Dimitri Oosterlynck

Dimitri Oosterlynck's thinking centers on a single recurring paradox: the things that look like risks are often the safest choices, while playing it safe is the real danger. "Ik heb zelf de indruk dat eigenlijk het gevaarlijkste is om geen risico te nemen," he says ², and this belief shows up everywhere in how he built Gimber, from betting his last €270 on 25 bottles of ginger concentrate ² to quitting a previous business six months in because half-measures don't work: "als je iets wil uitbouwen en je wil er een succes van maken... dan moet je er minimaal 110% voor gaan" ¹. He frames this as a binary choice every entrepreneur faces — "Ga je spelen om te winnen of ga je spelen om niet te verliezen?" ¹ — and his own answer is unambiguous: commitment has to be total, because half of a hundred percent isn't a viable strategy for building something real.

That conviction extends to how Gimber went to market. Rather than following the drinks industry's standard playbook — horeca for visibility, retail for volume, distributors for sales — Dimitri built a direct network of concept stores reached through courier services, a choice he now frames as having started out naive but turned into genuine competitive advantage ¹². The logic, in hindsight, was that concept stores offered an open, health-seeking audience with virtually no competition, a channel Gimber still exploits ². He backs this with a broader read on the market: big brewers are pouring money into alcohol-free products and expect roughly a quarter of production to be alcohol-free by 2024-25, with one in four under-25s in England no longer drinking ² — evidence that the unconventional bet on an alcohol-free ginger drink was riding a real structural shift, not a niche fad.

A second major thread is health as the entrepreneur's foundational asset. "Ons lichaam, dat is echt ons eerste kapitaal," he says, comparing it to a credit card that quietly depletes with every overdraw until one day it's empty ². He's explicit that this isn't abstract wellness talk but a business mechanism: a negative spiral where declining health produces worse decisions, which damages the business, which further erodes mental health — a loop he experienced directly after an untreated burnout that pushed his numbers into the red ¹. His prescription is blunt: "Investeer massaal in gezondheidskapitaal, dat zal de allerbeste zet zijn" ². Recovery, in his account, came from reinventing himself with sharper focus rather than pushing through, and he ties his own resilience to something almost sensory — "Per fles die ik verkocht voelde ik het leven en voelde ik mijn energie weer omhoog gaan" ¹, as if each sale was a small proof of life during a hard stretch.

On people and culture, Dimitri repeatedly undercuts the romance of the entrepreneurial idea itself. "Een idee is niets waard, daar geloof ik echt in. Vroeger dacht ik omgekeerd," he says, arguing the impulse behind a company is banal and that everything built on top — product, marketing, distribution, the accumulated daily corrections — is what actually creates value ². That belief pushes him toward heavy investment in people and feedback systems rather than idea-protection. He installed near-monthly feedback rituals at Gimber, including prepared two-way sessions between every manager and colleague, and a 'shoot at the CEO' format that let the team fire any question at leadership for two hours, which he credits with defusing tension after a dismissal ². "Feedback is echt de view van succesvolle ondernemingen, dat besef ik elke dag," he says ², treating open critique as infrastructure rather than an occasional nicety. His hiring philosophy follows the same instinct for trusting people over credentials: he hires for vibe over CV, asking whether he'd be happy standing next to someone at a trade fair or spending twelve hours in a car with them, because "enthusiasm is much harder to fake than experience or references" ². That trust in latent capability generalizes into a broader claim about organizations: "Ik denk dat wij eigenlijk het potentieel van onze mensen zeer zwaar onderschatten" ².

Perhaps the clearest evolution in his thinking is about his own role. Early on he was CEO and the driving operational force; later he deliberately stepped back, promoting his managing director Tim to CEO far sooner than planned, inspired by another entrepreneur handing his company to a much younger successor, on the belief that people grow only when given real space and responsibility ¹. Dimitri now describes himself through a musical metaphor: "Als je een bedrijf begint ben je eigenlijk een beetje de singer-songwriter... en als founder ligt effectief op vandaag mijn meerwaarde voor het bedrijf veel meer in de compositie" ¹. He extends the metaphor into sport, calling himself "een middenvelder die assists moet doen en dat hij kan scoren samen met het management team" ¹ — explicitly ceding the scoring role, reporting to the CEO, and accepting the CEO's decisions rather than steering day to day. This is a notable reversal from someone who once needed to control outcomes directly; his stated growth is learning that his highest-value contribution is now in product and brand, not command.

Finally, he treats ownership and alignment as the glue holding a growing company together. Describing Gimber's management buy-in structure, he points out that every manager put personal savings on the line and had to convince someone at home to support the decision — "Iedereen wil winnen, want iedereen heeft er een stukje van zijn spaarcenten voorgelegd en iedereen heeft wel iemand thuis moeten overtuigen om het te doen" ¹. For him this shared financial and emotional stake matters more than any theoretical risk of conflicting interests in decision-making, because it points every nose in the same direction ¹. He extends this logic to customers as well, framing early buyers not as transactions but as declarations of belief: "Elke fles die gekocht wordt is een stem voor Gimber: we geloven in jullie, we geloven in je project, we willen er een stukje mee bouwen" ². Across both interviews, the throughline is consistent: real commitment, whether financial, physical, or emotional, is what turns a banal idea into a company, and Dimitri's own journey from a nearly broke founder to a "founder-composer" stepping back from the CEO chair reads as a lived argument for going all-in on the right things and none at all on the wrong ones.