Herman Van de Velde

Herman Van de Velde's thinking centers on a simple but firmly held conviction: entrepreneurs who stay locked inside their own company for too long lose perspective. He describes the risk in direct terms, warning that "je moet opletten dat je geen oogkleppen opzet" and that at certain moments you have to deliberately step outside your business, open things up, and talk to other people ¹. This is not framed as an occasional nicety but as a recurring discipline, something an entrepreneur has to build into how they run a company rather than leave to chance.

What makes this stepping-outside valuable, in his account, is specifically talking with people who are wrestling with the same kinds of problems. He is emphatic that this kind of exchange "levert u ongeloofelijk veel ideeën op" ¹. The value he describes is not networking for its own sake, and not access to some rarefied circle of experts, but the plain fact of comparing notes with peers in similar situations. That reciprocity, other founders facing analogous pressures, is what he points to as the real engine of new ideas.

Notably, he pushes back against the assumption that inspiration has to come from far away. He explicitly rejects the idea that you need to travel to a place like Silicon Valley to find it, arguing instead that "er hier ook genoeg talent is en dat er genoeg goede ondernemers zijn waar jonge mensen iets kunnen van leren" ¹. This is a locally grounded confidence: the belief that the entrepreneurial ecosystem close to home is rich enough to teach younger entrepreneurs what they need, provided they are willing to seek out those sounding boards rather than assuming better answers exist elsewhere.

Alongside this emphasis on peer exchange, Van de Velde holds a second, more personal standard: a demand for excellence in whatever is undertaken. His advice is blunt and unqualified, "probeert te excelleren... probeer eigenlijk de beste te zijn" . There is no hedging in this counsel, no suggestion that adequate performance is acceptable; the bar he sets is being the best at whatever the task is, applied broadly rather than to any single skill or project.

That drive toward excellence is paired with a realistic, even sober acknowledgment that business life will not always cooperate. He states plainly that "het leven van een onderneming is niet altijd gemakkelijk en er zullen periodes komen dat het minder goed zal zijn" . This is presented as an expected condition of running a company, not a failure state to be avoided, and the implicit takeaway is that entrepreneurs need to prepare mentally for those downturns and keep pushing through them rather than being derailed by them.

Taken together, these two strands, the outward-looking habit of seeking peers and sounding boards, and the inward-facing discipline of striving for excellence while accepting inevitable rough patches, form a coherent picture of how Van de Velde frames entrepreneurial resilience. The concrete takeaway from his remarks is practical: build regular habits of stepping outside your own company to talk with comparable entrepreneurs, don't assume the best insights are located elsewhere, hold yourself to a standard of trying to be the best rather than merely competent, and expect and endure the difficult periods as a normal part of running a business rather than treating them as anomalies.