both is a distaste for standing still. He is blunt about what he considers real entrepreneurship versus mere management: "Gewoon een bedrijf hebben die ieder jaar hetzelfde doet, dat is managen, dat is niet ondernemen." ⁷ That line explains a lot of his own history at Besox, where he pushed 20-25% annual growth for six to seven years at profit margins of 0-5%, deliberately trading profitability for expansion ⁷. It also explains why, when a bank balked at financing that growth, he switched lenders and personally pledged his house as collateral rather than slow down: "Ik heb wel mijn huis in borg gegeven om juist die tweede schijf te krijgen." ⁷ The willingness to take on personal risk to keep growth uninterrupted is a recurring pattern, not a one-off anecdote.

That same risk calculus carries over into how he talks about venture investing. He rejects the conventional framing that public equities are the safe bet and startups the gamble: "Ik vind in mijn ogen een groot risico om te investeren in Apple vandaag dan om te investeren in pre-seed tech." ⁷ This is not a throwaway provocation but a stated investment thesis: NewSchool is built to write many small pre-seed checks (30-40 startups, up to €15-20M raised) on the belief that concentrated bets on mature, expensive public names carry more downside than a spread of early-stage founders. It is also why he draws a sharp line against private equity, even though he acknowledges it would have been the easier fundraising path — "would have raised €15-100M already" by his own account ⁷ — because buying already-profitable companies is, in his words, "meer making rich people richer" ⁷. He wants to be backing people who are still building the thing, not people extracting value from something already built.

On what he actually looks for in founders, Morbee is unusually explicit about method. He weighs team drive, technical ability, and sales/marketing capacity, and he flags the last as the systematic weak point of Flemish founders ⁷. But the most distinctive thing he says is about how he tests conviction rather than just credentials: "Soms test ik dat ook wel, de drive van de founders, door in het weekend of na de uren of 's morgens vroeg te bellen om te kijken of dat er een telefoon wordt opgepakt." ⁷ This is a concrete, repeatable diagnostic, not a vague appeal to "passion," and it fits his broader instinct that commitment should be observed under real conditions rather than taken on faith.

His account of the Officient exit shows the emotional register underneath the analytical one. Turning an angel check fourfold in three years visibly reset his sense of what was possible: "Ik dacht maal vier op drie jaar tijd. Wat is dat hier jong? Welke wereld dat ik nog doen." ⁷ That reaction is presented as the hinge moment that pushed him from being an occasional angel investor into building NewSchool as an actual fund. The Aikido Security and Spotable award wins, which he references directly on LinkedIn — "very happy to be an investor there with NewSchool.vc" and describing himself as someone who loves "finding teams like these who give their all and make it happen" — read as continuations of that same excitement, not new material.

Structurally, he is candid about why he chose the solo GP model and what its edge actually is: speed. With no partners to align with, he argues decisions happen in days, which matters most at pre-seed, where founders otherwise lose months of sales momentum to fundraising ⁷. He also frames NewSchool's differentiation not around capital size but around Besox's infrastructure: a 4,000-client network that feeds dealflow and introductions, plus the unusual ability to see real-time hiring and retention data in portfolio companies because Besox runs their payroll — "no other VC has" that vantage point ⁷. He is equally clear-eyed about the limits of small deals, noting that VCs generally won't engage with €300K rounds because the fund's economics can't be sustained by small checks even at a strong multiple, and that founders seeking VC money should be targeting €1-3M-plus raises ⁷.

Finally, there's a consistent thread about culture transfer from Besox to the startups he backs: low workload, good offices, unlimited leave, on the logic that if employees commit like entrepreneurs they deserve entrepreneurial freedom, and that a founder's own schedule naturally prevents the policy from being abused ⁷. He also describes a flywheel effect around exits, where liquidity events like Officient and Yuqido generate both new founders (employees who mention startup ideas at office events) and new capital circulating back into the Ghent ecosystem ⁷. Read together with his more routine LinkedIn activity, promoting hiring at Besox , payroll client testimonials , NewSchool closings , and startup partnerships , the picture is of someone who treats talent, capital, and infrastructure as parts of a single loop he is actively trying to keep spinning.