#203: Duco van Lanschot

LiF – Duco van Lanschot V2 MR48 31

Jeroen: Welcome to a new episode of the Leaders in Finance podcast. Thank you very much for tuning in. I’m very happy you’re listening.

This week, our guest is Duco van Lanschot, founder of Duna. Welcome, Duco.

Duco: Thank you. Welcome.

Jeroen: I’m very happy you’re here with us today. And before we begin, we would like to thank our partners for their continued support, and they are EY, Mogelijk Vastgoedfinancieringen and Lapaya. Many thanks to you, partners, for making this possible.

As always, as a good tradition, I will start by spelling the name of my guest. Duco is D-U-C-O and Van is V-A-N and Lanschot is L-A-N-S-C-H-O-T.

As an introduction, Duco van Lanschot is a Dutch fintech entrepreneur and the founder of Duna, a fast-growing technology company focused on business identity.

Through Duna, he’s building infrastructure that enables banks, fintechs and platforms to verify and onboard businesses. Think KYC on business customers. And to do that more quickly and with less friction.

The company was founded in 2023 by Duco and David Schreiber. And in a short period of time, it has already raised more than 40 million in funding. First, an around 11 million seed round in 2025, followed by a 30 million Series A in February 2026.

According to Duna, customers including Plaid, CCV, Fiserv, Moss, Bol and Brand New Day Bank are already using the platform. A very impressive list of businesses.

Before founding Duna, Duco worked at a number of well-known companies in tech and fintech.

At Stripe, he was responsible for the Benelux and DACH regions. He served as Chief Commercial Officer at Fourthline and at Blendle he worked on the company’s international expansion. Before that, he started his career at McKinsey & Company.

Finally, Duco studied law at Utrecht University. He’s 38 years old and lives in Amsterdam with his wife and two children.

This as an introduction, Duco, and there are so many places we could start this conversation.

But first of all, I would love to ask you: you’re an entrepreneur now. How does that feel? What’s great about being an entrepreneur?

Also, maybe compare it to not being an entrepreneur before.

Duco: So I recently got this question at a student symposium where they said: is the freedom delightful? And I responded: well, it’s the freedom to always decide which 80 hours of the week you want to be working, because you end up always working. Also when you walk the dog early in the morning or late at night.

Jokes apart, well, I love it. So for me, it’s been a change that I wanted for years. It just took me like three to four years to grab my co-founder, David Schreiber, and grab him out of the companies he was working at to start a company with me.

So in that sense, for me personally, it was long overdue. I often think back to what my younger brother once told me, which was when I used to complain quite a bit about my managers. Like it was always not great or they were micromanaging me. And after a while, he sat me down and he said: well, if you’re always complaining about every manager, maybe you are actually the problem, Duco. I think you are the problem.

And then after a moment of silence, I realized he was obviously fully correct. So maybe after all, I was indeed the problem myself.

And then my brother said: so maybe if you think you can do it better, why isn’t this the time to start your own business?

Jeroen: But what is it ultimately that makes you so happy about running a business? I mean, of course, there are times that you’re probably not overly happy, but in general, what makes you happy running your own business?

Duco: When David and I started the business together, we actually wrote down on a big white paper — let’s now put on a screen on the wall — what do you want to get out of this business? And if the only thing you want is money, just put down money. Let’s be honest.

And the first thing we put down was: we want to work with the smartest, most fun people, because David and I both worked at Stripe in the early days. And we really loved that. There were so many smart people around us.

And that just gave so much energy and positivity into the company. And you were also learning so much. So that was the first thing we wanted to get out.

The second thing was we wanted to create a product that was useful for society. So we do KYC technology, fighting money laundering and fraud. So we didn’t want to do flipping NFTs or crypto scam projects or delivering 10-minute delivery for lazy couch potatoes who want Ben & Jerry’s.

So that was the second thing.

Then the third thing is we wanted it to be intellectually complex, because we both get bored.

And the fourth thing is — and everybody wants something — we wanted it to be really big. And it’s just because we have insecure, fragile, competitive egos who always want to win.

So those were the four things we wanted to get out.

And that was also the moment when we decided: okay, so we didn’t chuck on money on that list. So we said: well, let’s then also put our money where our mouth is. And let’s not just talk the talk like Silicon Valley companies. They also often have a beautiful talk-the-talk, but they don’t really walk the walk.

So they always flip on the money switch the moment they can make money. And then the talk was just something that they chucked on a wall temporarily until they could make more money.

So what we then did at the start is we directed one-third of the incorporation equity to a nonprofit foundation. And also afterwards, we directly created a very large employee equity pool, because we said: well, putting our money where our mouth is, is if we are true about wanting to work with the smartest and awesome people on a cool product, then let’s give them a lot of equity because it will help us attract great talent.

So this is a bit about the why we started the company.

And then why do I enjoy it on a day-by-day basis? It’s because I’m a generalist and I love hopping from design to product to a customer to hiring and doing all of that with a lot of freedom.

And freedom is one of my top personal values. Like I really value my freedom and autonomy. And that’s probably what I love most from being an entrepreneur.

Jeroen: That’s great. So smart people to work with, useful for society, intellectually challenging and making sure it can become extraordinarily big. Those are the four key drivers.

So if, let’s say, David hears this podcast — your co-founder, whom I’ve never met — what would you like to tell him? Why did you want to work with him in the first place?

Duco: We’re a bit like a married couple.

No, David is great. Ideally, you start a company with somebody who makes all your own personal flaws a lot better and with whom you’re also completely aligned on values and the business and the type of business you want to build.

And David has all of that.

So I’m really bad at details. I’m not interested in the details.

And David is the biggest Einstein geek I’ve ever met, who will run through regulations and compliance policies of hundreds of pages until four in the morning. And the annoying thing is: he’ll remember everything 15 months later.

So sometimes when I’m in a meeting with him, I tend to forget things.

And then I ask him: oh David, do you remember what my responsibility was six months ago in this meeting and what we decided? And he’ll know.

Jeroen: And the other way around, what would he probably say about you?

Duco: He’ll probably say that I really love all the people and cultural and EQ-type topics that we have in the company.

So this was also one of the reasons why I wanted to start my own business, because both David and I had countless ideas on how to build a new organization. So an organization that is fully transparent, an organization with a lot of ownership, an organization without management or with the least amount of management possible.

And all those ideas — and we had so many of them — we could only put into fruition if we could just start from a tabula rasa and decide on it ourselves.

Jeroen: Well put. So what was the very, very first moment — if you can recall — that you thought: I’m going into this area of business identity, everything KYC-related, et cetera?

Duco: If you go back almost over 10 years in time, when David and I started in the early days at Stripe, we had a marketplace product there: Stripe Connect. It’s one of the lighthouse products of Stripe, where Stripe is onboarding hundreds of thousands, millions of sellers.

And what you start seeing is that we were known in the fintech space as having the best business onboarding there is.

But quite often — which I could also see as a McKinsey consultant when I was making a lot of PowerPoint slides back then — when you can look behind the curtain of a company, you also see a lot of things that aren’t as perfect as they could be.

So yes, we had great business onboarding at Stripe, but there was also very much to improve.

Then afterwards at Fourthline, we were onboarding millions of retail customers — so natural persons — and there I had more and more customers coming back and asking: can you also do our business onboarding?

And at Fourthline, we deliberately decided: okay, this is not a core business direction of the company.

And that’s the moment when I started calling David again and saying: well David, we’ve now been working for over a decade in fintech. Business onboarding is still a humongous problem.

Maybe Stripe or Adyen or Mollie can solve it. But how are the rest of all the insurers and financial institutions and banks going to solve it?

Because you need two things to do this well.

One is: you need enough bandwidth to invest hundreds of engineers and operational people and product people.

And then second of all, you also need the execution muscle from a technology perspective to do this.

And there are very few companies that have both of those things.

So the big banks might have the means to put hundreds of people to work here. But do they also have the technological execution power to create the most delightful business onboarding experience there is with fully automated onboarding?

And that’s where Duna intersects.

Jeroen: Where does the name Duna come from?

Duco: Great question. I always hope people ask this, and in every interview I tell this story and it never makes the interview. So thanks for asking.

Jeroen: So boring.

Duco: Yeah. So it never makes the interview. The last interview, I told this to the interviewer and then they apologized afterwards. Said it again — didn’t make the interview.

Jeroen: Make it a better answer, I would say.

Duco: So it’s twofold.

One: Duna means dune in Spanish, and dunes are intended to keep the sea out. So it’s our representation of keeping the bad actors and fraudsters out.

At the same time, Duna in Eastern Europe also refers to the Danube River — the Donau — the longest river in Europe. And rivers are an enabler of commerce and trade.

So for the good customers, we actually want to be like Duna the river, where we enable commerce and trade, and they should be able to do instant onboarding without requesting hours of documents and taking 50 days — or even longer at some companies — to, for instance, open a bank account.

Jeroen: And this was all thought about before you came up with the name? Or did you first come up with the name and then come up with this story?

Duco: Both, both.

So we had a long list of like 400 names. Then we trimmed it down to a shortlist of 10.

Then we had a top three and started choosing amongst the top three. And then we were like: oh, does this actually have something to do with our business?

So it was a bit of a hybrid, as always.

Jeroen: As always. I love the founding stories of businesses.

So what else can you tell us about this founding time? How long did it take before you actually went out with: we have a new company? How long was the preparation phase, for example?

Duco: I think we were building for like a year until we publicly announced.

So we worked with design partners, a bunch of launching customers, to build out and create this first product.

And until the moment we publicly launched, we didn’t really even have a website.

So I still remember that we once had an RFP for a bigger customer, and then we weren’t invited because we didn’t have a website.

And then within a day, we created a one-page website.

And then we said: oh come on, we do have a website. And then we were included in that RFP. It’s one of our customers now.

I won’t tell you which one.

But we then said: okay, if this is the problem, then we’ll have a one-page website in a day.

But it wasn’t really a website, of course it wasn’t. You could leave your email address.

