Thijs Cadier

Meet Sharief Mohamed RA, Co-Founder of Huppa: Operating system for gyms and studios in Europe. Certified Accountant. Previously CFO at Lalaland AI and Head of Finance at Otrium. What should the Netherlands do to make startups more successful? "Make it easier to give equity to strong individual contributors who join in a later stage. Right now, payroll taxes directly kick in when there is a valuation. But that valuation might only happen at an exit in the future. So you pay tax directly, but years later (if there ever will be an exit), you get your financial share associated with those taxes." Part of the Vliegwiel portrait series, highlighting 100 Dutch founders and ecosystem builders. Photography by Wesley Verhoeve, assisted by Joseph Frank and Simón Ducos.

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🇳🇱 Dutch HealthTech Startups: Stop Losing €600K–€1.2M Every Round 🇳🇱 Every funding cycle, Dutch founders leave hundreds of thousands in non-dilutive capital untouched - simply because they see fundraising as a one-off event instead of a repeatable process. The truth? 💡 It’s not about ideas. It’s about sequence - knowing which grants, programs, and investors to align at each stage of growth. Here’s how the smartest Dutch HealthTech founders build momentum - from early validation to international scaling 👇 🧩 1️⃣ Foundation & Validation Build clinical and technical credibility before equity. 💶 Use: NWO Take-off, Health-Holland PPP, YES!Delft HealthTech, ZonMw, Techleap, Medical Delta. 💰 2️⃣ Early Funding Stack Secure grants and innovation credits before you dilute. 🏦 Programs: RVO MIT R&D, Innovation Credit, VFF, TKI-LSH, Eurostars, ROMs, Invest-NL, Horizon Europe Cluster 1. 🚀 3️⃣ Investor Readiness Turn evidence and traction into investor confidence. 👥 Networks: Thuja Capital, INKEF, Curie Capital, Rockstart Health, Healthy Capital. 🌍 4️⃣ International Expansion Leverage the Dutch innovation brand for global reach. 🌐 Enablers: RVO Go4Export, EIT Health Bridgehead, InnovationQuarter International, NFIA, Holland High Tech. Why it works: ✅ Less dilution - replace equity with public support (2–6 pp saved). ✅ More runway - extend cash by 4–10 months. ✅ Higher valuation - validated traction = faster, larger rounds. #HealthTech #StartupFunding #DutchInnovation #DigitalHealth #NetherlandsStartups #VentureCapital #NonDilutiveFunding #GrantFunding #MedTech #LifeSciences #EUInnovation #FundingStrategy #Growth #PNTB #Betthera

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Here’s something I’ve noticed while building ObscuraQ: The top 1% aren’t the smartest. They’re the clearest. Clear on: • their mission • their direction • their leverage • and the exact problems they’re meant to solve AI doesn’t intimidate these people — it amplifies them. Because when you’re clear… you stop seeking approval you stop chasing shortcuts you stop doubting your direction and you start operating with a type of precision most people never experience. Clarity is dominance. AI is leverage. And when you combine the two — you become inevitable. #Entrepreneurship #HighPerformance #AI #PersonalBrand #ObscuraQ

Framer is now a $2 billion company. But 8 years ago, they got stuck at $5 million ARR with no way out. I met Jorn van Dijk and Koen Bok through Ben Blumenfeld. They'd both come out of the early design crew at Facebook. Ben described Jorn showing up on day 1 at Facebook and just opening a can of whoop ass. I couldn't wait to meet him. Soon after, we co-led their seed round. Their first product was a prototyping tool that made iPhone animations incredibly easy to build. Designers loved it. It spread completely organically - designer to designer - with zero sales motion. Then it stalled. Every attempt to scale with a traditional sales approach failed. They got to ~$5M in revenue but at that point, had to confront a hard truth: the product they'd poured themselves into wasn't going to get them where they wanted to go. So they made a "bet the company" call. They decided to build a no-code website builder - entering a space that was already crowded, where Webflow was well underway, but they had a point of view that most of the existing tools were pretty mediocre. It was a true Cortés moment. They burned the boats on the old product - honoring existing customer contracts - and threw everything behind the new direction. What a lot of people miss about pivots like this is that they don't play out in a day or a month. They can take 2 or 3 years to be proven out. And the whole time, you're sitting with the discomfort that the path you've chosen may not work. Revenue went roughly $3M → $9M → $30M → $80M. Having the conviction to walk away from something that's "working" - and sitting with the uncertainty long enough to find the thing actually worth building - is one of the hardest things a founder can do. Jorn, Koen and the Framer team proved it's also one of the most important. We talked through this and a lot more at SXSW. Listen to our full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/g93yuzbi

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This is great to see Sean Kenny and Paul van der Boor A lot of people talk about AI, but very few show what it actually looks like when it’s working inside real teams every single week. What really stood out to me in your chart is how long it took for the senior agents to appear. That’s exactly how trust is built in the real world. People start by giving AI the simple jobs. When it shows it can handle those reliably, they slowly hand over the more valuable, more complex work. We’ve watched the same pattern unfold with smart alex At first, companies used it for the basics. Then, after they saw the consistency, they started trusting it with the bigger tasks that impact revenue and operations. That shift always takes time, but once it happens, growth accelerates fast. Your data captures that moment perfectly. It’s a clear sign that AI inside organisations is moving from hype to something real, repeatable and operational.

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