Jochen Callens

Jochen Callens's account of building and selling Jobtoolz keeps returning to one idea: they knew the destination before they knew the route. "Eigenlijk wisten we al voordat het product gebouwd was dat we het wel gingen verkopen" ², he says, and that clarity shaped nearly every decision that followed, from refusing venture capital to setting a milestone and staying open to offers once it was hit ¹. He is equally candid that this worked because they didn't know what they were getting into: "Wij zijn gestart vanuit de zekere naïviteit dat we dachten van oké, we laten dat één keer bouwen en dan verkopen we dat en dat gaat wel werken. Moesten we het allemaal geweten hebben achteraf, dan gingen we waarschijnlijk nooit gestart zijn" ². He repeats the same sentiment about the product build itself, saying "Gelukkig waren wij super naïef, want als we niet zo naïef geweest [waren], ging het waarschijnlijk nooit van de grond zijn" ¹. For Callens, ignorance wasn't a weakness to be corrected so much as a fuel that got the company off the ground before the real costs became visible.

That said, he is unsparing about the biggest concrete mistake: paying an agency roughly €120,000 for a fixed-price first version of Jobtoolz before getting real market feedback, and then scrapping it entirely rather than patching it ¹. His retrospective advice is blunt and specific: "Moest ik het kunnen herdoen, dan zou het een no-brainer zijn om een developer aan te nemen, zou het een no-brainer zijn om een mvp te maken die bijna niets kan en van daaruit te gaan vertrekken" ¹. This connects to a broader operating principle he credits for keeping the company disciplined: "Onze revenue moet de ontwikkeling kunnen betalen" ² — development had to be funded by sales from month one, which he frames as the real proof of concept, reinforced by a competitive dynamic between the two founders who literally counted whose sold-client logos went on the wall ².

On the founding team, Callens pushes back against a standard piece of startup dogma. Conventional wisdom says a tech company needs a technical cofounder paired with a commercial one; Jobtoolz had two sales profiles, which investors later criticized, yet he credits that exact pairing for the company's growth because both founders could immediately commercialize the product ². What he says mattered more than skill complementarity was trust: "Ik kon perfect zeggen: als ik er niet ben, heb ik 100 procent vertrouwen in wat dat Dieter deed, en omgekeerd. En ik merk soms binnen founding teams dat dat niet altijd het geval is" ¹. Still, he doesn't romanticize the choice entirely — if he were starting again, he'd add a technical cofounder from day one to avoid the delays the all-sales setup caused ¹, and he's frank that "je moet kunnen verkopen" ¹ was the non-negotiable skill underneath everything else.

COVID gets singled out as the inflection point that turned a struggling niche product into a scaling business. With HR staff suddenly working from home and finally confronting their Excel-based processes, the team spent the first lockdown weeks calling every HR contact they had to ask what was missing, and conversion rates jumped from roughly 25-30% pre-COVID to 50-55% during it ¹. But he's equally clear that the growth years were not glamorous in the moment: "Iedereen ziet altijd de mooie kant van verkopen, maar de jaren ervoor... Ik herinner mij momenten dat wij belden met elkaar en dat we zeiden van: oei, en nu volgende maand, hoe gaan we dat doen?" ¹. That anxiety, paired with a near-missed payroll early on, is why he kept at least three months of cashflow buffered at all times, out of a sense of responsibility toward employees' families ².

The decision to refuse venture capital and instead sell the company outright is one of his most repeated positions. "Wij zijn ondernemers en wij willen niet continu bezig zijn met te lopen van kapitaalronde naar kapitaalronde" ², he says, framing VC funding as trading entrepreneurship for management: "Je wordt groter en je wordt eigenlijk meer een manager, minder een ondernemer, en ik denk dat dat twee verschillende zaken zijn" ². When international scaling eventually required capital, they chose a full sale to Strada instead of raising a round, and spent two to three years deliberately making themselves dispensable — building processes and delegating to their CTO and marketing director — precisely so they'd have the leverage to choose their own exit moment and leave cleanly rather than endure a long earn-out ². That same restructuring solved an investor objection (that both founders were commercial profiles) by letting the CTO and marketing director buy in as shareholders, which incidentally gave Strada a ready internal successor CEO ¹. His view on staying post-acquisition is unambiguous: founders who stick around are typically "fed up within six months because the culture and vision inevitably change under new ownership" ², and "voor ons was dat heel duidelijk: als we exit, dan moeten wij er ook uit" ².

He's also self-critical about how the due diligence process itself was handled, admitting "wij zijn daar ook weer als ondernemer wel in de fout gegaan omdat we te bereikbaar waren" ¹ — answering the buyer's questions directly instead of routing everything through an advisor gave Strada unfiltered access and endless follow-up questions, a mistake he'd fix by delegating fully to Dealmakers next time ¹. On the investor relationships that eventually produced the buyer, his approach was patient rather than transactional: he declined funding offers that came in after an awards nomination but kept quarterly calls going with nearly every interested party, which is how Strada surfaced from that wider network of contacts ¹.

Perhaps the most unexpected thread in his account is how hard the period after the sale actually was. He describes imagining the payout as a release valve — "Ik dacht van: de keer dat die handtekening er staat en het staat op de rekening, dan begint de nice life" ¹ — only to find the opposite: restlessness, anxiety, and a scramble to figure out "en nu, wat ga je nu doen?" ¹, which led him to jump too quickly into a CEO role that didn't fit before he found his footing at Voka ¹. He describes nearly chasing an unrelated business idea (acquiring car washes) out of that same manic energy before consciously forcing himself to slow down ², and on financial advice from other exited founders he parked the proceeds in a one-year term account to buy thinking time, eventually settling on fund-of-funds exposure rather than direct startup investing ¹. Across both interviews, the throughline is that entr