Jeroen: What was the thing that went quite easily, which you didn’t expect? Or something that was much harder to crack before you could actually start growing the business and raise these enormous amounts of money?

Duco: Oh, a lot of things.

I think what has been very difficult is to build out an end-to-end system where you can use compliance policies and leverage these policies to create the best business outcomes.

And what does that mean?

Business outcomes across three axes.

So one is increasing revenues.

The second one is decreasing costs.

And the third one is avoiding risks — security risk, compliance risk, et cetera.

So on the first thing, what you see in the past decade is that with compliance thresholds and requirements increasing, compliance started completely dictating the onboarding of a customer.

You almost need to fight nowadays to become a customer.

It’s the other way around.

Usually you would say: I want to become a customer at this bank.

Well, here’s the red carpet. Here’s trumpets. Here’s five angels singing you a song. Please become a customer here.

But that’s not the case.

We meet many banks and they take 50 or 60 days to approve customers.

And what we have built is a front-end onboarding experience where after every data point, we run the full risk model.

And if the risk model is recalculated, we can directly on the spot collect new information or request clarifications, or according to policies with AI give feedback like: hey, the document that you just uploaded doesn’t seem to be the correct document we’re requesting. Can you have one more look at it?

By doing that, what we create is an increase in the STP — straight-through processing — ratio of the customers.

Because what we see across our book of businesses that are being onboarded is: every time you need to ask them for more information, you lose 15% in conversion.

There’s just a number of people who are like: fuck off. I’ve had enough of this stuff. I want to become a customer. I don’t want to be interrogated in some FBI or police interrogation.

So what we’re doing is increasing those straight-through processing rates by having this flexible front end that listens exactly to the compliance policies.

And we can then also say to a customer: well, you’re requesting a VAT number here that you don’t necessarily need to request. And we’re seeing on average a 1% conversion drop across this customer base because of that.

So why don’t you request this after the onboarding, and you’ll have 1% more revenue?

And what you see historically is that all these types of business decisions aren’t even part of the conversation anymore.

It’s just like: second line of defense says here are 200 pages of policies, and then somebody implements them, and then it becomes a stale document.

And there’s never a conversation around: how can we collect these documents in a better way? How can we automate this? How can we make this a delightful customer experience?

So that’s always what we say: compliance is a hygiene factor.

So it starts with great compliance. That’s what we’re intending to do.

But once that bar is met, business onboarding should drive revenues.

And that has been completely forgotten in the industry.

Jeroen: And if it does, it’s easy to pay you, right?

Duco: Exactly. Right.

Jeroen: I mean, I think it sounds like a really good sales argument as well.

Duco: Exactly.

Jeroen: I mean, if you make more money through paying you, it’s an easy business case, right?

Duco: That’s exactly the goal.

Jeroen: But then still, these large financial institutions — and I already mentioned a couple of really big names that work with you — need to trust you. I think there are a lot of players that will probably come up to a bank, let’s say, or another organization and say like: hey, we have the solution for you. And then a lot of banks will say: well, that sounds too good to be true.

So what makes it that they actually want to work with you? Because you’ve just started the business a few years ago, with a lot of really good experience — especially with Stripe, I think — but still, they need to trust you.

So what makes them want to work with you?

Duco: Yeah, I think this goes a bit step by step.

This is also what one of our advisors — a very successful fintech entrepreneur — said: it’s about what are your stepping stones to get into the most interesting segment you eventually want to play in.

So we obviously didn’t first start with a bank. We first started with fintechs, then marketplaces, then the first bank, then the second bank.

And as you continue on that trajectory, more and more companies trust you with their business. And then you can bring the results from the first customer to the next customer, et cetera, et cetera.

And of course, the quality of the people that we hired helps as well. I mean, they’ve been at Stripe, Adyen, Mollie, Uber, Apple, Google, Klarna — all top companies.

And also the quality of the investor base.

Jeroen: Yeah. I wanted to ask you, because I mentioned in my introduction: you’ve raised a lot of money, right? Which is not super usual in the Netherlands, especially to raise so much money in the first few years of your business.

So why do all these people want to put so much money into your business?

Duco: Well, best to ask them, obviously, but let me try to fill it in a bit for them.

So I think it’s a couple of things.

One is: this is a massive industry where historically people have only looked at the software spend.

But there are actually two more interesting axes.

One is: how can you drive revenues and increase conversion and create a great onboarding experience, especially when you’re being overtaken left and right by fintechs with fast onboarding?

And then the second new axis is in the world of AI, where you can use AI to automate a lot of these standard checkbox exercises from your compliance operations.

So there’s a much bigger opportunity in this space than what people previously thought.

The third angle is: if you manage to have enough coverage in a country and you can use that as a backbone to create a network where people can share those identities, so it becomes a one-click onboarding and one-click checkout, there’s an even bigger opportunity because everybody wins.

The customer wins, the other institution wins and Duna also wins.

So it would be like a three-sided marketplace where everybody benefits.

Jeroen: I recently interviewed you on your latest raise. It was a very short interview, purely on that raise.

And I remember — if I’m not mistaken — that I asked you: what are you going to do with all that money?

But I want to ask that question again.

Duco: Yeah. So we’re continuously investing 60 to 70% at least into R&D.

So right now I would say that 80-plus percent of our P&L goes into R&D: engineering, product, design.

So we will keep investing large amounts into that.

Next to that, we don’t really spend on marketing or things like that.

So it’s also just a lot of money, and we weren’t necessarily planning to raise.

One of the reasons why we still wanted to raise that money is also trust.

Because if you are a bank and you want to work with an onboarding and compliance provider, you want us to still be around in five to 10 years.

You don’t want us to be a startup that’s running out of cash in the next two to three years.

And many startups run out of cash in less than two to three years. More like six to 18 months.

So the majority of this money is just going to sit there in a mix of money market funds and deposits, waiting there.

It’s insurance and security, which is also trustworthiness for our customers.

Jeroen: And you said in one of your sentences very quickly: we weren’t planning on raising. How does that work? People just come to you and say like: I’d love to buy some of your shares?

Duco: Yeah, sort of. Slightly differently.

So we talked to CapitalG because they were connected to some of our angel investors.

So the former CTO of Stripe and the former COO of Stripe both work at Google, and CapitalG is — they’re independent — but they’re an investment arm of Alphabet.

Then they got to know us via Claire Hughes Johnson and David Singleton — former Stripe COO and CTO.

They passed by one or two times in Amsterdam, and then they basically did a full assessment of the business.

And that’s how it went.

So they talked behind our backs, they talked to customers, did industry research, et cetera.

And then they said: hey, we’re interested in exploring this.

And we were interested too.

So that’s how it went.

Jeroen: So my colleague Jelke always prepares my podcasts in a very detailed manner, so I want to check something with you.

She wrote down: you do not have any traditional titles, but you use Pokémon titles. Or is that not true?

Duco: Yeah, it’s only meant for internal purposes.

But the background story to it is that we run a fully transparent company and everything internally is transparent.

So the right question is not what is transparent. The right question is: what is not transparent?

So personal identifiable information, personal feedback, HR dossiers — that is private.

But all the rest is public.

So notes — if I chat one-on-one with my co-founder — and notes from Granola and Gong, where we record meetings with, are automatically pushed into Slack.

All my emails, apart from confidential HR emails, are BCC’d into an archive, and we can then run LLMs on all of that information, which is really cool.

So as a hobby project, for instance, a Duna colleague created — based on the full Duna database that is continuously coming in — a Duna daily podcast, which is a five-minute podcast on what happened yesterday within Duna.

It’s narrated by a mimicked voice of somebody who works at Duna — so by a colleague — and it’s automatically generated based on all of our transcripts from the last day and all of our open communication from the last day.

And it’s actually quite spot on.

So I think it’s a big advantage to have a transparent company these days, because you can feed everything into your internal LLM and it will make your whole company way more productive, because the whole knowledge base is very in-depth and continuously updated.

Jeroen: But I guess a lot of people love to read your emails as well, right? Then they spend some time reading your emails.

Duco: They can. And I can entrust them: it’s very boring.

Jeroen: So given it’s so transparent, what about the Pokémon?

Duco: Yeah, exactly. So I realized I ditched your question on the Pokémon.

There’s one archive. So we have different archives where we BCC things into.

There’s one thing called [email protected], and we have a lot of colleagues who like to lurk in that channel and see what the communication with investors is like. Anyways, back to your Pokémon question.

So everything is transparent. We have job levels, and I didn’t want to give them numbers and I didn’t want to give them letters, because that creates some sort of hierarchy. And we want people to be entrepreneurial and have ownership despite hierarchy. So that’s why we thought: okay, we can give them fantasy names. And then I just decided to use Pokémon names for them.

Jeroen: Do you have a Pokémon card as well?

Duco: I have a Pokémon card as well.

Jeroen: Are you going to share it or?

Duco: I’m not going to share my Pokémon.

Jeroen: You’re not going to share it. It’s not that transparent.

Duco: Internally, it’s all transparent. People also know exactly what everybody gets paid, including what my co-founder and I get paid, including exactly how many shares we have in the company.

So all of that is public.

And I’d say there’s a benefit to doing this transparently.

Because you are forced to be fair and consistent.

And this was one of the biggest recommendations I got from Index Ventures, one of our investors. They had a full-time compensation expert.

And he said: the biggest troubles arise when your comp is not fair and consistent.

And most companies aren’t fair and consistent.

And what then happens is: people in your team go out, drink three beers, and after beer four they already know what everybody gets paid — and there’s always a difference.

And then half is unhappy and the other half is happy, and it doesn’t feel fair.

So in that sense, I feel like we have relatively little conflict about compensation compared to other organizations, despite it always being a discussion topic.

I have never seen an organization where it wasn’t.

Jeroen: No, I mean, it makes sense.

But I really love the strategy — quote unquote — of this transparency policy you have.

I was just wondering: were you ever disappointed? Like someone sharing your salary more generally, or other things where you thought: well, this is something you should not have shared outside the company?

Duco: No.

Jeroen: So far, so good.

