Jelle Van Impe

Jelle Van Impe's thinking centers on one company, Studaro, and one central diagnosis: Belgium wastes an enormous pool of talented students by shoving them into "quick and dirty" horeca jobs instead of study-relevant work, and the education system hasn't adapted to a labour market that has changed drastically around it ³⁴. He frames this repeatedly not as a generational failing but a structural one: "Er is geen generatiekloof, er is een innovatiekloof" ¹. Schools and universities, in his telling, teach almost nothing about the newest technologies or emerging fields like prompt engineering, so companies can't absorb innovation through fresh graduates, and he goes as far as to say "er is niks dat je niet kunt leren van het internet. Sorry dat ik het zeg, hogescholen en universiteiten: letterlijk niks" ¹². Studaro's answer is a consultancy model, not an interim one: experienced higher-educated students become Studaro employees deployed two to five days a week at student tariff, ideally six months to a year before graduation, so companies can bind talent early and hard-to-fill vacancies get filled ¹⁴. He's candid that the model is still ahead of the market — more talent sits in the database than there are known vacancies, because companies don't yet understand the concept and sales still runs on manual intake rather than something findable on VDAB ¹.

A second, more personal thread runs through nearly every episode: entrepreneurship as psychological survival. He describes founding, losing co-founders to a legal battle that "nearly killed" the company, being left "mijn eentje" in his attic during COVID, and eventually staging a 2023 buyout of every shareholder and investor after being handed an ultimatum to leave his own company — accepting the possibility of "15 years" of debt repayment because his team's jobs mattered more than the financial risk ¹⁴. Out of that he distills a hard rule: "Elke ondernemer moet een [f***] you moment hebben" ¹. His account of the co-founder split is unusually specific and self-critical: the mediator brought in was a consultant already embedded in the company and therefore not neutral, which made things worse, and his lesson is to bring in a genuinely external mediator immediately ¹. He also generalizes from that failure into concrete co-founder selection criteria: run if money is their driver, pick someone from outside your existing network, look for an opposite energy profile (structured versus visionary), and share some interest outside work ¹. Underlying all of this is a belief that silence is the real cost driver — "niet communiceren... kost je uiteindelijk veel meer" in legal fees, sleep, health and time than the hard conversation would have ¹.

Ego surfaces again and again as the villain of his story: "Ego is de grootste killer van samenwerkingen, van connectiviteit met mensen" ¹. He pairs that with a fairly severe view of human motivation — "In die end denkt iedereen in de eerste plaats aan zichzelf. Prepare for that" ² — and even claims that people who advised him to quit Studaro turned out to want his position for themselves ⁵. Yet he doesn't resolve this into cynicism; instead he preaches radical accountability paired with communal credit: "Als het goed gaat met het bedrijf, dan is het de verdienste van uw collega's... Maar als het slecht gaat, is het de fout van u" ¹. His remedy for the loneliness this creates isn't stoicism but community — surrounding yourself with entrepreneurs who ask about your personal struggles, not just your business ones, and dropping the fear that vulnerability will be weaponized against you ¹.

On careers, his advice to students is consistently anti-optimization. He tells them not to chase a dream job or an early salary — "Je moet niet op je 27 jaar 10, 15.000 willen verdienen... voornamelijk ontdek wie dat je zijt" ² — and instead treat early jobs as "a process of elimination," including deliberately taking a "brain dead" job just to learn what you don't want ²³. Job hopping for money is, in his view, a red flag that gets you rejected at Studaro itself, because someone chasing money "is toxic to team passion" ². He's equally blunt about pensions, urging people to save privately because he doesn't trust the system will hold, while insisting this only matters after you've built early-career skill and value ². On AI, his read is that it will push value toward the human, empathic side of work — sales, storytelling, customer relationships — precisely because most people still prefer a person to a chatbot, while prompt engineering becomes a legitimate skill learned by experimenting and joining communities rather than buying influencer courses ².

His entrepreneurship advice to students mirrors his own biography closely. He argues student entrepreneurship is the lowest-risk moment to start anything — "Wat hebt je te verliezen? Niets" ³ — and that parents, trained by instinct toward safety, are often "de grootste blokkade van een generatie innovatie" ³. He warns against starting from an "idea" and insists you start from a need you've personally hit, because "Een idee is niks waard, execution is key" ¹⁴. Practically, he pushes bootstrapping over fundraising: he built Studaro on €150 using free growth-marketing tools, and tells founders to map where their time goes and automate the biggest sinks before ever raising capital ³⁴. He also frames the founder's job as working toward their own irrelevance: "Ge moet zorgen dat gij misbaar zijt. Het bedrijf moet kunnen draaien zonder u" ³, and on networking he's dismissive of events in favor of relentless outbound plus inbound content, captured in "Stalk mensen, echt waar. Krijg 100.000 keer nee en de ene ja gaat zo satisfying voelen" ³.

Finally, there's a recurring belief that growth requires rupture, not comfort. "Ik denk de echte groei zit hem in breken, niet buigen" ⁵, and his account of borrowing and personally investing the largest sum of money he'd ever seen to keep Studaro alive, losing sleep over it, is offered as proof that surviving genuine self-doubt shrinks every subsequent problem ⁵. Fear of failure, he says plainly, is not something he's overcome but something he needs: "zonder dat kan ik de ambitie en inspanning die ik er vandaag insteek niet volhouden" ⁵. The throughline across all five conversations is the same insistence that ideas are cheap, execution and character are everything, and that the loneliest and hardest moments — the buyout, the attic, the mediator failure, the pizza-delivery nights while building the company — are exactly where he locates whatever authority he now claims to speak with: "Ik heb bewezen dat ik letterlijk op mezelf Studaro er heb doorgetrokken, mijn eentje" ¹.