A good place to start.

In 2014 I wrote [a short piece about raising money in the Netherlands](https://medium.com/@renn/seeding-amsterdam-babb6e9e7b73). I was a founder then, I had made most of the mistakes I was describing, and I was fairly rude about Dutch investors.

One line I'd stand behind least comfortably and most stubbornly:

> Big ideas are usually frowned upon, partially due to the culture, and Dutch investors are risk averse in general.

I now sit on the other side of the table, running Noord. The 2014 sentences that still exist are the boring ones. So it seems only fair to mark my own homework.

Marking it turned out to be the easy part. The uncomfortable finding is not in the sentences I got wrong. It is in how little has moved underneath all of them.

## What I got right

That structural observation holds. It was hard in 2014 to find European investors who had built products or shipped code themselves. So they priced risk in the wrong places. They'd underwrite a spreadsheet and flinch at a team. That's why we incorporated Human in the US, though the first checks still came from Dutch angels.

Our tactical advice also holds, mostly because it was boring. Don't expect a commitment at the first meeting. Show weekly progress rather than annual projections. Make a specific list of the investors you want and know why you want each of them. Define your round size before you start taking meetings. Half the funds that describe themselves as seed-stage mean something entirely different by it, and will consume two months teaching you that.

And the thing I'd underline hardest: the earliest checks were written on the strength of a team that could ship. Everyone on our founding team wrote code or pushed pixels (four of us, no exceptions). Your story will change, your market will change, your product will certainly change. What an early investor is actually underwriting is whether you can survive those changes quickly.

## What I got wrong

Three things, and the first is the big one.

**I mistook a stage a market was passing through for a permanent trait.** "Dutch investors are risk averse" was a satisfying sentence, and it described an ecosystem that had not yet had enough outcomes to know what a good bet looked like. That is inexperience, not culture, and inexperience wears off. Far more European operators have now built something significant and are deploying their own money. You can see the difference in how they judge a bet.

Being rude about it felt good and explained nothing.

**I treated raising in the US as the obvious escape hatch.** We founded Human in California partly for this reason, and it was the right call for us at the time. But I'd generalized from it. That move costs a lot. The time zones, the entity, the tax surface, the fact that your team and your board sit on opposite sides of an ocean. I under-described all of it because it had worked out for me.

I was giving founders advice calibrated to a market that was about to stop existing, in the confident tone of someone who'd been through it once.

**I framed fundraising as the hard part.** It is the part you can see. It has a finish line and a number attached, which makes it feel like the achievement. Almost everything that decided whether those companies worked happened afterwards, in long stretches with nothing to announce.

## What I'd tell you now

**I do think you should optimize for the investor who has done the job.** Not for brand, not for ticket size. In a bad quarter, an investor who has run something gives you a useful call. One who has only written checks gives you a meeting you have to prepare for.

**Dutch risk aversion, where it survives, is now mostly about ambition rather than money.** Capital is more available than it was. What is still rarer here than in the Bay is permission to say out loud that you are attempting something enormous. That's cultural, and I don't think it's entirely a defect. A certain skepticism about grand claims is good hygiene. But it does mean European founders routinely under-describe what they're attempting, and then get read as under-ambitious rather than merely polite.

**Build the thing that makes the round unnecessary for another six months.** Strongest position in any conversation is the one where you'd be fine without it. That was true in 2014 and the intervening decade has not softened it.

**And do the homework.** Know how a fund actually deploys, what they've done in the last two years, what their real check size is as opposed to their stated one. This has become a great deal easier to research and founders still don't do it. I take meetings where it's obvious within ninety seconds that nobody looked.

## The thing I didn't think to be wrong about

So the sentence I was rudest about is the one that fixed itself. That should be reassuring and it isn't, because the part I never thought to examine has barely moved in twelve years.

I wrote about investors. I did not write a word about the machinery underneath them, which I assumed was somebody else's department. It is the department that decides whether any of this compounds.

Start with the one founders complain about most and outsiders find dullest. Employee equity. [Robert Gaal](https://x.com/robertgaal) has spent years on this and [puts it plainly](https://mtsprout.nl/groei/robert-gaal-vliegwiel): as it is currently arranged, it is good for nobody. Grant somebody options here and they can owe tax before there is any money, on paper gains in a company whose shares they cannot sell. His line for it is the one I keep repeating to founders: you still have to pay tax while you don't have the money at all. The 2023 change was real and it was not enough. The Netherlands still sits twenty-second of twenty-five countries on how workable its scheme is, and roughly four percent of Dutch company shares are held by employees, against nineteen percent in the US. That gap is not a cultural preference about ownership. It is a tax treatment, and it is why a Dutch company bidding for the same engineer as a British or American one is bidding with a weaker instrument.