Duco: No, so far, so good. And I think it’s also clear: if you give people trust, they’ll give it back. And by the way, if people would throw out the cap table in public or information like that and we would find out, we would of course directly fire them. And we would also not hide why we fired them and what went wrong. And this sounds very harsh, but it’s like: we entrust people with all this sensitive information.

Jeroen: Noblesse oblige, right?

Duco: Yeah. Noblesse oblige.

So we trust them to treat it that way.

Jeroen: This is Leaders in Finance with Jeroen Broekema.

So on your four points we discussed earlier in this conversation — the one about working with the smartest people, useful for society, et cetera — one was getting very big.

You said in other interviews and in many places that identity is one of the internet’s biggest unsolved problems.

So that means it’s maybe not only for financial services. It’s much bigger than that.

Is that what you dream about? Or is this really a business focused on financial services first and only?

Duco: No, so this is where we start: financial services. And the dream is of course bigger. And in that sense, we’ve maybe been a bit influenced by Stripe. And what I do love about Americans is that they tend to dream big. And if you have a big—

Jeroen: I thought they were Irish.

Duco: Yeah, they’re Irish, but the company is very American, I would say. When it comes to vision, mission, branding, et cetera, it’s more American-native than European-native. What I like about it is: it’s hard to eventually live up to that big vision if you don’t have it and don’t aim for it. And in that sense, the whole “aim for the stars and land on the moon” thing is definitely something we can do more of in the Netherlands. And we do have some companies — like if you read the book on ASML by Marc Hijink, which I think is a fantastic book. People might think it sounds boring, but people should really read it. It reads like a novel. And he always writes fantastic pieces. So I would highly recommend that. But if you read that book, those guys were definitely aiming for the stars. And they landed on the stars. It’s something to be proud of in the Netherlands. We’re often not proud enough of it, I’d say. But I like that attitude. You’re not pretending you’re necessarily going to land there, but it’s definitely what we aim for.

Jeroen: Well, let’s take a very short detour because it’s really interesting to me. So there apparently are, in your view, too many businesses that don’t aim to become a really, really big global company. Do you know why that is?

Duco: No, I think it’s just very Dutch.

Jeroen: Is it?

Duco: So I’ve done quite some angel investing personally over the past five-plus years. And I often see that entrepreneurs from the Benelux are pitching you their feature. But what a venture capital investor is looking for is an outsized return. So you’re looking for: what is the story to do 100 million in revenue? Or what is the story to do a billion in revenue? And could you potentially get there? And obviously, if this is two dudes sitting on an Amsterdam canal and there’s nothing there yet, you don’t expect them to already have it. But you at least want to see a vision that they’re aiming to get there. Because otherwise the odds of them getting there are even disproportionately smaller.

Jeroen: Is this because you were always like that? Even as a kid, maybe you wanted to become really big in what you do? Or is it influenced by what you said — by working in the US, by working with people who run a business like an American business that really aims for the stars?

Duco: So I would say it’s definitely mostly influenced by Stripe. Both David and I were working from Europe, but very much influenced by that Silicon Valley DNA. I would also say that both David and I are very competitive and we like big and hard things. So I think it also touched something that we already had inside of us — a fire that was easily lit.

Jeroen: Is it going fast enough at the moment? It never just started, right?

Duco: I think it’s never going fast enough. I even recall that already from Blendle, where the founders — Marten Blankesteijn and Alexander Klöpping — always felt it wasn’t going fast enough. And back then I already concluded once with Marten: isn’t it maybe also the fate of an entrepreneur that if you’re an entrepreneur who’s satisfied, the business is probably going nowhere? Like probably dissatisfaction is the mother of progress.

Jeroen: Where do the competitive egos come from?

Duco: Oh, I don’t know. I always had that.

Jeroen: What is it that makes you really want to compete and win?

Duco: Yeah. I just hate losing. I really want to win.

So David and I don’t play a lot of games together because it usually ends with at least one of the parties being unhappy.

Jeroen: When I was preparing for this interview — and now I’m going to turn more towards you personally — one thing that stood out to me is that you’re very broadly interested. So you’re apparently a good piano player. You’re a good runner. You can do the math kind of science stuff, but also the alpha stuff. You’re such a broadly oriented person, right? Does that resonate with you if I say that?

Duco: It sounds positive, but my brothers would say the negative explanation is: jack of all trades, king of none.

Jeroen: That’s the other way of looking at it. Well, let’s mention one other. Apparently you were at a cabaret festival and actually won a prize.

Duco: Yeah, that’s true.

Jeroen: Tell me the story.

Duco: I went to one of my friends, Menno Ploeg, at university, and we were sitting in a café on Utrecht’s Nobelstraat, and I said: hey, you’re sort of funny. Maybe I’m sort of funny. Let’s do a comedy show together.

And then a third friend, Clemens Lokien, said: okay, I also want to join. So he sort of forced himself upon the group. And then we participated in a Utrecht student cabaret thing, and then in a student association cabaret thing. And then we got a message from the Groninger Student Cabaret Festival: do you want to participate or do an audition?

And we were very honored. Later on, we found out that they were desperately looking for candidates. So we were part of this desperation exercise. We definitely should not have felt honored. And then we participated and got into that contest. And then suddenly, three months later, we won that contest out of nowhere.

And we were like three young law students. Then we went on a tour around the Netherlands. We also performed in De Kleine Komedie once. That was the height. And from then on, it went completely downwards.

Jeroen: And was it that you guys just had a lot of bluff, or did you prepare really well?

Duco: No. So we worked hard for it, obviously. And we also had a bit of bluff involved. Like the first time you stand there on stage, you have no clue what you’re doing.

We also had a lot of awful performances. Like once we drove to Assen for a half-hour performance and nobody laughed in that half hour, like not a single person. And then we needed to drive back to Utrecht, where we studied, and it was total depression. It was worse than a funeral. But it’s also good, because you grow up.

Jeroen: No, but I guess it has also been a very fun time, right? To do this and actually…

Duco: So it was definitely a fun time. It was definitely a fun time. I think also the director of De Kleine Komedie once put it… She said, like, one of my friends, she said: yeah, he is really special. Like one of us was really special. It wasn’t me.

And then if you need to make a career in comedy, first of all, you need to be funny enough. So first of all, maybe we just weren’t funny enough to really make a career. But you also need to really want it and go and pass through theater after theater and theater and…

Jeroen: But it was never your plan, right? Not even a single moment you thought: I’m going to do this for a living?

Duco: No, because I actually disliked it after a while, because we were then going to a new theater and then we played our own show for the 50th time and we again had a sound check and all of that stuff. And I didn’t really enjoy it. Whereas I heard from other people who are actors or comedians that they still enjoy it after the 30th time and they love it, and the show is in development and it brings them joy.

Jeroen: Does it help you in your current work that you’ve done this?

Duco: I think it definitely helps. Like it will never get worse than driving to Assen to hear people who bought a ticket and don’t laugh a single time in half an hour. Like it gives some eel top your zeal. So I do think it helps.

Jeroen: I guess it also — but it’s just a suggestion — helps when you get into trouble. Once in a while, as an entrepreneur, you get into trouble, you need to solve something big. Everybody’s stressed. Maybe humor — but you probably had that already — but maybe how to show that to your team. Maybe humor helps to put things into perspective as well.

Duco: Yeah, definitely. I think we should always try to laugh and have fun. So in that sense, it helps.

Jeroen: Something very different is your running career. Because when I didn’t know you, the only thing I knew about you — I don’t know why, but someone once sent it to me — was a short video on YouTube, I think when you were preparing for Marathon des Sables, one of the hardest marathons in the world. You should tell me more about it. But have you always been running as a kid as well, or did this come later?

Duco: No, so it came later. I was a fanatic hockey player, and during that, of course, you had training runs and et cetera. But no, I wasn’t actively running before I was a student.

Jeroen: When did you start running? What age was that? Like seriously running?

Duco: Only 24 or something, quite briefly before that Marathon des Sables. I had never done a marathon before we did that Marathon des Sables.

Jeroen: Never ever a marathon, and the Marathon des Sables is like five marathons in a row or something like that?

Duco: Yeah, so it’s like six marathons in six days through the Moroccan desert.

Jeroen: You had never done a marathon before?

Duco: No, and also not afterwards.

Jeroen: You were not suicidal, or?

Duco: I did one official marathon, which is the last day of the Marathon des Sables. Then you have an exact marathon, and the other days it varies. So it’s like 35 kilometers, 30, 45, and then one day was 91 kilometers through the desert nonstop. Then you have a day of rest, and then there’s one more marathon to top it off.

Jeroen: Why did you start with this? What was the trigger event?

Duco: A friend of mine, Tom Skisauer, had another friend, Tom, and he had applied for this race. And when I heard this from my friend Tom, I was like: ah, this is unreal. Six marathons in six days through the Moroccan Sahara. I thought it was a joke.

And then I went online and there’s this documentary from Discovery Channel about James Cracknell, a British Olympic rower, and he runs the race. And he goes completely crazy and he’s almost puking and his temperature is too high. And I looked at it and I thought: this is so cool and so unreasonable. It just sounds so unreasonable. I would love to also just subscribe.

Jeroen: But you didn’t do it alone. You did it with other people. It was a team, right?

Duco: Yes. So I first contacted like 15 people to do it with me and nobody was interested.

Jeroen: Very surprisingly.

Duco: Yeah, surprisingly. And then at a certain point in time, I called two brothers who wanted to swim across the English Channel. And I asked them: hey, don’t you want to do this running first?

And then these guys, Tyler and Renee, said: okay, we’ll watch the documentary. So they called me back, I think it was probably roughly a week later, and they said: oh, we watched the documentary. And then I was like: oh my God, again somebody who’s going to say: I don’t want to run this weird race.

And then they said: we watched it and we think it’s really cool. We’re in.

Wow. So then they were in, and then two other friends also participated in the race. And then in the end, there were five of us.

Jeroen: And you also did it very fast, right? Wasn’t it the fastest Dutch people ever or something like that?

