In 2014 I wrote a short piece about raising money in the Netherlands. I was a founder then, I had made most of the mistakes I was describing, and I was fairly rude about Dutch investors.
The line I'd stand behind least comfortably and most stubbornly was this one:
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 a small fund and a studio out of Amsterdam. So it seems only fair to mark my own homework.
What I got right
The 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.
The 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, because 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 for a character 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's inexperience rather than culture, and inexperience resolves. The number of European operators who have now built something significant and are deploying their own money is not what it was in 2014, and the underwriting is visibly different as a result.
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. The cost of that move (the time zones, the entity, the tax surface, the fact that your team and your board are on opposite sides of an ocean) is substantial, and I under-described 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's the legible part. It has a clear finish line and a number attached, which makes it feel like the achievement. Almost everything that actually determined whether those companies worked happened afterwards, in stretches with no announcement attached.
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 the difference between an investor who has operated and one who has only allocated is the difference between a useful call and a status update you have to prepare for.
The Dutch risk aversion, where it survives, is now mostly about ambition rather than money. Capital is more available than it was. What's still scarcer here than in the Bay is permission to state an enormous goal without embarrassment. That's a cultural thing and I don't think it's entirely a defect, since a certain skepticism about grand claims is good hygiene, but it does mean European founders systematically 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. The 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 dramatically easier to research and founders still don't do it. I take meetings where it's obvious within ninety seconds that nobody looked.
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, and the thing 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 I am on the other side, writing a small check, and 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 also notice that I have no way to prove I would still think it if it were not.
The same goes for the softer claims. When I say the ecosystem has matured, part of what I am saying is that people like me are now deploying, which is a self-flattering account of maturity. A founder who has just been passed on by three Dutch funds in a row would write a different essay, and I am not sure I could show them they were wrong.
So the honest instruction is the one I would have wanted at the time: treat any investor's account of the funding market as a document with an interest behind it, including this one. The parts of the 2014 piece that held up best were the boring, checkable ones about round sizes and meeting cadence. The parts that aged worst were the confident characterizations 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 early-stage fund and studio in Amsterdam. The original piece, "Seeding Amsterdam," went up in April 2014. I've deliberately not gone back and softened it.
© 2026 Renato Valdés-Olmos