Joris Van Der Gucht

Joris Van Der Gucht's thinking centers on one conviction that has only sharpened over time: culture is the substrate everything else grows from. "Het start allemaal met de cultuur van uw bedrijf. Het valt en staat allemaal met de cultuur," he said reflecting on Silverfin's first decade ⁶, and by the time he was building Ravical that belief had hardened into practice rather than sentiment. A tech company, he argues, is "meer dan ooit een mensen business" because in B2B you are selling trust and credibility, and culture from day one is what lets technology and go-to-market work together ⁴. He is candid that culture is also fragile and transferable in ways founders underestimate: when Silverfin brought in an external CEO, he accepted that "die cultuur die verandert, hè. Dat is ook oké. Maar dat is een ander bedrijf" ⁵, a lesson he says he had naively not anticipated the first time around.

A second constant is his obsession with rejection and persistence, told through near-identical stories across interviews. Silverfin's first year was almost nothing but no's, to the point that prospects printed the incorporation deed and asked who would guarantee the company would still exist: "Vergeet niet hoeveel keer nee dat wij gekregen hebben. Dat is ongezien. Ik denk dat we het eerste jaar alleen maar nee kregen" ⁶. That same refusal to accept a single no is how he describes landing early believers: "Eén keer nee krijgen, ja, daar doen we eigenlijk niet aan mee" ⁵, and how he explains outbound sales tactics so aggressive some prospects were contacted a hundred times before converting: "We hebben sommige prospects 100 keer lastig gevallen tot ze zeiden van stop het, maar nadien zijn ze wel klant geworden" ⁵. He generalizes this into a sales philosophy for B2B workflow businesses specifically: nobody is actively searching for improvement in a process they've run for decades, so you must go outbound and proactively re-educate the market rather than wait for inbound interest ⁴.

His view of Belgian, and specifically Flemish, entrepreneurial ambition is pointed and self-critical. "Think big zit niet in ons DNA als Vlaming," he says, framing Silverfin's growth into a genuine global challenger as proof that the ambition gap is cultural rather than structural: "Dus eigenlijk die challenges zijn identiek, dus waarom is het dan niet mogelijk?" ⁶. He credits exposure to serial entrepreneurs who had taken companies public with showing him Silverfin's problems were the same problems everyone faces at scale, and he allows himself, carefully, to claim the outcome: "Ik durf toch wel te zeggen dat wij vanuit België hier toch wel een serieuze challenger hebben gebouwd" ⁶. This sits alongside a strong distrust of the "go international fast" dogma of the 2010s. He now argues that going international multiplies management complexity by roughly ten rather than two or three, since managing someone in the UK, Netherlands or France differs fundamentally, and that deep, dominant local positions are underrated compared to premature global expansion ⁴⁵.

On the mechanics of building companies, he keeps returning to founder dynamics and speed as the two variables that matter most. He attributes most of the startup failure rate not to product or market but to bad founder agreements struck too early, contrasting that with Silverfin's own foundation of near-total trust between co-founders with little formalized on paper ⁴. He is explicit that unequal cap tables and overly complex early terms poison the journey: "Als je van in het begin al een beetje vastzit, te grote cap table, te moeilijke afspraken, ja, dan wordt de journey wel een beetje lastiger" ⁵. He extends this into how he reads investors and acquirers, saying the terms on offer already reveal who someone is, and that good investors keep terms simple because over-securing a deal kills founder freedom and motivation ⁴⁵. Speed itself he treats almost as a moral good: "Er zijn meerdere routes naar succes, dat speed is hard to beat" ⁴, and he calls delaying product validation "het domste wat je waarschijnlijk kan doen" ⁴.

His account of the Silverfin exit is deliberately anti-strategic: there was no exit planning across ten years of building. "Wij hebben hier iets gebouwd dat een industrie een beetje verandert," he says of the outcome ⁵, insisting acquirers appeared because of relentless focus on market and product, not because of any engineered path to sale ⁴. He describes writing the CEO job posting as "growth CEO" without mentioning M&A specifically so as not to skew the candidate pool toward dealmakers rather than builders ⁵, and he singles out Visma's willingness to preserve culture and measure employee net promoter score as the signal that made them the right acquirer ⁴. Running through all of this is a personal operating discipline he tries to install as a system rather than a mood: reviewing his own playbook weekly, on Sunday evenings, and pushing himself to obsolete his own role. "Kwartaal op kwartaal wil ik mezelf ontslaan en wil ik de nieuwe versie van mezelf aannemen," he says, treating self-replacement as the job description of a founder in a market moving this fast ⁴.

With Ravical, his thinking shifts from scaling a known model to interrogating whether the whole professional-services business model survives AI. He frames the entire knowledge-worker industry as a historical parenthesis, "de industrie die bestond tussen de opkomst van de computer en de opkomst van AI," arguing the value of knowledge is eroding fast and advisors must reinvent how they charge, not just how they work ⁴. That plays out concretely in his account of UK accounting firms: 92% of SMEs would pay their accountant more, and 94% said they would bring outsourced work back if the firm could deliver it, which he reads not as a service gap but a capacity gap that AI is now closing. "Firms always wanted to serve these clients. They never had the capacity to do it, and that is the part now changing" . He pairs this with a blunt diagnosis of the industry's real bottleneck: "The industry has no problem adopting AI. It struggles to build a new business model around it" , and he predicts pricing itself must move from seat-based licensing to token or value-based models where vendor and customer are mutually exposed to whether value is actually delivered ⁴. Because that redefinition happens so fast, he treats moat and vision as moving targets rather than fixed assets, saying Ravical's own sense of its moat is completely different every few months and that continuous iteration, not a locked long-term plan, is now priority number one ⁴.