Duco: Yeah, I don’t know if it still is, but back then, together with Paul. So we ended 44th and 45th out of, what, 1,300 people, something like that.

Jeroen: How much training was involved? For a year or something, or longer?

Duco: Yeah. So a lot. I started a year, 10 months before, and then it went up all the way until every morning I ran 10 kilometers with 12 kilograms of rice in my backpack. Because in the Marathon des Sables, you also need to bring all your own food. And it also gets quite cold at night. So you need to bring everything in your backpack.

So they also call it planned starvation because you need to bring all your food for those days. And if you bring too much food, you basically need to carry 15, 16 kilos. So then you slowly start eating that food and you get more and more starved towards the end of that race.

Jeroen: So it’s extraordinarily heavy. Did you cry during the race?

Duco: Yeah, I cried a couple of times. At the same time, I also just think they have a really good marketing department. So I recently read somebody in a newspaper who had run that race, and then she said: yeah, my husband told me there are better reasons to die for. And then it was like: wow, okay.

But this is a very safe race. There were 1,300 people participating back then, you had 80 doctors, you had two helicopters, you had SOS and GPS coordinates with you. And dumb luck also, one or two people have died very sadly, but that happens at every type of race.

So if anything, I think nowadays it’s really a safe race. And then it depends, like they don’t have a closing timeline. So they have a couple of camels that start every day, and these camels only go three to four kilometers per hour. So you can run the race, but if you just sort of walk it and you stay in front of the camels, then you can also get to the end.

So I think the race is more a testament of perseverance rather than necessarily the toughest foot race on earth.

Jeroen: And if you look back at it, what is the number one thing you think about?

Duco: What I’m most proud of is that I just loved the training for it. And I’m very proud that we ended that high, because we literally gave everything. And I believe at the end, like half of my toenails were off. I had 17 blisters. I had a blister sometimes within a blister. It was honestly awful.

You asked me when I cried. After those 90 kilometers, we had run so hard and then my feet got so swollen that I didn’t fit into my shoes anymore on the last marathon. So then I cut out the insoles of my shoes with my pocket knife. And then I would cram in my swollen foot with 17 blisters and many toenails missing, and put them back into that shoe.

And then I walked to the starting line and I literally almost had to cry. And that was the start of a marathon after 210 kilometers already ran.

And then together with my friend Paul, we ran that last marathon and we did it through the Sahara Desert, including sand, in four hours and 16 minutes. And on that, I’m genuinely really proud because I couldn’t move anymore. So I was only behind my friends and two times I also hit my shoe against a big rock. And two times I started crying because I didn’t have a toenail left anymore on that foot.

And then we still ended it in four hours and 16 minutes. And I recall being so tired I couldn’t talk anymore. But the day before, I had eaten all my food. So we were in the middle of the desert, and then we had finished this last marathon, and then I had 24 hours without food, but only 10 liters of water.

And that went from one of the biggest highs in my life to total depression.

So I’m really proud. If I think of what I am proud of: that we did this with a group of friends. And on that last marathon, I’m really proud because it just shows that with perseverance, you can put your mind over matter. And that has been one of the big lessons of ultra-running: that you can do way more than you think.

And it’s also one of the quotes that I love from Haruki Murakami. He’s a very famous Japanese writer, but also an ultra-runner himself. And he always says: pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. And I think that’s a very good explanation of how to do well in an ultra-marathon.

Jeroen: Impressive. His book is something like What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

Duco: Exactly.

Jeroen: But it’s a great little book. Yeah, that’s true. Do your investors know that you’ve done these kinds of marathons?

Duco: Yeah, I think so.

Jeroen: Because if they want to check perseverance, I mean, here’s the evidence, right?

Duco: Exactly.

Jeroen: I mean, if you put this competitive, but also this kind of psychological mindset — as you call it, mind over matter — into a business as well, right, you will not give up. These are my words, not a question.

So if we take a turn to you even more personally, could you share something about how you grew up?

Duco: Yeah. So I grew up in Aerdenhout with two brothers, in a very happy, loving family, where my mother had a lot of work with three quite ADHD, energetic brothers. And she really invested a lot. So we can be very grateful for that.

It was a childhood filled with a lot of luck.

Jeroen: Is that where the competitiveness comes from as well? Two brothers?

Duco: Definitely partly. All three of us are very competitive.

Jeroen: What else about your youth? What did your parents do for work, for example? Was it Christian or not? Was there another belief? Were there certain values that were really important when you were growing up?

Duco: My dad was a lawyer. He worked at Stibbe for like 20, 30 years. And afterwards he was director of the VSB Fonds. And my mom used to be a GP, a huisarts, general practitioner. And then after we moved to Paris, with three young kids, she became a house mom and took care of us, which was more than a full-time job, I would say.

Then the values: we were quite disciplined. So my parents definitely told us: be disciplined, work hard, don’t try to complain too much. But they also raised us with a lot of confidence and with a lot of positive self-view.

And quite often people would say: oh, this might be a very old-fashioned and conservative family. But my parents actually even told me when I was young: you can be what you want to be, as long as you work hard and give it what you want to give.

So if you want to be a painter or a ballet dancer, it’s also a possibility. But choose, and then actually choose and work for it. And also think about your surroundings and the world around you.

Jeroen: So your last name is also the name of one of the well-known banks in the country. How is that relationship?

Duco: So it was founded in 1737 by like a great-great-great-grandfather. But my branch of the family hasn’t had anything to do with it for a long time.

Jeroen: I see. So when it’s about your youth, do you recall what you wanted to be when you were older? When you were, I don’t know, five years old, 10 years old, 15 or 20?

Duco: Yeah. There is one school book where I have said something with the rechtbank, something with the justice court. But I think that was probably mimicking that papa was a lawyer.

Jeroen: But you did go and study law.

Duco: Yes.

Jeroen: Was that related to your dad, do you think?

Duco: I don’t know. Maybe, maybe. But in the end, I would have preferred to study either math or econometrics or art history. All things I would have found more interesting than law.

Jeroen: After high school, did you go directly into university or did you do something in between?

Duco: Yes, I did something in between. So I went for three months to Benin, which is next to Nigeria, where I worked in an orphanage. And I still recall that there were often people — like I grew up in Aerdenhout, so it’s a very bekakte, elitist neighborhood — and a lot of people were then doing volunteer work and paying a lot of money. And then you saw pictures of them only getting drunk with people in a random place in the world.

I was like: how is this volunteer work? You pay a large amount of money to get drunk and pretend you’re doing something.

So together with my parents, we had organized it separately. And then I ended up in Benin, in Allada, which was I think like one hour from Cotonou, the capital. And the idea was: oh, you’re going to sit here, and there are also five or six French sisters who are going to work here.

And then I recall arriving, and the priest was my supervisor, and the priest brought me to the house. And then I asked: oh, where are the French people? And they said: oh, nobody told you? They’re not arriving.

So there I was, in a house with 15 beds. And then he said: yeah, it’s quite safe here, but just to be sure, don’t leave the house later at night without this. And then he chucked a massive knife into my hand.

And that was basically me then working in an orphanage there for three months as the only white guy. And I recall like four weeks later, some people driving by in a car, and those were the first white people that I saw in four weeks.

So that was definitely going from Aerdenhout to that place. And it didn’t have a supermarket. Yeah, I was definitely homesick, but I didn’t want to give up. And I think it was good to go from this neighborhood where everything is organized for you to then cooking your own meals. And I ate pasta with pineapple and ham and that type of stuff, or tomatoes. Like there was literally almost nothing in the village.

But I think it was a good experience. Yeah.

Jeroen: And the rest of the year?

Duco: The rest of the year I was in Paris and I played field hockey there.

Jeroen: Ah, I see. Because you played, as you alluded to earlier, field hockey at quite a high level as well.

Duco: Yeah, quite. So that is like, okay, but not great.

Jeroen: What kind of student were you?

Duco: I would say I was disciplined, but not overly fanatic. So in my bachelor, every time I had a subject, I just wanted to get past it because I didn’t want to do it again, because I didn’t like law. And then in my master’s, I was more fanatic about getting high grades and doing really well.

Jeroen: Girls, alcohol, not much, very much, somewhere in between?

Duco: It depends on whose viewpoint you take. If you talk to my students…

Jeroen: From your own viewpoint.

Duco: From my own viewpoint, it was the balance that I liked myself. If you ask some people around me, they always thought that I never drank and I was very slow and I would poop the party, but I think I’m a bit in the middle. Yeah.

Jeroen: How long did you study?

Duco: Four years.

Jeroen: And your first job, do you remember how you got to your first job? That was McKinsey, or?

Duco: Yes, that was McKinsey. I knew I wanted to do nothing with law. So somebody told me: instead of avoiding problems, you can also solve problems. Here’s this company, McKinsey.

I had no clue. So I applied there and I got an internship. And then afterwards I found out that if you have an internship, you almost certainly have a job. So I sort of rolled into that. And after the internship, you then get an invite to stay, but it didn’t really feel like that job was a good fit.

But then I did a look at other jobs in the market and I also didn’t really like any of these other jobs. So it was more a pragmatic, transactional decision. Like this has a good esteem and it’s probably good as a starter for my career, but it wasn’t like I started there because this was the dream job.

Jeroen: But from day one, you were not like: I’m going to become a partner here.

Duco: Yeah, that was quite clear.

Jeroen: And then you stayed for a few years?

Duco: Yeah. Two years.

Jeroen: Learned a lot?

Duco: Yeah, it was definitely useful. I just think that the type of job, like at the start here I also said: I don’t really love details and super deep and endless research. So a McKinsey project is 10 weeks. And I loved the first week when we were getting to the week one answer. And then I didn’t like the other nine weeks, but yeah, you still have nine weeks of a project left and it’s quite intense.

So I just think it wasn’t a fit for me, but I’ve seen a lot of other friends of mine thriving there and loving the job, but it wasn’t for me.

Jeroen: I love these moments of transition, right? Because people can relate to that. I can relate to it. Listeners can relate to it. So do you remember how you… Your next thing was Blendle, right?

