Ruth Janssens

Ruth Janssens speaks with the authority of someone who has been on both sides of the table, and that dual vantage point is the organizing idea behind everything she says. Her core conviction is that entrepreneurship demands courage in two opposite directions: the nerve to commit fully despite the odds, and the nerve to stop when it isn't working. She distills her own experience with Small Teaser into a simple, almost consoling logic: "Ik heb het geprobeerd en ja het is niet gelukt, maar als ik het niet had geprobeerd, dan had ik het nooit geweten." ² That willingness to risk failure rather than wonder "what if" runs alongside a belief in scarcity of time that clearly shaped her decision-making — "Je beseften we dat je maar 18 zomers hebt" ² — a reminder that she treats founding a company as something with a real, ticking cost, not an open-ended experiment.

The other half of her philosophy is about knowing when to quit, and quitting well. She is unusually blunt that waiting too long is the real danger, not failure itself: "Voor mij zeer precieze kies de marathon ontlopen ben, en als ik niet op tijd mij in oude, ja, dan wordt het een sprint en niemand houdt tafel" ², meaning delay turns a manageable process into chaos that serves no one. This is not abstract for her — when Small Teaser's trajectory turned, particularly after her brother and co-founder left without a credible replacement to satisfy investors for the next round, she moved quickly to file for bankruptcy, deliberately limiting creditor exposure and making sure the team was paid through their last working day ². She frames this as an ethical stance as much as a practical one: pull the plug early, get a trusted lawyer involved, and accept that having tried everything is itself a form of peace of mind ¹. She is emphatic that the commercial court should not be feared — "there are people who help struggling founders turn things around" ² — but only if entrepreneurs ask for help before the debts become unmanageable.

A second recurring theme is the importance of formalizing relationships before stress reveals people's true character. Her advice to put co-founder agreements on paper, "ook al kende met jaar heel goed" ², is not boilerplate caution but something she clearly learned the hard way: illness, waning motivation, and irreconcilable disputes need to be addressed on paper while everyone still gets along, because pressure exposes traits partners have never shown each other before. This belief in structure and honesty over sentiment extends into how she now operates as an investor.

Having experienced the "hot breath in your neck" of investor pressure herself, she has built Morrow Ventures around the opposite instinct: staying in constant, informal dialogue with founders between board meetings, including through WhatsApp groups, so support doesn't collapse into surveillance ². She is explicit that investors should be chosen for fit and added value, not just capital — sector expertise or customer access matters, and investors without something concrete to contribute "should stay on the sidelines" ². This same skepticism toward people who claim authority without having earned it shows up in her dismissal of "expensive gurus who never built anything themselves" ², a pointed preference for lived experience over consultancy theater.

Finally, she frames her fund's identity partly through gender, arguing that a fund led by two women brings a genuinely different lens to deal evaluation, with an explicit ambition to change outcomes for female founders in an investment ecosystem she implies has not served them well ². Combined with her acknowledgment that VC-backed product companies fail at a rate above 80 percent, and that negative cash flow is simply the normal shape of the tech growth model once banks step back ², her overall message reads as realistic rather than triumphalist: startups are a rollercoaster, "als ge daar wil blijven opzetten, ja, dan moeten gewoon het lef hebben" ², and the real skill is having the courage both to ride it and to get off in time.