Jan Hollez

Jan Hollez's thinking centers on a single, repeated demand: intensity beyond what feels reasonable. "100% is niet genoeg in mijn ogen," he says, "ik zeg vaak je moet 300% door iets gaan" ⁶. This is not a throwaway line but a worldview he applies to himself and to how he judges others, including founders he might back: anyone unwilling to state plainly what they are building has, in his eyes, already failed the test, because "als iemand anders je kan verslaan gewoon omdat hij meer gedreven is, ben jij niet de juiste persoon om dat probleem op te lossen" ⁶. He extends the same logic to lifestyle expectations for founders, rejecting the idea that startups and balance coexist: "voor work life balance moeten... dat is goed als je dat wilt, maar dan moet je geen start-up beginnen" ⁶. Ambition, for him, is meant to be almost absurdly large. He recalls that at Deliverect the goal was never modest market capture but something closer to cosmic overreach: "wij willen de wereld veroveren. We wanna conquer the galaxy. I will bring a burger to the moon" ⁶. His public advice distills to one line: "whatever you're thinking, think bigger" ⁶.

A second recurring theme is his insistence on disciplined scaling rather than reflexive scaling. Drawing on the failure of his earlier venture Siruna, which raised too much money too quickly and got locked into a B2B pitch it could not abandon when the iPhone changed the market, he concluded that founders must "schalen wat dat wat dat werkt en niet uw probleem schalen" ⁶. This is why, even after building capital and experience at Posios and Lightspeed, he and his co-founders deliberately restarted Deliverect scrappy rather than scaling prematurely ⁶. The lesson is explicitly tied to capital discipline: raising too much too early distorts what gets built and how fast, so the amount of money available should never dictate the pace of scaling ahead of proof that something works.

On fundraising itself, Hollez describes a repeatable, almost mechanical playbook: send continuous updates with concrete targets to a long list of investors, then hit those targets, so that the company becomes the party being chased rather than the one begging ⁶. He frames this transparency as counterintuitively efficient, since "everyone is already up to date," which reduces ad hoc questions and pre-qualifies which investors are genuinely interested. He is candid about turning this leverage against investors who had previously lowballed him, giving one investor "exactly one chance at a record-high valuation" by exploiting FOMO created by an earlier undervaluation of Posios, and he is blunt that European investors' habit of lowballing kills their own future access to good deals ⁶. His view of early-stage European VC is scathing: he contrasts it unfavorably with banks, arguing at least a bank "weet dat hij een bank is en dat is logisch dat hij minder risico pakt," whereas VCs who claim to offer risk capital in practice "pakt niets van risico" until everything is already certain ⁶. That skepticism was born from necessity: Posios ended up financing itself through an ING loan secured against the founders' own houses because venture capital wasn't actually available for early risk ⁶.

He also reflects on product philosophy and dealmaking instinct in ways that reveal how he reads markets and people. He describes Posios as having been "product voordat product LED bestond" ⁶, meaning the product sold itself to customers despite the founders being weak at formal sales process, a trait he believes investors value even above a classic technical-plus-commercial founder pairing. His account of the Lightspeed acquisition shows the same attentiveness to psychological framing: he and his co-founder staged the negotiating room, taking the uncomfortable stools themselves and leaving Lightspeed the one comfortable sofa, in order to control the dynamic of that meeting. That same refusal to settle for less shaped why he eventually left Lightspeed to start Deliverect, since Lightspeed's IPO focus meant it would allocate only two people to delivery integration when the founders wanted at least twenty, and, in his words, "we don't take no for an answer" as a working principle ⁶.

On personal capacity, he explains a somewhat paradoxical choice: learning to fly helicopters at a moment when he had no spare time at all, precisely because "ik had teveel ik had geen tijd en dus heb ik iets extra gedaan dat veel tijd kostte om te zorgen dat ik meer tijd" ⁶. The point was forcing himself to build Deliverect so it could run without his constant presence, using an extreme personal commitment as leverage to build real delegation into the organization rather than remaining a bottleneck.

More recently, his public statements shift toward ecosystem-building and a new focus on European sovereignty in space and defense. He argues plainly that "we hebben Googles nodig hier" ⁶, framing Europe's shortage not as one of capital or momentum but of people capable of executing at the required speed, which is the stated motivation behind a prospective fund with Jürgen Ingels. This concern recurs in his public appearances: pitching the Smartfin Space & Defense Fund at Innovation Day , and in a Dutch-language conversation describing Europe as being "op een belangrijk kantelpunt," where wanting more autonomy requires actually daring to invest in the technology, companies, and entrepreneurs that make it possible . He treats this as continuous with his community-building work at Deliverect's recurring AI events, describing their purpose as straightforward: "share what we're learning, build a true community, and help push the whole ecosystem forward together" . The GenAI event series he convenes gathers practitioners to discuss concrete, hands-on lessons in building with AI, framed around "real lessons from people actually shipping AI" , and he links this same energy to broader conversations about rewiring engineering organizations and driving AI adoption, calling the current pace of innovation "wild" .

Taken together, his public voice is consistent across contexts: an operator's impatience with half-measures, a founder's distrust of capital that arrives without real risk-taking, and an increasingly outward-facing conviction that Europe's next competitive advantage depends on backing people who will actually execute at the scale the moment demands.