Duco: Yes.

Jeroen: If I’m not mistaken. So do you know how you ended up with Blendle?

Duco: Yeah, definitely. So Alexander Klöpping, founder of Blendle, put a role for Head of International out. I simply applied for that role. And back then it was 2015, Dutch tech was almost nothing. So you couldn’t really hire somebody who had tech experience. We were all just doing something and finding it out while playing for that.

And I still recall, we needed to record a video and then you needed to answer some questions, like: why do you want this job? Why are you well-placed for this job? And then at the end, do something funny or your favorite hobby. And it needed to be a video.

And I was like: they have so many applications. So I had a super serious video, and I was back then working for a McKinsey project in Perth and I had rented an apartment, but it used to be from the Hugh Hefner of Perth. And in the middle of the apartment, it had only red leather couches and, I kid you not, a stripping pole.

So, and I’m bad at a lot of things, but I have decent stripping pole dancing skills. So then at the end of that video, which was my application video for Blendle, funny music started and you saw me actually walking into that room and then jumping from the red leather couch and making three turns on the pole. And that’s how this ended.

And I was like: well, at least these guys are going to take a serious look at this application. And they are all 25 too. They just want to laugh. I mean, this doesn’t look like a very serious company to me. And luckily they did think it was funny.

Jeroen: Instantly hired.

Duco: Not instantly hired, but it was, I think, seen as a positive joke.

Jeroen: Where do you get pole dancing skills? Where do you get that from?

Duco: In a lot of nightclubs they have these types of things.

Jeroen: This is the Leaders in Finance podcast with Jeroen Broekema. So you were hired. And was that already the time where Alexander Klöpping was quite well known? Was he on television a lot already? Or was he unknown?

Duco: Yeah, he was well known. Yeah.

Jeroen: What was your job there? You said international.

Duco: So my job was to do the international expansion. It was a very fun company with a lot of talent and a great company culture. I just think the business model in the end wasn’t a great business model.

And you’ve seen that if you’re not working in a very interesting market, you’re a bit swimming against the water. And Blendle was doing micropayments for journalism, and there isn’t any other micropayments-for-journalism startup that became big or did great. So I just think fundamentally that business model, even though it was great to use, wasn’t a great business.

Then for us, when we expanded internationally, that was my responsibility back then, and I spent like six to eight weeks analyzing every country we could go to, like a McKinsey project. And it looked super smart. And then we ended up trying to go to France, Germany, the UK and the US, which were quite logical and wherever we could sign up the publishers. So then we wasted eight weeks on this.

We could have literally decided this standing in our office next to whiteboards in one hour. So total waste of time. This is also a bit like the consulting way of looking at your business. And then you just analyze everything. And because you now analyzed it, you have reached the conclusion that you think you know, but it’s analytical certainty illusion.

And this is what you see in a lot of these businesses: sometimes when you do more analysis, the only thing you do is convince yourself that this is the right decision, but you don’t really know. You’re better off just going into an execution mode, executing, iterating and shipping quickly rather than sitting there and thinking and making great extensive plans. So plans now at Duna should not be more than two or three pages.

Anyways, back to this. So then we went to Germany and I had spent all of this time and we had signed up all the publishers and then we went live and nothing happened.

So it was just not a fit. The business model wasn’t a fit. We didn’t have the aura of Marten and Alexander, who are well known here and on television, and it didn’t become as big as we wanted it to, which was of course my responsibility. So in that sense, I failed the international expansion there. And I learned a lot.

I think it’s also a tangible testament to the company that a lot of these people ended up at really cool other startups. So it has been a fertile breeding ground.

Jeroen: From there on to Stripe. How did you get to Stripe? Same question.

Duco: So Stripe contacted me via LinkedIn, and then I felt like: online payments sounds super boring. Sounds very boring. But I saw all the coolest investors that I know from Silicon Valley. So I was like: okay, I’ll take one call with these people.

And then I thought the person on that call was very smart, very intellectual, had a really good story on why payments would change the world and why it wasn’t boring. And then I went into a range of calls, which ended up with me talking to, I think, 10 or 12 people before I got hired, flying to San Francisco.

I think I watched 50 hours of every podcast and video that they had. I checked all the 300 or so employees they had back then on LinkedIn. I clicked through every profile because I also thought after Blendle and McKinsey: it’s really the quality of the people that makes the difference.

And then I even recall when I was being interviewed at Stripe, I got some questions from John Collison on how do you think about hiring people? And I still recall that I gave him the exact answer back that he had said on a YouTube video at Stanford, but he didn’t notice that I gave him his own answer back.

He did laugh about it when I told him this a few years later, like: did you realize I actually gave your answer back? And he said: oh no, what a hiring mistake. I was like: or not a mistake. You know, I’m also doing sales here.

Jeroen: Exactly.

Duco: Yeah.

Jeroen: I thought it was not a hiring mistake as well, but during the time you were there, about what is it, five, six years maybe, massive growth, right?

Duco: Massive.

Jeroen: So what are the things you’ve learned there in terms of massive growth? Because you probably need that now as well with Duna.

Duco: The quality of the people, the quality of good execution. This was fintech infrastructure and there’s just continuous investing in R&D and good execution. So many things. It’s hard to mention now a couple of specific things, but it comes like the importance of culture.

Stripe was very adamant on what is the company culture we want to have? What are our operating principles? How do we hire people and how do we encourage people to operate with these principles in mind? And I thought that was a very strong ingredient to attract high-quality people, but also to invest in your retention, because it was a great place to work.

Jeroen: And you were a big part, or only a part, in the US?

Duco: No, I was always here in the Benelux.

Jeroen: So what was your time in the US then? When was that?

Duco: Only when I was going there back and forth to the headquarters.

Jeroen: Yeah, because you alluded to it that the culture, like the Silicon Valley culture of growth, you got through that company, but not by living there.

Duco: And for example, these BCCs with these email archives, that’s something we copied from Stripe. So also at Stripe, a lot of information was open. Prior to the board meeting at Stripe, they would share the deck internally with all the employees and people would actually comment on the deck and say like: hey, this is a mistake or this is incorrect for my department, which was a really funny and cool vibe. And you could also learn a lot from that.

So you could see the long-range plan. What is the five-year plan from the finance department at Stripe? And how do they think about modeling that future? I loved these types of things. Like if you’re curious, for the curious mind, it’s really like a candy store.

And this is one of the things also with our Duna transparency. We have engineers that work as an SRE, a Site Reliability Engineer on DevOps, that watch sales recordings of sales meetings because they’re interested in it. And they watch it like they’re watching or listening to a podcast. So you can really follow your natural curiosity in a transparent organization.

Jeroen: After Stripe, you went to Fourthline, worked there a few years. How did you get there and how was it to work at Fourthline?

Duco: How I got there was via acquaintances and connections in fintech, who connected me to this company that back then only had N26 or mostly N26 as a customer. And I started connecting with the team and I knew how big KYC and identity of a problem it was at Stripe.

And this was like a cool, promising Amsterdam fintech where I was thinking: okay, there’s a lot of opportunity in this market. And in the years afterwards, we scaled and started doing the retail onboarding for Nationale-Nederlanden, Western Union, now also parts of Revolut, parts of Rabobank. They collaborate with Qonto, Trade Republic, really good fintechs, et cetera.

Jeroen: So at some point — and I must say before I ask this question — you started to write columns for Quote magazine. I always really enjoyed your columns. Also in one of your columns, you explain how much time you spend on it, preparing these columns.

But first, why did you think: I’m going to write a column? I have enough to share that people apparently like, because they were really well read, right?

Duco: I don’t know about the well-read part. I don’t know the comparison.

Jeroen: How many people read them on LinkedIn, and a lot of people forwarded them to me and others.

Duco: So for that, we should ask Quote. I don’t have the numbers of the other columnists.

So I actually loved the creative process. That’s also something that I loved from doing the comedy and the cabaret: that you can look at the status quo in a different way and then have a view or a vision on it and write something about it that is intellectually interesting or appealing, and also crack some jokes in it.

So very often when I would write a column, I would always try to see: is there still one or two jokes? Can you make people smile? Can we make it a bit joyful? Because I mean, it’s also a column. Let’s not inflate ourselves.

It’s a lot of work if you’re not great at writing fast columns, and I suck at writing fast. So I’m too perfectionistic and I would literally spend my whole weekend on it. People would go out on Friday drinking and I would work until 3 AM, and then I would pick it up on Saturday and also work on Saturday afternoon until 1 AM. And then my column was ready.

So I would spend the craziest amount of hours and often late at night, and they did get funnier when I usually drank four or five whiskeys, but there was a lot of nervousness that went into it.

I generally really enjoyed the process. I learned a lot from it. I became a better writer. A friend of mine, Thomas Rueb, who is a journalist, would always give me feedback on the columns. I learned so much from him. The first time he sent it back, everything was red. And as I wrote more columns, it was still red, but less and less red, and I became a better writer. And I liked the skill and it puzzled me and it stimulated critical thinking. So I really enjoyed writing them.

Jeroen: At some point you left Fourthline, started to think about Duna and then started the business. And you already mentioned it earlier, but you also started investing, or did you already invest way before?

Duco: No, so I think the first time was something like 2019 or something, six, seven years ago, and then it slowly started. And now it’s been like around 30 or 31 businesses that I have.

Jeroen: And all startups?

Duco: Yeah, almost all. Yeah, all are startups.

Jeroen: And do people find you? Do you find people?

Duco: Mostly a mix. So they come in via network, via people I know of.

Jeroen: You don’t have much time to spend on these startups now, I guess, right?

Duco: It depends. With some, I actually do spend some time, but I usually say I do it reactively. I’m not going to write them an email every two weeks: what can I do for you?

But if they have a question, I usually just ask them: let’s put it on WhatsApp and then we can have a quick WhatsApp call, or you just put it on WhatsApp and then do a quick voice memo. That’s also what I do with our own angel investor base. I realize all of them are busy.

