Joris Van Der Gucht

The through-line

Across a decade of building Silverfin and the years since, one conviction runs through everything Joris Van Der Gucht says: the market decides, and it decides faster than founders are comfortable with. "Veel startups zijn met teveel bezig. Het moet breken bij de klant" [6], and the corollary, that "het uitstellen van productvalidatie is echt wel ja het domste wat je waarschijnlijk kan doen" [4]. Everything else he argues about, culture, outbound, fundraising, internationalisation, is downstream of the question of whether something is actually breaking at the customer.

What has shifted is the time horizon on which that validation has to happen. In the Silverfin years he defended patience and consistency, arguing that founders quit too early and that "ge als ondernemer altijd meer tijd hebt dan je denkt" [6]. Building Ravical he describes a world where a demo from three months ago is already an eternity, where vision and product reality now run one-on-one and you can no longer sell a long-term vision while slowly educating the market [4]. The moat question gets debated weekly at Ravical and looked completely different three months earlier, which makes continuous iteration priority number one [4]. The patience is still there in the ten-year framing, but the unit of execution has compressed to the week.

On why the advisory industry needs a new business model, not just AI

His sharpest current claim is that adoption is not the bottleneck. "The industry has no problem adopting AI. It struggles to build a new business model around it" [3]. For decades growth in accounting meant more billable hours, hire more people, take on more work, and "that model is breaking" [2]. He frames the knowledge-worker industry as the one that existed between the rise of the computer and the rise of AI, with the value of knowledge eroding fast and the advisory industry facing a full reinvention of its business model [4]. Pricing follows: the shift is from seat-based to token and value-based models in which vendor and customer are mutually linked, so that if no value is delivered nothing is consumed and the vendor earns almost nothing [4].

The demand side of that argument comes from surveying 500 UK SMEs. 92% are willing to pay their accountant more, plenty of them send work elsewhere that their accountant could be doing, and 94% said they would bring it back if the firm could deliver it [1]. His reading is that firms were never unwilling, they were structurally unable: "You cannot put your best people on a client who only pays for a few hours a month, so those clients only get the basics" [1]. Most firms therefore carry a large part of their client base they have never been able to serve properly, because the economics never worked, and capacity is "the part now changing" [1]. Clients would rather get this from the firm they already know than from anyone else [1].

On validation, speed and the disappearing moat

He treats speed as the closest thing to a defensible position: "er zijn meerdere routes naar succes, dat speed is hard to beat" [4]. In the AI era he thinks it has become nearly impossible to define a durable moat at all, which is why Ravical revisits the question weekly and treats continuous iteration as the first priority [4]. The old sequence of selling a vision and educating the market over years is gone; you have to continuously re-educate prospects because the product moves faster than their memory of it [4]. He puts numbers on the metabolism: "Een technologiebedrijf op een kwartaal doet dingen die sommige industrieën op een jaar doen" [4], and the Silverfin experience of hypergrowth was "pure adrenaline. Dat is ongezien wat je kan realiseren op zo'n korte tijd" [4].

He is comfortable with the mess that speed produces. "Het is het prachtigste wat er is als alles kapot is in een bedrijf. En een technologiebedrijf moet altijd ergens kapot zijn, hè, want anders zijn we niet aan het groeien" [4]. Against all of this he sets a caution about narrative: "het is nooit overnight. Sommigen zijn al jaren bezig" [4], and he credits "een gezonde naïviteit die er nodig is, maar ook een goede portie geluk" [4].

On outbound, rejection and the persistence math

His view of B2B demand generation starts from a bleak premise: "In een B2B context, heel crew gezegd, is niemand echt op zoek naar verbetering" [4]. In workflow businesses the industry has done the process the same way for decades, so nobody is browsing for improvement and you have to go outbound and educate rather than wait for inbound demos [4]. Silverfin's early machine was a hacked Mailchimp setup sending short personalised problem-statement emails, and prospects who clicked and met with them virtually all became customers within a year [4]. Cold calling he still rates as a highly efficient way to get meetings, provided you accept the rejection math; Tim, a reluctant seller, was coached through afternoons of cold calling into "de beste beller die je zou ontmoeten" [5].

