Robin Wauters

The through-line

Robin Wauters keeps returning to a single argument in different registers: Europe has the talent, the science and the capital, and keeps losing anyway because it thinks too small, moves too slowly and organises itself badly. "De cijfers tonen aan dat we slecht bezig zijn. We hebben eigenlijk als je kijkt 25 jaar lang de boot gemist. Switch to mobile, switch to cloud, software as a service, AI" [19]. The diagnosis is not primarily about money. It is about mindset, structure and the absence of shared plumbing, which is why his prescriptions run from the personal ("Wees meer ambitieus in heel België, maar ook in heel Europa. Denk gewoon groter. Denk sneller. Denk groter. Denk gewoon meer impact" [19]) to the institutional: a standard European company entity, a federal startup commissioner, pooled angel capital, pension fund reform.

What has sharpened over time is the urgency. He describes arriving only lately at the full scale of the problem, "Ik besefte pas heel recent in how much [ __ ] we are" [19], and the work that follows from that has moved from observing the ecosystem to building parts of it: a fund group, a campus, a lobbying coalition, a deep tech newsletter [3][5][9][14].

On Europe's lost 25 years

The failure he describes is not one of invention but of capture. Europe contributes talent, science and intellectual property, and the value creation on European-developed technology happens in the United States [19]. Cloud dominance in particular compounds, spilling into dominance in other sectors through power laws, which means each missed platform shift makes the next one harder to win [19]. He is blunt that superiority on the merits is no defence: "Het is niet noodzakelijk omdat je een beter product hebt dat je gaat winnen" [19].

The one genuinely open field he names is quantum. Because it is greenfield, fifty to sixty years of American IT dominance does not guarantee leadership there, and Europe can still compete in both hardware and software, with machines of 100+ qubits expected around 2030 to 2031 [19]. The stakes are framed generationally: "Startups zijn de bedrijven van morgen. Future large companies noemen wij dat dan. Dat zijn de ASML's en de OpenAI van morgen, zijn vandaag twee drie man groot" [19].

On mindset and ambition

The transatlantic gap starts on day one with identical equipment and identical capital. "They think a lot bigger, they go a lot faster, they don't mind breaking things and you just go sell things that aren't even there yet to develop them later. Europeans are typically more prudent" [20]. Europeans, in his telling, do the right things, only slower, and the fix has to reach children through project-based learning rather than being bolted on later [20]. "Curiosity is what got us to the moon" [20].

His most practical argument for ambition is that timidity is not even cheaper: "De hoeveelheid effort en tijd en sacrifice dat je gaat moeten insteken in het bouwen van een bedrijf met een klein doel is bijna even groot dan echt van die big goals te gaan najagen" [19]. The same logic applies to geography. "Imagine that Spotify said let's start with Sweden and then expand country per country — it would never have had the impact on the local ecosystem that it's had today. Same goes for Belgium: we have to think beyond borders, let alone language borders" [20]. And it applies to failure: in Silicon Valley failed serial entrepreneurs still get funded, while in Europe failure remains a taboo and a negative signal, a mindset he actively works to counter [19]. Honest talk about ambition, scale and failure from founders who built global companies out of Brussels is exactly the kind of evening he says BeCentral was conceived for [13].

On EU Inc and the rules of the game

European founders are effectively forced into Delaware incorporations because that is the global standard investors understand, and that choice pre-decides later decisions about US capital, exits and IPOs [19]. A standard European entity is the fix. He is uncompromising about the form it takes: there is a genuine risk of the European Commission's EU Inc proposal being watered down, including calls to turn it into a Directive rather than a regulation, which "would completely undermine the goal of creating a truly European company framework" [9]. What startups need is an EU Inc that is "simple, fast, and works seamlessly across the Single Market", because "a fragmented approach will NEVER deliver the impact Europe so desperately needs" [9]. He treats this as a campaign rather than a consultation, urging people to share, comment and tag policymakers, alongside Allied For Startups, the European Startup Network and member associations [9], and frames the wider policy fight the same way: "Let's make this one work for startups. For Europe." [6]