So I just get them on WhatsApp. And then if it’s a bigger question, I say: hey, this is the question. They write a quick message, but feel free to do a voice memo because it only takes you five minutes. And then it’s my problem to work from their words, and it works quite productively.

Jeroen: And investments in any industry? Could be anything? Or is it more like fintech-related stuff?

Duco: Usually it’s fintech and/or SaaS, B2B SaaS slash AI. And if I deviate from that, it’s only because either I know the founder really well and I trust the founder, or I know the lead investor really well and I trust them.

Jeroen: So I’m just curious. I don’t know if you want to share, but out of these approximately 30 investments or something, did some of them already either IPO or could you sell your shares? So in other words, did some of them become a big financial or otherwise success?

Duco: Yeah. So I have a little website, sirnelsoncapital.com, which is basically a pink website with my dog on it. Because investors take themselves way too seriously. So I thought, let’s make a joke website.

Jeroen: People in general, right?

Duco: Yeah, right. It says something like: money is a commodity, but my dog Nelson isn’t. I think that’s the tagline of the website.

So some of them include Mollie, for instance, where I invested in the Series A. It’s on that website. But also Cradle, a really cool Dutch company. I invested in Fourthline when I joined the company. Decagon or Omnia are really cool B2B slash recent AI companies. But I also haven’t updated this website in ages. I should actually update it.

Jeroen: Normally with my guests, I tend not to talk about politics, but in this case I thought I really have to, because both your brothers are actively involved in politics. They are out there, one for the CDA party, the Christian Democratic Party, and one for Volt. Are you also outspoken about your political views or do you tend towards one of your two brothers?

Duco: In that sense, it’s sort of making life easy because they are in different parliaments. So I don’t need to pick preferences.

Jeroen: Because one of them is in the Dutch parliament.

Duco: Yes.

Jeroen: And the other one is in the European Parliament.

Duco: My oldest brother is for the CDA in the Dutch parliament, and he’s doing foreign affairs and defense. And my younger brother is for Volt in the European Parliament. And he also does foreign affairs. I think he also does defense. So they’re doing the same thing back home, or not. There were definitely a lot of interesting Easter discussions again about defense, Ukraine, foreign politics, et cetera.

Jeroen: Do you understand that they’re in politics? Or is it something you would not even consider or think about?

Duco: I would consider or think about it, but it’s obviously not on my mind now. I really enjoy building Duna, but I also understand why they have a very interesting and compelling job, and they can have a lot of positive societal impact in this job.

Jeroen: And obviously you’re going to answer this question, I’m sure. So would that be for CDA or for Volt or for a new party or another existing party?

Duco: That I won’t.

Jeroen: I thought you were so transparent, Duco. But it has nothing to do with the business, right?

Duco: My political preferences, you know, I have to keep all the brothers happy. But for both of them, I’m very proud. They work exceptionally hard and they’re both doing the right things. I mean, these are both not extremist parties. Otherwise, it would have been a more difficult Christmas conversation.

Jeroen: Fair enough. Fair enough. Leaders in Finance with Jeroen Broekema.

We have a couple of things we always ask our guests, and one of them is the five unusual questions. Or sometimes two or three or four, depending on how much time we have. But let me start with some of them. First of all, do you have a somewhat unusual hobby or something you do in your spare time?

Duco: Well, it used to be ultra-running, but now that I have two kids and a company and we’re renovating a house, I’m not running that much anymore. I’m still playing quite a lot of piano. And then with my three-year-old now, we sometimes make songs.

And the latest song that we wrote together is called I’m Cleaning Up the Whole Room and It’s So Much Fun. And then I play that song on the piano and she gets to clean up the room, and it’s very fun. So let’s see how long this will last until she finds out that this is a very manipulative song. But right now it seems to be working for the past two weeks.

Jeroen: I think at some point there will be a song where she’s singing it: you should pay more pocket money every week.

Duco: Exactly.

Jeroen: Then it’s time for a new hobby. What has been the scariest moment in your life?

Duco: When I got a call from South Africa that my bestie, Charles Witlox, was hit in a kitesurfing accident. Then he was brought to the hospital in extremely severe condition. And then half an hour later, I got another call that he had passed away.

So that was the worst half hour of my life, which ended even worse.

Jeroen: Yeah. Terrible.

Duco: Yeah. It’s a frightening, scary moment. You never forget. Even now, when I talk about it, I directly get like a stone in my stomach. But he was one of the coolest, most awesome guys on earth. And my daughter was born two months later and is also named after him with one of her additional names.

Jeroen: That’s beautiful. Yeah. Thanks for sharing.

So on a very different note, another unusual question, which is: you get 200 million or 2 billion or whatever, pick your number. Very good segue, super emotional and going into money. But let’s say you get 200 million or 2 billion or 200 billion, whatever number you pick, in your personal account today. But the catch is you have to spend it very quickly, let’s say in a few weeks’ time. What do you spend it on?

Duco: One, I would share with my friends and I would optimize it for the friends who have most need for it. And the friends, of course, of my wife and friends and family. Second thing, I would give to charities and nonprofits.

And then third thing, I would buy — we already have a nice house — but maybe I would buy one or two nice big houses. That’s the only thing I like from a capitalist consumerist perspective. We don’t need a boat or a fancy car or expensive clothes, or need to stay only in five-star hotels with 10,000 butlers. We don’t really care about all of that crap.

Jeroen: And when it comes to NGOs, are there particular fields of interest to you? I mean, there are some people who really want to focus on nature. Others want to focus more on people or anything else.

Duco: Yeah. So I love everything to do with people, social equality, financial education, giving people the tools to build a life for themselves.

Jeroen: And would it be more here in the Netherlands or more in certain parts of the world? Any preference there?

Duco: It would be both. I think it can go to Benin, where I’ve done volunteering work and where you can have a lot of impact, but also right here in Amsterdam. There are a lot of people working on the street and you have institutions like the Regenboog Groep, the Rainbow Group, who are doing fantastic things for people here locally in the municipality.

Jeroen: Because you do have a special relationship with Africa because of Benin or other things.

Duco: Yeah. And also because my friend Charles, he had Charlie’s Travels. It still exists. His wife, his partner, now runs it for the largest shareholder, which is his son, little Charles. So I would visit him often in Africa, where he was living in Kenya. And he would organize off-the-beaten-track travels from, like, a group of guys from student associations to lovebirds, family travels.

And I think if you want to do cool things in Africa, off the beaten track, they are great. It’s charlies-travels.com, something like that. But what he would basically do is go on a motorbike. He would literally go across Kenya and countries close by in the region, and he would talk to local inhabitants and create off-the-beaten-track travels to interesting, non-standard areas.

So if you then go on a Maasai tour with people that he met, it’s literally a tour that they only do for people organized by Charlie’s Travels. And he’s maintaining that whole village. So after he passed away, the person from that village who does these tours, I think they traveled like six hours to be at his memorial in Nairobi.

So it just gives a sense of how close it brings you to the human side, and how cool the type of impact is that you can then create for people in other areas.

Jeroen: Thank you for sharing. Let’s do one last unusual question. If there is one decision in the past that you could do differently, what would it be?

Duco: If I think about it, I don’t really have something that comes to mind.

Jeroen: No regrets.

Duco: No, my point is: of course there are 10,000 regrets and there are a lot of stupid things that I have done and things I shouldn’t have done. But also, if it happens, then it happens, and I should learn from it and reflect and not make the same mistake again, and then move forward.

Yeah, there are countless mistakes. Where to start? It’s endless.

I like this quote from Derek Sivers, the media entrepreneur, who says: alles komt goed en ook als het niet goed komt, dan nog steeds komt het goed.

Jeroen: So let’s try to translate that into English.

Duco: So everything will be all right. And even if it won’t be all right, it will still be all right. And I think it’s a nice way to look at it. Things might burn down or not work well, but then learn and rebuild.

Jeroen: Yeah. Very sad. He also recently passed away, of course.

Duco: That’s one example of an inspiring entrepreneur.

Jeroen: Yeah, I agree completely. Yeah. It’s such a sad story. Could have been so different.

Of any of the 200 guests, all of them, we’ve asked them the same question, which is: do you have a particular book or books, titles you would like to share with us? Could be because you love them or they’ve inspired you, or you’re just reading them right now.

Duco: Yeah. So I thought about this before.

Jeroen: Yeah. It’s one of the two questions I give people before.

Duco: Exactly. And I also thought it was sort of hard, but then I just realized: let’s pick the books that I read the most times. And the book that I read the most times is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Jeroen: Yeah.

Duco: And I don’t know if you know the book.

Jeroen: The Holocaust survivor. Yeah, I do. I think I read it twice or three times.

Duco: Yeah. So it’s a Holocaust survivor. He survived Auschwitz and he observes people’s psychological responses to extreme suffering. And he says that the primary driver is not pleasure, the Freudian one, or power, the Adler version, but rather the pursuit of meaning. And that’s why it’s called Man’s Search for Meaning. And he calls that the will to meaning.

And then he calls this logotherapy, and it’s focused around survivors who maintain a sense of purpose in the camps — love, future goals, creative work, a kid to still live for. They were more psychologically resilient than those who lost hope.

And in that sense, I think even though it’s a very sad and very impactful story, it’s also a story where even if you can’t control your circumstances, you can still control your attitude towards them. So it’s almost a bit like a radical focus on what you can control, which is Epictetus.

So that’s what I loved about the book. And what I also love: it’s a thin book. And I like it when people can write down very briefly what could have been very long.

Jeroen: Well, they also say that if you really master a topic, you can explain it to people in two sentences, or in a very tiny book in this case, right?

Duco: Exactly. And we also sometimes repeat that internally at Duna. If you create a complex solution for a complex problem, it’s still complex. But it should actually be a simple solution for a complex problem, and that is true mastery.

So on this book, and then I had two other books that I’ll only briefly discuss. The other one that I then read the next most amount of times is Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, which is about Buddhism, about wisdom. And I think it’s also, first of all, really short. It’s like a hundred years old and it’s a really great novel to talk about Buddhism and meaning, and that nothing exists in isolation.

