Fabio Romagnoli

Fabio Romagnoli's thinking centers on a single structural conviction: that a marketing agency should not merely advise on value creation but actually share in it. Tunity takes equity stakes in the companies it works with, and Romagnoli frames this as a matter of intellectual honesty rather than a business gimmick. "We will put our money where mouth is," he says, adding the pointed observation that "de meeste marketingbureaus roeren alleen uit voor een klant, maar wij ons voor ons eigen geld ook" ¹. This is not incidental positioning; it is the organizing idea behind the company, and it recurs whenever he explains why Tunity differs from ordinary agencies.

That same logic of reciprocity surfaces in how he talks about no-cure-no-pay arrangements. When clients wanted to pay Tunity only on results, he pushed back on the asymmetry: a supplier who absorbs downside risk should also get access to upside, not just a fee for services rendered ¹. This isn't abstract fairness talk, it became the actual mechanism Tunity operates by, and he benchmarks the results of this participation model against public markets and private equity, claiming returns that have outperformed both the roughly 8% historical average of ETFs and the 11-15% typical of private equity ¹. Where this thinking has visibly matured is in how he now discusses exits: early participation deals were struck without planned exit terms, and he now treats this as a lesson to correct going forward, since flexibility that exists "aan het begin" often disappears years later ¹.

Romagnoli is unusually blunt about deflating the startup mythology he grew up on. The American garage-founder stories he absorbed as a kid, he now says, hid the investors, mentors, and favorable circumstances that made those stories possible ¹. This isn't nostalgia correction for its own sake, it feeds directly into a counterintuitive piece of advice: despite having bootstrapped everything himself through roughly 25 side projects and Innocoder, he says he would tell young founders today not to bootstrap, and not to start at all unless the idea is genuinely innovative. "Is het innovatief? Is het nee? Niet starten," he says flatly ¹. He is equally candid that the early years cost him more than they paid: "als het per uur tel, was het bitter weinig," and he explicitly says he wouldn't recommend that path to young viewers of the podcast ¹. The value he extracts from that period is educational rather than financial, tied to his belief that comfort teaches the least and that being forced early into an NV structure, a shareholder agreement, and a board accelerated his learning even though it was uncomfortable ¹.

A second major thread is what happened to his leadership and vision after becoming sole founder post-Covid. He treats this as a turning point that let him build without compromise and hire purely for cultural fit, noting that the first people brought on in those weeks are still with the company ¹. He frames the earlier, more consensus-driven version of the company in explicitly Belgian terms, "voor iedereen," and argues that trying to satisfy everyone left nobody truly satisfied or dissatisfied, whereas a sole founder can commit to a sharper vision aimed at a specific kind of person ¹. This ties back into how he thinks about hiring and reward: because profits are shared across the team, he lets employees run the second interview stage and says they are stricter gatekeepers than he is, since it's their money being distributed ¹. His self-deprecating summary of the tradeoff, "ik ben misschien mijn noten verloren, maar ik heb 20 man erbij gekregen die eigenlijk dezelfde vibe geven," captures how he weighs personal cost against collective culture ¹.

On acquisitions, Romagnoli's stated position is that preparedness is not optional even for people with no active deal on the table. His central claim is that "eigenlijk ben je altijd klaar voor een overname," meaning founders should build acquisition literacy before a target or a consolidation wave forces the issue . He draws this from a personal setback: relying entirely on external advisors made him too slow in a live negotiation, and competitors, "kapers op de kust," moved in while he waited on someone else's availability . He extends the same logic to sellers, arguing that once an owner decides to sell there is real urgency, and a buyer's lack of knowledge can cause them to miss "de deal van hun leven" .

His framing of the value of training reflects the same cost-benefit instinct that runs through his views on agency compensation and startup risk: he argues courses should be judged not by sticker price but by the cost of not doing them, a gap he estimates could run from a few thousand euros to millions over a career . He initially assumed a course was simply expensive, then reframed the question entirely: "eigenlijk moet je vragen wat kost om het niet te doen" . He uses the metaphor of not flying without a pilot, knowing where the emergency exits are, to argue that structured knowledge, like a screening template, could have cut a real negotiation of his down from a year to roughly half that time .

Across both sources, the same instinct repeats in different domains: skepticism toward comfortable, low-friction paths, a preference for structures that align incentives (equity over fees, shared profits, employee-run hiring, exits negotiated up front), and an insistence that founders prepare for hard scenarios, whether M&A or startup failure, before they arrive. His own verdict on the entrepreneurial path, only half joking, sums up the tone: "Startup is a fuck-up, en zeker met zoveel geld dat wij dit gaan doen" ¹. The concrete takeaway he offers to others is less about ambition than about structure: build the professional scaffolding early, share both risk and reward honestly, and don't wait for the moment that forces you to learn what you should have learned already.