On Belgium's structural problem

His account of Belgium is that the money is largely there at the entry point and the organisation is not. There is no shortage of early-stage capital; the real gaps are growth capital for scale-ups, commercialising university research into spin-offs, and political attention for the next generation of founders [19]. On top of that sits fragmentation: innovation budgets and support structures dispersed across Flemish and Walloon organisations that do not coordinate. His proposed remedy is a federal commissioner for startups with power over the autonomous regions, instead of local ministers of innovation [20]. "Belgium on a world scale is tiny, right? So why not combine these efforts, why not build more bridges between those organizations to really operate on a pan-Belgian level?" [20]

Two further blockages recur. Belgian tax debates are almost never about the entrepreneurs who will create the wealth of the next five to twenty years and almost always about existing wealth holders; entrepreneurs need to be in the room even though they do not agree among themselves on how they should be taxed [20]. And tech transfer cannot be imported wholesale: you cannot copy the Stanford spin-off model to Europe, local constraints matter, and a good starting point would be addressing the fact that European university endowments spend more money investing in US funds than in European ones [20]. On the institutional capital side, European pension funds allocate just 0.07% to venture capital; Italy's mandate to move to 0.1% in Italian funds spooked local funds worried about market distortion, which he reads as evidence that unlocking capital has to be phased, with the Capital Markets Union discussion carrying this at EU level [20].

Above all of it he places liquidity. "The biggest catalyst for an ecosystem isn't necessarily capital or people, it's exits, right?" [20] Exits generate a new generation of entrepreneurs, operators and angel investors that accelerates the flywheel, which he sees happening in Ghent [20]. But the base layer stays human: "At the heart of any ecosystem though is entrepreneurs. You think about taking the startups and the actual people who are building those companies out of the equation and everything implodes" [20].

On reading the funding market

He resists the celebratory reading of headline numbers. Belgian tech companies raised just south of €500 million across 74 rounds in the first half of 2026, 40% more capital than a year earlier while the number of rounds barely moved, and his conclusion is that this "says less about a booming market than a changing one" [7]. Capital is available and increasingly flowing to companies that have already proven they can execute, with Aikido Security, Keyrock, eyeo and VerticalCompute as examples; investors are writing bigger cheques for fewer businesses, and founders raising at the earliest stages will still feel a market that has not fully recovered [7]. The analysis was produced with Scaleup Flanders and Agoria [7]. He works the same comparative instinct at global scale through contributions to Startup Genome's Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2026, which he values for offering perspective and actionable recommendations to entrepreneurs, investors and policymakers alike [10].

On how to invest at the earliest stage

His investing philosophy starts from an admission of how bad the odds are alone. Angel investing on your own almost guarantees losing your money, and "Ge moet 30 tot 50 investeringen doen voordat je het begint te leren", which is the argument for pooling both capital and decision-making in a group [19]. Because you cannot predict which of ten investments becomes the outlier that returns the fund, and may not know until six or seven years after pre-seed, every portfolio company has to be supported equally [19].

Two signals decide it early: whether the founder can genuinely sustain the grind in this market for ten to fifteen years, and whether the market is big enough to return a fund [19]. That first test reflects his description of the job itself: "Je wordt bijna elke dag op uw gezicht geklopt, met wijze van spreken. Dus je moet het maar lang genoeg volhouden" [19]. It is a view he has probed with others too, including the common investor error of focusing too much on the idea rather than on the qualities, motivation and drive of the founder [16].

On what kills companies, and what saves them

The number one startup killer, in his ranking, is failing to reach product-market fit fast enough to become financially self-sustaining; the number two is co-founder misalignment on vision and strategy that stays hidden until stress or scale exposes it [19]. The corresponding discipline is simple: "Never assume. Bouw niet iets zonder dat je weet dat er een markt voor is" [19].