And I think it’s really nice if you’re not super spiritual and you don’t want to be a meditative Buddhist influencer sitting in Bali or Ibiza, but you are actually interested in these types of topics. I think it’s a great book.

And then the best business book, because these are also nonfiction but not really business books, is Influence by Robert Cialdini. That’s this scientific analysis of how you can influence people and others, whether it’s sales or marketing or people. And I think it’s a useful way to see from what angles we as human beings also get influenced by others. So how are you being tricked, but also how does influencing others work?

And I think in the workplace, when it comes to reciprocity, that is one of the most standard things. It’s like, we feel obliged to return a favor. So if you do me a favor, I feel super obliged to invite you back, even though maybe I wasn’t planning to invite you. But if you invite me two times, I need to invite you back.

And there are a lot of these things there, like commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, that work very much. And that scarcity is also super human. If you hear that you can buy this, you’re not interested. But if you hear there are only five left, suddenly you’re listening.

I think it’s a very impactful book. I also read it multiple times.

Jeroen: I didn’t think about it, but I invited you now twice to the podcast. There’s actually a clear reason why I’m doing that. It’s interesting. I just learned this now.

Thanks for sharing these books. I know all three of them and they really resonate with me. Hopefully with listeners as well.

The other question we’ve asked everyone, all of the 200-plus CEOs and fintech founders and other professors and members of parliament, is: do you have tips for people who start their career now, let’s say in finance? Or it could be anywhere, but do you have particular tips, or tips to your own self when you started your career back out of law school and went into consulting?

Duco: Yes. I always actually point people to the same article. It’s called Career Decisions by Elad Gil. That’s E-L-A-D space G-I-L. And Elad Gil talks there about what things to overweight and what things people overvalue that don’t matter.

So first, the things that people overvalue.

One: the role. And I’ve seen this numerous times. People say: I can do two startups, but here my role is called VP of whatever. And people really care about that. But the thing is what Sheryl Sandberg, the former Facebook COO, says: if you get given a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask which seat.

So I’ve seen people at Stripe getting into a seat that was not attractive, but it was a rocket ship, and all their careers… If you now look at their CV, they’ve done great for themselves. They’re at OpenAI or Anthropic. They made great careers.

Meanwhile, other people went to a mediocre startup, but got a nice VP title, and are still stuck there.

Then on compensation, it’s also a factor people really overweight. So 0.1% equity of a great company beats 1% equity of a bad company. And the great companies also raise salaries over time.

So in that sense, people, especially when they go to a technology company, should think long-term like a startup would. And they shouldn’t think about what the short-term cash or equity compensation is, in particular when they don’t have children or a big mortgage yet.

But I see people who spend a few years in business and consulting, and then they don’t want to go down in their salary. Somehow they got attached to this compensation part and this cash comp, even though they don’t have any responsibilities apart from a bit of a mortgage yet.

So those are the things people should not value that much, and that I still see people often overvaluing.

Then there are four things to overweight.

One is network. That’s the most important factor. So the people you work with and around, founders, investors, colleagues, because they shape your career for decades. If you look at the PayPal networks, the Google networks, but also now the Stripe network, if you fall in with that right crowd, it’ll take you to other places.

So if I now just look at people from those early days at Stripe, they’re scattered everywhere among interesting fintechs. Many are at Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, other interesting AI startups. That’s the network part as the first thing.

The second is market and growth rate. So if you go to a Google or if you go to a fast company like Shara or Decagon now growing fast in the Valley, or Duna of course — sell on duna.com/careers, we have a lot of open roles — when you join…

Jeroen: What was that company? I’ve never heard of it.

Jeroen: You don’t have much time to spend on these startups now, I guess, right?

Duco: It depends. With some I actually do spend some time, but I usually say I do it reactively. I’m not going to write them an email every two weeks: what can I do for you? But if they have a question, I usually just ask them: let’s put it on WhatsApp and then we can have a quick WhatsApp call, or you just put it on WhatsApp and then do a quick voice memo. That’s also what I do with our own angel investor base. I realize all of them are busy. So I just get them on WhatsApp. And then if it’s a bigger question, I say: hey, this is the question. They write a quick message, but feel free to do a voice memo because it only takes you five minutes. And then it’s my problem to work from their words, and it works quite productively.

Jeroen: And investments in any industry? Could be anything? Or is it more like fintech-related stuff?

Duco: Usually it’s fintech and/or SaaS, B2B SaaS slash AI. And if I deviate from that, it’s only because either I know the founder really well and I trust the founder, or I know the lead investor really well and I trust them.

Jeroen: So I’m just curious. I don’t know if you want to share, but out of these approximately 30 investments or something, did some of them already either IPO or could you sell your shares? So in other words, did some of them become a big financial or otherwise success?

Duco: Yeah. So I have a little website, sirnelsoncapital.com, which is basically a pink website with my dog on it. Because investors take themselves way too seriously. So I thought: let’s make a joke website.

Jeroen: People in general, right?

Duco: Yeah, right. It says something like: money is a commodity, but my dog Nelson isn’t. I think that’s the tagline of the website. So some of them include Mollie, for instance, where I invested in the Series A. It’s on that website. But also Cradle, a really cool Dutch company. I invested in Fourthline when I joined the company. Decagon or Omnia are really cool B2B slash recent AI companies. But I also haven’t updated this website in ages. I should actually update it.

Jeroen: Normally with my guests, I tend not to talk about politics, but in this case I thought I really have to, because both your brothers are actively involved in politics. They are out there, one for the CDA party, the Christian Democratic Party, and one for Volt. Are you also outspoken about your political views, or do you tend towards one of your two brothers?

Duco: In that sense, it’s sort of making life easy because they are in different parliaments. So I don’t need to pick preferences.

Jeroen: Because one of them is in the Dutch parliament.

Duco: Yes.

Jeroen: And the other one is in the European Parliament.

Duco: My oldest brother is for the CDA in the Dutch parliament, and he’s doing foreign affairs and defense. And my younger brother is for Volt in the European Parliament. And he also does foreign affairs. I think he also does defense. So they’re doing the same thing back home, or not. There were definitely a lot of interesting Easter discussions again about defense, Ukraine, foreign politics, et cetera.

Jeroen: Do you understand that they’re in politics? Or is it something you would not even consider or think about?

Duco: I would consider or think about it, but it’s obviously not on my mind now. I really enjoy building Duna, but I also understand why they have a very interesting and compelling job, and they can have a lot of positive societal impact in this job.

Jeroen: And obviously you’re going to answer this question, I’m sure. So would that be for CDA or for Volt or for a new party or another existing party?

Duco: That I won’t.

Jeroen: I thought you were so transparent, Duco. But it has nothing to do with the business, right?

Duco: My political preferences, you know, I have to keep all the brothers happy. But for both of them, I’m very proud. They work exceptionally hard and they’re both doing the right things. I mean, these are both not extremist parties. Otherwise, it would have been a more difficult Christmas conversation.

Jeroen: Fair enough. Fair enough. Leaders in Finance with Jeroen Broekema.

We have a couple of things we always ask our guests, and one of them is the five unusual questions. Or sometimes two or three or four, depending on how much time we have. But let me start with some of them. First of all, do you have a somewhat unusual hobby or something you do in your spare time?

Duco: Well, it used to be ultra-running, but now that I have two kids and a company and we’re renovating a house, I’m not running that much anymore. I’m still playing quite a lot of piano. And then with my three-year-old now, we sometimes make songs. And the latest song that we wrote together is called I’m Cleaning Up the Whole Room and It’s So Much Fun. And then I play that song on the piano and she gets to clean up the room, and it’s very fun. So let’s see how long this will last until she finds out that this is a very manipulative song. But right now it seems to be working for the past two weeks.

Jeroen: I think at some point there will be a song where she’s singing it: you should pay more pocket money every week.

Duco: Exactly.

Jeroen: Then it’s time for a new hobby. What has been the scariest moment in your life?

Duco: When I got a call from South Africa that my bestie, Charles Witlox, was hit in a kitesurfing accident. Then he was brought to the hospital in extremely severe condition. And then half an hour later, I got another call that he had passed away. So that was the worst half hour of my life, which ended even worse.

Jeroen: Yeah. Terrible.

Duco: Yeah. It’s a frightening, scary moment. You never forget. Even now, when I talk about it, I directly get like a stone in my stomach. But he was one of the coolest, most awesome guys on earth. And my daughter was born two months later and is also named after him with one of her additional names.

Jeroen: That’s beautiful. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. So on a very different note, another unusual question, which is: you get 200 million or 2 billion or whatever, pick your number. Very good segue, super emotional and going into money. But let’s say you get 200 million or 2 billion or 200 billion, whatever number you pick, in your personal account today. But the catch is you have to spend it very quickly, let’s say in a few weeks’ time. What do you spend it on?

Duco: One, I would share with my friends and I would optimize it for the friends who have most need for it. And the friends, of course, of my wife and friends and family. Second thing, I would give to charities and nonprofits. And then third thing, I would buy — we already have a nice house — but maybe I would buy one or two nice big houses. That’s the only thing I like from a capitalist consumerist perspective. We don’t need a boat or a fancy car or expensive clothes, or need to stay only in five-star hotels with 10,000 butlers. We don’t really care about all of that crap.

Jeroen: And when it comes to NGOs, are there particular fields of interest to you? I mean, there are some people who really want to focus on nature. Others want to focus more on people or anything else.

Duco: Yeah. So I love everything to do with people, social equality, financial education, giving people the tools to build a life for themselves.

Jeroen: And would it be more here in the Netherlands or more in certain parts of the world? Any preference there?

Duco: It would be both. I think it can go to Benin, where I’ve done volunteering work and where you can have a lot of impact, but also right here in Amsterdam. There are a lot of people working on the street and you have institutions like the Regenboog Groep, the Rainbow Group, who are doing fantastic things for people here locally in the municipality.

Jeroen: Because you do have a special relationship with Africa because of Benin or other things.