Rejection is the recurring test. Silverfin's first year was almost nothing but no, with prospects printing the incorporation deed to ask who would guarantee the company would still exist in a few years [6]: "Vergeet niet hoeveel keer nee dat wij gekregen hebben. Dat is ongezien" [6]. His rule is blunt: "Eén keer nee krijgen, ja, daar doen we eigenlijk niet aan mee" [5]. "We hebben sommige prospects 100 keer lastig gevallen tot ze zeiden van stop het, maar nadien zijn ze wel klant geworden" [5]. He applies the same method to investors, having "gestalkt" the Showpad founders and Jürgen Ingels into a €250k seed [5], and he thinks fear of rejection is what stops most founders after a single refusal [5]. Third-party validation compounds the effort: a press release naming credible investors moved Silverfin from third or fourth on prospects' agendas to the top, which in enterprise digital transformation software directly accelerated sales [5].

On culture as the actual product of the founder

"Het start allemaal met de cultuur van uw bedrijf. Het valt en staat allemaal met de cultuur" [6]. He argues culture is set unconsciously by the founders and first employees, cannot be written down at the beginning, and is the foundation that determines whether you can take on the world [6]. That belief has hardened with AI: a tech company is more than ever a people business, because in B2B you sell trust and credibility, and winning requires technology and go-to-market together, which makes culture from day one essential [4]. He is explicit about what good culture buys you. A founder always has the unfair advantage of being able to decide and close deals; culture instead gives accountability to people who want to take it, supports them through failure, and builds a feedback loop rather than a founder who overrules everyone [4].

He is candid about getting it wrong. Building culture across two locations, product in Ghent and commercial HQ in London, at two different speeds, was underestimated, and in hindsight he would explicitly pick one location to build the culture [5]. His hardest moment was managing out team members through what risked becoming a toxic environment, something he never intended as a founder and never wants to repeat [6]. And he accepts that handing over changes the thing: an external CEO genuinely reshapes the company, "die cultuur die verandert, hè. Dat is ook oké. Maar dat is een ander bedrijf" [5].

On founders, co-founder dynamics and clean terms

He attributes the bulk of the 90% startup failure rate to bad founder dynamics: poor early agreements, misalignment, unequal commitment [4]. Silverfin's foundation was close to total trust between co-founders with very little on paper [4]. The structural equivalent is the cap table: "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 posits a correlation between investor quality and clean terms, because over-securing a deal kills founder freedom, motivation and passion [5], and he reads the terms offered as a direct signal of who an acquirer or investor really is [4]. Visma stood out for wanting to preserve culture and for measuring employee net promoter score [4].

On hiring, he separates his own position from general advice. As a second-time founder, Ravical takes an unfair advantage by hiring experienced people from day one and raising €7M+ immediately to buy time and speed; first-time founders, by contrast, should prioritise builders with a can-do mentality over skills [4].

On knowing what you are good at

The London move taught him he is a better entrepreneur than manager, and he now deliberately focuses only on what he does well and enjoys instead of trying to be good at everything [6]. He states the principle flatly: "Als je iets niet graag doet, ga je er waarschijnlijk nooit goed in worden. Live with it" [4]. That does not mean standing still. "Kwartaal op kwartaal wil ik mezelf ontslaan en wil ik de nieuwe versie van mezelf aannemen" [4]. He recommends founders build a personal operating system or playbook and review it weekly, which he does on Sunday evenings, thinking in compounding week-on-week delivery rather than only in decade-long visions [4].