He pushes founders to broaden what they count as innovation. It is not only product; the business model, the pricing or the go-to-market can be the innovation that creates the difference [19]. Storytelling belongs in the same category of underrated capability. It is not about getting in the paper, it is about attracting talent, convincing investors and winning customers and partners, and a worse product with better marketing frequently beats a better product with none, which is why founders should learn it themselves rather than outsource it early [19]. On people, he is equally sceptical of surface fixes: culture is baked into the founders' personality and cannot be bought with ping-pong tables, and for key hires the test is who someone is as a human being outside a work setting [19].

On AI as an organisational question, not a tools question

He has little patience for the tooling genre of AI event. "Most AI events (and there are admittedly many) focus on tools. This one focuses on what happens to your company when AI becomes the default" [12]. The questions he says founders and executives keep raising with him are structural: what happens when software becomes dramatically easier and cheaper to build, how you defend a competitive advantage when barriers to entry are falling, which roles, processes and organisational structures need to change, what to automate and what to protect, and "what will still be left of your company in two to four years" [12]. He curates these conversations deliberately small, as with the AI Summer School run with Scaleup Flanders, Agoria and Sirris | Innovation forward for a selected group of thirty [12], the same design logic he applies to a VC-readiness session for female founders where "the audience is kept limited to allow for maximum interactive and peer-to-peer learning" [1]. His shorthand for where this is heading is unsentimental: "The robots are coming" [19].

On building the institutions rather than commentating on them

The organisations he works on are described as means to an end, never as assets. Of the search for Syndicate One's next Head of Finance & Operations, covering three funds, a 250+ LP base, close to 40 portfolio companies and every filing and capital call behind them: "We didn't build S1 to run a fund. We built it because Belgian founders deserved an ecosystem that could back them all the way. The finance and operations seat is what makes that promise real rather than rhetorical" [5]. He screens explicitly against status seeking, warning that "anyone taking it for the title or the assets under management would be taking it for the wrong reason", and offers to bend the role around the right person, remote, part-time to start, whatever it takes [5][2]. The same ecosystem-first framing carries his return to BeCentral, described as co-writing the next chapter for Brussels and the wider Belgian tech ecosystem [14], his visible cheerleading for individual companies such as Polysense on food waste and Timefold [8][11], and his backing of a new initiative on whether VC funding is right for aspiring female founders in tech, when it starts to make sense and what comes after the decision [1].

His media work is handled with the same candour. Having sent no edition of the Inside European Deep Tech newsletter since 11 May, he declines to apologise: "I would say I'm sorry, but I'd be lying. Things just got too busy; it happens" [3]. Instead of curating a million links he looked for patterns and wrote a summer briefing, and then asked readers to help him decide what the newsletter should become next [3]. Underneath all of it sits the softest and broadest of his ambitions: "My dream would be that we start talking to each other again, and I mean that as society as a whole" [20].

Takeaways

• Read funding headlines for shape, not size: 40% more Belgian capital across a flat number of rounds means bigger cheques for proven executors, and no real recovery yet at pre-seed [7].
• Do not accept a Directive where a regulation is needed; EU Inc only works if it is "simple, fast, and works seamlessly across the Single Market" [9].
• Angel investing solo is close to a guaranteed loss, since "ge moet 30 tot 50 investeringen doen voordat je het begint te leren", pool capital and decisions instead [19].
• Since the fund-returner is unknowable for six or seven years after pre-seed, support every portfolio company equally rather than picking favourites early [19].
• Screen founders on two things: whether they can sustain the grind for ten to fifteen years, and whether the market is large enough to return a fund [19].
• Treat storytelling as a founder skill, not an agency line item; a worse product with better marketing routinely beats a better product with none [19].
• Chase exits, not just capital: "the biggest catalyst for an ecosystem isn't necessarily capital or people, it's exits" [20].
• Ask what AI does to your company's structure and defensibility, not which tools to buy, starting with "what will still be left of your company in two to four years" [12].
• Fix the plumbing behind Belgian innovation: a federal startup commissioner with authority over the regions, entrepreneurs inside tax debates, and endowments that stop favouring US funds [20].