Gilles Mattelin

Across every appearance, Gilles Mattelin returns to the same conviction: speed and instinct beat overthinking. "Just do it hè. Just just [ __ ] jump hè," he says of starting up, and the corollary follows immediately in his advice to others: "Als je die ambitie van dagen hebt, stel het dan niet lang uit en begint daar gewoon aan" ³⁴. He is openly suspicious of the conventional career on-ramp, arguing against spending years at a Big Four before founding something, because "je leert het sowieso pas als je een start-up start" ⁴. That same impatience with caution shows up in how he talks about naivety at Intuo: "Het is pure naïviteit denk ik... Wij wisten niks hè. Niks. Letterlijk niks," he admits, but frames it as a feature rather than a bug — the not-knowing is partly what let him and Jorn Vanysacker move ⁴.

Founding with a friend is not, in his view, the reckless move people assume. "Veel mensen zeggen ook dat dat een dom idee is hè om met vriend te ondernemen. Maar ik vind dat juist een best idee, want je kent ze het best," he says, and that partnership with Vanysacker runs through Intuo, Henchman and now 100IN ⁴. Operationally, the co-CEO structure he and Vanysacker used during the Henchman sale is one of his clearest tactical takeaways: one of them kept hitting revenue targets while the other ran the parallel M&A track, because negotiating with twenty VCs is already a full-time job on its own ³. Pivoting on customer signal is treated the same way — not as failure but as the correct response: the Fagron white-label request that turned a GP course product into a learning management system is offered as proof that the willingness to bend the product to real demand was what actually built Intuo ³. He carries that logic into how he evaluates founders he backs now, praising a second-time Ghent founder who is "throwing everything overboard" for a new product on the reasoning that every day of delay burns capital ⁴.

On selling companies, his playbook is specific and hard-won. Know your buyer universe from day one, he insists — Henchman only ever had three plausible acquirers (Thomson Reuters, Litera, LexisNexis), and the founders spent two years dining annually with LexisNexis's corporate development team before any deal existed ³. When negotiations came, they used a term sheet's minimum-exit clause and competing funding offers as leverage, arguing internally that the board simply would not sell below those numbers ³. The single earnout lesson he repeats across both podcasts is the sharpest: refuse revenue-based earnouts. At Intuo, promising employees nothing would change and then resisting Unit4's integration wrecked morale and the earnout itself, teaching him that fighting an acquirer's urge to integrate fast is "self-sabotage" ³⁴. At Henchman he inverted the approach entirely, refusing any earnout, aligning instead on milestone-based integration goals, and telling staff on day one 'it's gonna change' — the result, he says, was a sale where "nobody was stressed" and LexisNexis got its head start cleanly ³⁴. Underneath the tactics is a stated principle about who gets paid: "Wij gaan geen money grab doen waarin dat wij rijk zijn maar dan de rest pist is op ons... Gent is te klein daarvoor" ³.

His growth philosophy is built around focus and clarity of metric. He is blunt that Intuo suffered from spreading itself across three products and three product teams, while Henchman's strength was doing "one thing and one thing good" — a single search bar, one pitch, one dev team — which simplified everything downstream, from marketing to sales ⁴. That focus was paired with a repeated North Star metric, time-to-meaningful-action from a search result, and an explicit, almost brazen public target: "We staken ook niet onder stoelen of banken. We're gonna scale. We gaan snel groot worden en we gaan voor midden verkopen" — a goal of 30,000 lawyers and a €100M-plus exit by 2026 that they ultimately beat on both speed and size ⁴. He also credits inbound demand, not outbound sales, as the real engine at both companies, with 60% of leads arriving inbound, and argues founders should build brand and content before scaling a sales team ⁴. As a second-time founder he changed his capital strategy accordingly: raise early, before product or go-to-market exist, because "eenmaal je begint en als je goud in handen hebt, dan komen de Amerikanen achter u aan," and spend that capital on experienced hires — poaching sales talent and installing CRM, customer success and a chief of staff before the first customer even signs ⁴.

As an investor now with 100IN, he says he decides mostly on the person, often within an hour, looking for a "krijger" who carries the same fire he recognizes in himself, and leaving deeper diligence to co-investing funds ⁴. He is wary of what outlier stories like Lovable and Aikido have done to founder expectations, arguing that inflated valuations without a plan to grow into them lead to downrounds that wreck credibility with both the market and employees ³. That same investor posture extends to backing ventures far outside SaaS: with the beer brand Tout Bien Pils and its Average Rob branding, he describes an inverted playbook where an old, commodity market gets disrupted through personal brand and online distribution r