Thomas Aertgeerts

Thomas Aertgeerts's thinking centers on a single diagnosis: traditional accountancy is not broken because of bad intentions but because of structural mismatch between the profession's promises and its actual delivery. His clearest formulation of this is "De realiteit is een monster van Frankenstein" ¹, describing how a typical accounting firm stitches together 20-30 different software tools that promise integration but deliver a patchwork held together with duct tape. This diagnosis did not arrive fully formed. Astro started as a pure technology company selling software to accounting firms, but after two to three years Aertgeerts realized the firms themselves did not feel enough pain to change: "Wij moeten niet die boekhoudkantoren helpen, want die hebben op zich niet zo'n groot probleem. Nee, nee, wij moeten de klanten van boekhoudkantoren helpen, want die zijn allemaal mega ontevreden" ². That pivot, from selling to firms to becoming a firm itself with a "technology DNA," is the origin story he returns to across both conversations ¹².

A second recurring theme is his critique of how large accounting groups treat small clients. He describes a deliberate pricing strategy in which firms don't refuse doctors, consultants, or freelancers outright but quote them €450-600 a month so they either leave or overpay, a practice he calls both unethical and shortsighted: "Ik vind dat één niet ethisch, maar ik vind dat vooral ook economisch ongelooflijk dom" ¹. His reasoning is that today's small client is tomorrow's large one, so pricing them out sacrifices future growth for short-term convenience. This same conviction that small entrepreneurs are underserved runs through his account of Astro's client-refusal strategy on the other side: rather than accepting everyone, Astro deliberately said no to very small sole proprietorships and larger KMOs to focus on a specific segment, only broadening once the technology matured. He frames this bluntly: "Hoe kunt je schalen door klanten te weigeren? Dat is wat we gedaan hebben" ².

On expertise and specialization, Aertgeerts is emphatic that the traditional model asks the impossible of individual accountants. He argues no single person can master tax law, bookkeeping, business advice, financial ratios, and HR at once, pointing out that even within tax law each lawyer occupies a narrow niche: "Ene mens, hoe briljant dat je ook zijt, kan nooit in al die aspecten uitblinken" ¹. His answer is that firms should specialize rather than claim to serve everyone from students to large enterprises, and that knowledge should be embedded in the organization through playbooks rather than trapped in individual heads, since people eventually leave no matter how good the environment is ¹. This organizational-knowledge philosophy connects directly to his claims about talent and AI: because entry-level bookkeeping is heavily automated at Astro, junior staff do more complex work than accountants with three or four years of experience elsewhere, and AI has advanced to the point that, in his words, "Die AI is nu beter dan een boekhouder tussen 0 en 5 jaar ervaring" ². New interns, he says, are now trained by studying the AI's reasoning rather than doing rote work, which he calls "the reversed world" ².

Aertgeerts is candid about the gap between marketing and reality in accounting software generally. He jokes that the only thing he genuinely likes about competing software is the advertising: "Weet je wat ik echt goed vind aan die software? Dat zijn de reclames. Echt goede reclame. Weet je wat ik echt slecht vind? Al de rest" ². Behind the joke is a serious claim: providers promise "no hands accounting" but only 20-30% of the work is truly automated, with the rest manually keyed in by junior bookkeepers or offshore labor, because OCR software can read an invoice but cannot make intelligent booking decisions ². This is also the basis for his advice to entrepreneurs choosing an accountant: if a traditional firm promises real-time bookkeeping, treat it as a red flag, since traditional setups typically run at least three months behind, and simply having books current "on the spot" already gets a client 80% of the way there ¹.

On AI more broadly, his view has sharpened into something close to a structural claim about capital and competition. Building technology used to require significant capital and teams; now, he argues, "Zeker AI is een game changer. Met zelfs met ene briljante developer kunt gij bij wijze van spreken de wereld veroveren" ¹. He extends this into a rule of thumb for evaluating any dev investment: team size is irrelevant, what matters is what return each euro invested in technology yields, since a lean team can now do what was impossible even two or three years ago ². He frames Astro's own model, blending software and human service so tightly that clients cannot tell whether AI or a person handled a task, as evidence that services and software companies are merging into a single category, one AI will only accelerate ².

Running underneath all of this is a personal register about conviction and risk tolerance. Aertgeerts repeatedly signals no regret about leaving a legal career for entrepreneurship, first plainly ("We zijn nu zes jaar verder, nog geen minuut spijt van gehad" ¹) and then more emphatically ("Ik heb nog op geen enkele moment, ook niet als het moeilijk ging, gedacht van was ik nog maar advocaat gebleven. Nul keren" ²). He notes the timing of his departure from corporate life with some irony, describing his last day in a "safe corporate context" as the first day of the COVID lockdown ². He also frames entrepreneurship itself as totalizing responsibility, "Als je ondernemer zijt, alles is uw probleem. Alles, alles" ², and counters that pressure with a mantra of composure, "Kalmte alleen kan u redden" ², alongside a self-check he calls his twelve-month test: asking whether he would have signed up for today's position twelve months ago, as a defense against comparing himself to an unreachable ideal ².

A final, concrete takeaway concerns mentorship and learning. Aertgeerts credits a switch from a corporate investor, who resisted the very ideas Astro was built on, to a serial-entrepreneur investor as a turning point, noting that one hour of conversation with the right person can compress three months of management work into immediate insight ¹². This sits alongside his stated appetite for continuous learning, "Ik wil leren, leren, leren, leren, leren" ¹, and his belief that in five years the accountant's job should contain zero compliance work and instead be built around eight advisory calls a day, turning what has been an introvert's profession into fundamentally a people business ². Taken together, his positions form a consistent argument: the accounting industry's problems are structural and fixable through integration, specialization, embedded knowledge, and aggressive use of AI, not through asking individual professionals to be more heroic.