[Vliegwiel](https://vliegwiel.nl/en), which Robert made with [Wesley Verhoeve](https://www.wesley.co/), is the most serious attempt I have seen to put this in front of people who can change it. A hundred and two founders photographed and interviewed, sixteen policy proposals drawn from what they actually said, backed by Techleap and the Dutch Startup Association. Tax options when they become real money rather than on paper. Lighter compliance for early-stage companies. Tax relief for angels. And one number that should end any argument about whether this country has capital: the Netherlands manages one and a half trillion euros in pension assets, and virtually none of it reaches Dutch startups.

Box 3 is the same story wearing accountancy. The [law that would finally tax actual returns rather than invented ones](https://www.eerstekamer.nl/wetsvoorstel/36748_wet_werkelijk_rendement_box) passed the Tweede Kamer in February and has been sitting in the Eerste Kamer since, with 2028 as a target date that is still not firm. Twelve years of taxing a return people did not make, several rulings against it, and it is not settled yet. Whatever you think of the policy, an angel cannot plan around a regime that has been provisional for a decade, and angels are the first money most of these companies will ever see.

Then the version that isn't national at all. [EU Inc](https://www.eu-inc.org/) has gathered twenty-six thousand founders, investors and operators across twenty-seven countries behind one request: that you should be able to incorporate once in Europe and be legible everywhere in it, with a standard option scheme attached. It is in negotiation between the Council and Parliament now, and the campaign's own warning is the sharpest sentence anybody has written about European tech policy. Without free choice of registration seat, what arrives is twenty-seven national regimes sharing a logo.

## If none of this lands

I want to be plainer here than the rest of this essay has been.

The improvement I described earlier is a market maturing, and a market can mature and still leak. Capital being available in Amsterdam counts for little if the company it funds redomiciles at Series A because that is where the option pool works and the paperwork is one jurisdiction rather than five. We did exactly that with Human. Earlier I said I over-recommended that move, and I stand by both halves: it costs far more than founders expect, and it is still the rational answer to a structure nobody has fixed.

Fund the beginning of things and export the middle, for another decade, and the ecosystem does not fail. It just stays a good place to start.

So the honest forecast. If the option regime stays where it is, if box 3 stays provisional, if the pension money stays out, and if EU Inc arrives as twenty-seven regimes sharing a logo, then none of the progress since 2014 accumulates into anything. The founders keep getting better and the companies keep leaving, and we go on describing that as ambition rather than as a policy outcome. I do not think that future is dark. I think it is small, and it arrives quietly enough that nobody has to be blamed for it.

Which is why the boring work is the important work here. Not the funds, not the accelerators, not another report on the ecosystem. The option scheme, the wealth tax, the entity. Robert and the people around him have picked the least glamorous fight available, and it is the one that decides the rest.

## The part that hasn't changed

Twelve years ago I ended that piece by saying I mentor founders by telling them about my mistakes, and that there's no recipe. I'd quoted Ben Horowitz on the absence of formulas for hard things.

Now I'm the one being pitched. What I look for hasn't moved at all. Can this team ship, and do they know why they're doing this specific thing rather than an adjacent easier one. Everything else is downstream: deck, terms, structure, all of it.

Which is a slightly deflating conclusion for an essay, and also the reason I'm still doing it.

## Discount this accordingly

There is an obvious problem with the advice above, which is who is giving it.

In 2014 I was raising and had every reason to describe investors accurately, because being wrong about them cost me directly. Now that I've written angel checks myself, the same sentences serve me differently. Advice that founders should prefer investors who have operated is advice that happens to describe me. I do think it is true. I have no way to prove I would still think it if it were not.

The same applies to the section above it. Every reform I just argued for would make my own position easier: a workable option scheme makes the companies I back cheaper to staff, and a settled box 3 makes writing the check simpler. I would like to think I would want those things anyway. In 2014 I did not even notice they were missing.

What held up best in the 2014 piece was the boring, checkable material about round sizes and meeting cadence. What aged worst was the confident characterization of what other people were like. That ratio has not changed just because I switched chairs.

I've founded three companies, mentored at Rockstart, and now run Noord, an AI Design Lab that occasionally invests in startups. That original piece, ["Seeding Amsterdam,"](https://medium.com/@renn/seeding-amsterdam-babb6e9e7b73) went up in April 2014. I've deliberately not gone back and softened it.