On going international, and the case for the deep local winner

He pushes back hard on the go-global dogma of the 2010s. Going international multiplies management complexity by ten, not two or three, because managing someone in the UK, the Netherlands or France differs fundamentally [4]. Deep local winners are underrated [4], and in SMB financial software, ERP, tax and accounting, local players can grow to enormous potential inside a single small market like Belgium [5]. The practical frictions are concrete: negotiating in your non-native language against a native British counterpart starts you at a structural disadvantage, a real issue when a Belgian company switches to English as its corporate language [6]. Sales cultures differ too, with British prospects saying "super" and then never committing or answering the phone again, while Dutch prospects tell you within five minutes whether it is good or bad, learnings he thinks must be codified for the whole company rather than left in individual heads [6].

On the growth mindset Flemish founders lack

"Think big zit niet in ons DNA als Vlaming" [6]. The unlock for him was exposure, via Silverfin's first investor, to serial entrepreneurs taking companies public, and discovering their challenges were identical: "Dus eigenlijk die challenges zijn identiek, dus waarom is het dan niet mogelijk?" [6]. Index Ventures' biggest contribution was the same thing at a larger scale, mindset-stretching plus network, with a board partner challenging them to come back with a million-euro deal, which they signed nine months later [5]. He is willing to claim the result: "Ik durf toch wel te zeggen dat wij vanuit België hier toch wel een serieuze challenger hebben gebouwd" [6], and "Wij hebben hier iets gebouwd dat een industrie een beetje verandert" [5]. He sees the Ghent ecosystem compounding the same way, yesterday's founders becoming today's venture boutiques and funds, alongside a community of experienced SaaS operators, AEs and customer success people, that did not exist ten years ago: "Dat zijn hefbomen, dat zijn sneeuwballen, dat gaat alleen maar volgens mij accelereren de komende jaren" [5].

The counterweight to ambition is patience. Too many founders quit too early, because after one year you often still know nothing, and what makes entrepreneurs successful is consistency and long-term thinking combined with short-term execution [6]. The constant rush, he argues, can be handled more calmly with better prioritisation [6].

On exits that are not engineered

Silverfin never planned or discussed an exit in ten years of building, and acquirers appeared on the radar precisely because of relentless focus on the market and the product [4]. The signalling was managed deliberately: the CEO vacancy said "growth CEO" with no mention of M&A or exit preparation, because candidates tend to be good at either M&A or growth and hinting at an exit would have skewed the search [5]. What he takes from the whole arc is compression of experience, "een enorme fast track op wat dat je kunt meemaken in de life cycle van een business" [5], and something closer to affection than triumph: "Het is eigenlijk iets van het mooiste dat er is" [5].

Takeaways

• Treat business model, not adoption, as the hard part of AI: firms adopt the technology easily and struggle to build a new commercial model around it, while the billable-hours growth engine breaks [2][3].
• Believe the demand data before believing capacity constraints are permanent: 92% of UK SMEs will pay their accountant more and 94% would move outsourced work back in-house if their firm could deliver it [1].
• Validate on the market immediately, because delaying product validation is "het domste wat je waarschijnlijk kan doen" and startups busy themselves with too much internal work when "het moet breken bij de klant" [4][6].
• Revisit your moat on a weekly cadence rather than assuming one; at Ravical it looked completely different three months earlier, so continuous iteration is priority one [4].
• Never treat a single no as an answer, for prospects or investors: some prospects were contacted 100 times before becoming customers, and the same persistence produced the €250k seed [5].
• Go outbound and educate, because in B2B workflow industries "niemand echt op zoek naar verbetering" is, so inbound demand will not appear on its own [4].
• Keep the cap table and the terms clean; over-securing a deal kills founder freedom, motivation and passion, and the terms offered already tell you who the counterparty is [4][5].
• Price on value or consumption rather than seats, so vendor and customer are mutually linked and no value delivered means almost no revenue earned [4].
• Assume internationalisation multiplies management complexity by ten, and take the deep local winner seriously as a strategy [4][5].
• Build a personal playbook and review it weekly, aiming to "mezelf ontslaan" each quarter and hire the next version of yourself [4].