Michiel Bearelle

Michiel Bearelle's thinking centers on a single conviction: build with people, not in isolation, and validate before you build anything at all. He describes how Officient started with nothing more than a clickable Adobe XD prototype and a round of visits to actual companies to see how they handled HR processes, rather than disappearing for six months to write code no one had asked for ⁵. That same instinct for grounding software in real practice resurfaces years later at Peepel, where he gathers "tien experts" around a table to talk through skills, routines and "moments that matter" before shipping features, insisting that "de beste HR-software bouw je niet vanachter een bureau" . The through-line across nearly a decade of building is that product decisions get made with users and experts in the room, not assumed from a founder's desk.

He is equally deliberate about the mechanics of founding a company: money, equity and roles. At Officient, the four co-founders negotiated their equity split upfront, before incorporation, based on actual contributions rather than a default 25/25/25/25 — a process he treats as valuable in itself because it reveals how co-founders negotiate under pressure ⁵. Cash discipline shows the same pragmatism: invoicing annual licenses a year ahead, leaning on social secretariat partners for advances, and using signed partnership contracts as leverage with banks when the books looked worse on paper than the business really was ⁵. He and his co-founders capped their own salaries and hired people instead, on the logic that "wij kozen er gewoon voor om iemand aan te nemen in plaats van ons loon te verhogen" ⁵ — equity, not salary, was where they expected to make money. And when cash was genuinely tight, the ordering was fixed: "medewerkers zijn ook nooit één dag te laat betaald," small suppliers got paid, and only large suppliers who could absorb it were asked to wait, always with proactive communication ⁵.

His account of the Officient exit to Exact is candid about both the mechanics and the psychology. Internationalizing payroll software, he explains, is brutally hard because every neighboring country regulates differently — the Netherlands has no ziektebriefje but the wet poortwachter instead — and that regulatory wall pushed the team toward selling rather than raising more to expand ⁵. Valuation wasn't reverse-engineered from a formula; it came from calling founders who'd done comparable deals, like Intuo, and simply asking about multiples ⁵. And when it came to legal support for the deal itself, he's blunt about upgrading ambition: "we moeten hier een goede advocaat, geen Jupiler Pro League maar Champions League lawyers," because earn-outs and signing/closing structures matter far more than the headline number ⁵.

What's most striking is how the exit changed his relationship to risk — in the opposite direction people might expect. He didn't become bolder with newfound wealth; he became more cautious, because "vroeger had ik niks, dus kon ik ook niet veel verliezen, maar nu wilt daar als een goede huisvader mee overweg gaan" ⁵. That same caution shapes how he's approaching his next venture: he's consciously avoiding pouring his own exit money into Vendorvue, aware that "ge zijt altijd verliefd op uw eigen kind" and that emotional attachment can cloud financial judgment — so he plans to raise external capital and hold co-founders to the same standard ⁵.

The Peepel-era material shows this same operator instinct applied to a maturing company rather than a fresh idea. He frames HR itself as a function drowning in the wrong work — "de afdeling die verondersteld wordt met mensen bezig te zijn, maar in de praktijk verzuipt in payroll, onboarding en 100 admin taken" — and positions Peepel's AI as the thing that finally frees HR from that load . He talks about partnerships in explicitly architectural terms, describing a "open ecosysteem" with "geen muren rond onze software, wel slimme connecties met de beste spelers in de markt," which is why the Attentia partnership gets framed as shared vision rather than just a deal . And he's visibly invested in people surviving hard pivots: recounting how a brand-new hire's first job happened to coincide with killing Vendorvue and pivoting the whole company, he credits the employee's resilience as saying "meer dan veel CVs" — a sentiment consistent with someone who has repeatedly prioritized people and honest communication over cleaner narratives, both in crisis and in growth.

Taken together, the concrete takeaways are consistent whether he's talking about 2018 or 2026: validate with real users before building, structure equity and roles explicitly and early, protect employees and small suppliers first when cash is tight, hire specialist help for high-stakes deal mechanics rather than generalists, and treat post-success caution as a feature, not a contradiction, of having something to protect. His own words capture the arc best — from a founder with nothing to lose who would "gewoon" call a prospect and ask to show an idea ⁵, to one now consciously guarding against being "verliefd op uw eigen kind" ⁵ as he builds again.