Duco: Yeah. And also because my friend Charles, he had Charlie’s Travels. It still exists. His wife, his partner, now runs it for the largest shareholder, which is his son, little Charles. So I would visit him often in Africa, where he was living in Kenya. And he would organize off-the-beaten-track travels from, like, a group of guys from student associations to lovebirds, family travels. And I think if you want to do cool things in Africa, off the beaten track, they are great. It’s charlies-travels.com, something like that. But what he would basically do is go on a motorbike. He would literally go across Kenya and countries close by in the region, and he would talk to local inhabitants and create off-the-beaten-track travels to interesting, non-standard areas. So if you then go on a Maasai tour with people that he met, it’s literally a tour that they only do for people organized by Charlie’s Travels. And he’s maintaining that whole village. So after he passed away, the person from that village who does these tours, I think they traveled like six hours to be at his memorial in Nairobi. So it just gives a sense of how close it brings you to the human side, and how cool the type of impact is that you can then create for people in other areas.

Jeroen: Thank you for sharing. Let’s do one last unusual question. If there is one decision in the past that you could do differently, what would it be?

Duco: If I think about it, I don’t really have something that comes to mind.

Jeroen: No regrets.

Duco: No, my point is: of course there are 10,000 regrets and there are a lot of stupid things that I have done and things I shouldn’t have done. But also, if it happens, then it happens, and I should learn from it and reflect and not make the same mistake again, and then move forward. Yeah, there are countless mistakes. Where to start? It’s endless. I like this quote from Derek Sivers, the media entrepreneur, who says: alles komt goed en ook als het niet goed komt, dan nog steeds komt het goed.

Jeroen: So let’s try to translate that into English.

Duco: So everything will be all right. And even if it won’t be all right, it will still be all right. And I think it’s a nice way to look at it. Things might burn down or not work well, but then learn and rebuild.

Jeroen: Yeah. Very sad. He also recently passed away, of course.

Duco: That’s one example of an inspiring entrepreneur.

Jeroen: Yeah, I agree completely. Yeah. It’s such a sad story. Could have been so different. Of any of the 200 guests, all of them, we’ve asked them the same question, which is: do you have a particular book or books, titles you would like to share with us? Could be because you love them or they’ve inspired you, or you’re just reading them right now.

Duco: Yeah. So I thought about this before.

Jeroen: Yeah. It’s one of the two questions I give people before.

Duco: Exactly. And I also thought it was sort of hard, but then I just realized: let’s pick the books that I read the most times. And the book that I read the most times is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

Jeroen: Yeah.

Duco: And I don’t know if you know the book.

Jeroen: The Holocaust survivor. Yeah, I do. I think I read it twice or three times.

Duco: Yeah. So it’s a Holocaust survivor. He survived Auschwitz and he observes people’s psychological responses to extreme suffering. And he says that the primary driver is not pleasure, the Freudian one, or power, the Adler version, but rather the pursuit of meaning. And that’s why it’s called Man’s Search for Meaning. And he calls that the will to meaning. And then he calls this logotherapy, and it’s focused around survivors who maintain a sense of purpose in the camps — love, future goals, creative work, a kid to still live for. They were more psychologically resilient than those who lost hope. And in that sense, I think even though it’s a very sad and very impactful story, it’s also a story where even if you can’t control your circumstances, you can still control your attitude towards them. So it’s almost a bit like a radical focus on what you can control, which is Epictetus. So that’s what I loved about the book. And what I also love: it’s a thin book. And I like it when people can write down very briefly what could have been very long.

Jeroen: Well, they also say that if you really master a topic, you can explain it to people in two sentences, or in a very tiny book in this case, right?

Duco: Exactly. And we also sometimes repeat that internally at Duna. If you create a complex solution for a complex problem, it’s still complex. But it should actually be a simple solution for a complex problem, and that is true mastery. So on this book, and then I had two other books that I’ll only briefly discuss. The other one that I then read the next most amount of times is Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, which is about Buddhism, about wisdom. And I think it’s also, first of all, really short. It’s like a hundred years old and it’s a really great novel to talk about Buddhism and meaning, and that nothing exists in isolation. And I think it’s really nice if you’re not super spiritual and you don’t want to be a meditative Buddhist influencer sitting in Bali or Ibiza, but you are actually interested in these types of topics. I think it’s a great book. And then the best business book, because these are also nonfiction but not really business books, is Influence by Robert Cialdini. That’s this scientific analysis of how you can influence people and others, whether it’s sales or marketing or people. And I think it’s a useful way to see from what angles we as human beings also get influenced by others. So how are you being tricked, but also how does influencing others work? And I think in the workplace, when it comes to reciprocity, that is one of the most standard things. It’s like, we feel obliged to return a favor. So if you do me a favor, I feel super obliged to invite you back, even though maybe I wasn’t planning to invite you. But if you invite me two times, I need to invite you back. And there are a lot of these things there, like commitment, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity, that work very much. And that scarcity is also super human. If you hear that you can buy this, you’re not interested. But if you hear there are only five left, suddenly you’re listening. I think it’s a very impactful book. I also read it multiple times.

Jeroen: I didn’t think about it, but I invited you now twice to the podcast. There’s actually a clear reason why I’m doing that. It’s interesting. I just learned this now. Thanks for sharing these books. I know all three of them and they really resonate with me. Hopefully with listeners as well. The other question we’ve asked everyone, all of the 200-plus CEOs and fintech founders and other professors and members of parliament, is: do you have tips for people who start their career now, let’s say in finance? Or it could be anywhere, but do you have particular tips, or tips to your own self when you started your career back out of law school and went into consulting?

Duco: Yes. I always actually point people to the same article. It’s called Career Decisions by Elad Gil. That’s E-L-A-D space G-I-L. And Elad Gil talks there about what things to overweight and what things people overvalue that don’t matter. So first, the things that people overvalue. One: the role. And I’ve seen this numerous times. People say: I can do two startups, but here my role is called VP of whatever. And people really care about that. But the thing is what Sheryl Sandberg, the former Facebook COO, says: if you get given a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask which seat. So I’ve seen people at Stripe getting into a seat that was not attractive, but it was a rocket ship, and all their careers… If you now look at their CV, they’ve done great for themselves. They’re at OpenAI or Anthropic. They made great careers. Meanwhile, other people went to a mediocre startup, but got a nice VP title, and are still stuck there. Then on compensation, it’s also a factor people really overweight. So 0.1% equity of a great company beats 1% equity of a bad company. And the great companies also raise salaries over time. So in that sense, people, especially when they go to a technology company, should think long-term like a startup would. And they shouldn’t think about what the short-term cash or equity compensation is, in particular when they don’t have children or a big mortgage yet. But I see people who spend a few years in business and consulting, and then they don’t want to go down in their salary. Somehow they got attached to this compensation part and this cash comp, even though they don’t have any responsibilities apart from a bit of a mortgage yet. So those are the things people should not value that much, and that I still see people often overvaluing. Then there are four things to overweight. One is network. That’s the most important factor. So the people you work with and around, founders, investors, colleagues, because they shape your career for decades. If you look at the PayPal networks, the Google networks, but also now the Stripe network, if you fall in with that right crowd, it’ll take you to other places. So if I now just look at people from those early days at Stripe, they’re scattered everywhere among interesting fintechs. Many are at Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, other interesting AI startups. That’s the network part as the first thing. The second is market and growth rate. So if you go to Google or if you go to a fast company like Shara or Decagon now growing fast in the Valley, or Duna of course — sell on duna.com/careers, we have a lot of open roles — when you join…

Jeroen: What was that company? I’ve never heard of it.

Duco: Yeah, exactly. A fast-growing company creates a lot of internal opportunities because the organization grows around you. So I had acquaintances and friends who joined Adyen in 2014. Nobody really knew what online payments was back then. And if you then look at the same people who joined KLM, you see that KLM maybe sort of went sideways or stayed there as an organization, but Adyen became maybe 10 or 15 times bigger. And all of these people also did great for themselves just because the organization and the market and the company were growing.

And then the third and the fourth are optionality. So does it open doors to new types of roles in the industry? And the other one is brand. And that last thing Elad Gil then says: hey, this matters less if you already have a recognizable name on your résumé. So if you have one or two strong brands already, optimize for the other factors. But if you have none of this…

Jeroen: It’s kind of conflicting with the KLM example then.

Duco: Yeah.

Jeroen: People know KLM well, but Adyen did much better.

Duco: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But with Adyen, the brand is not the key thing, but it does help. Like if people have worked at an Adyen brand, that is a very powerful brand.

Jeroen: And probably you having worked for McKinsey, if we take you as an example, McKinsey probably still helps to open some doors at least. It’s recognizable. People think if he got into that, it’s kind of a badge of approval.

Duco: Yeah. So McKinsey definitely helped me get both into Blendle and into Stripe. But then afterwards, that’s basically his point. You don’t need to go on a brand collection exercise. If you have one or two, then the rest matters more.

Jeroen: Great. I love this. Thank you so much for sharing. A couple of last questions. First of all, in all the things we’ve discussed today, you seem to be, if you do something, you really go for it. Whether it’s the piano or running a marathon in the desert or Duna, or all the other examples we discussed today. So how do you switch off?

Duco: Yeah, I’m not really good at switching off. So I’m a bit obsessive, for my poor wife, of course. So I don’t switch off a lot. It can only be when I go running or when I sometimes go to the sauna, then I switch off a bit. But apart from that, I’m not really good at switching off.

Jeroen: Just for example, to go to sleep. Is it easy for you to boom, just sleep? Or do you keep thinking about all the things you do?

Duco: No, I always still need to read a bit before going to sleep. I can’t.

Jeroen: So reading and sports are important?

Duco: Yeah.

Jeroen: Playing music?

Duco: Sports, playing music. But I relax by doing something where I can only do one thing. Like I’m just running and then listening to music. Well, that’s still two things, but I’m sort of doing one thing. Or playing the piano. I rest more when I do something and just don’t think about the standard day-to-day work.

Jeroen: So could we say that it’s your strength, being very focused on something and really going for it, but it’s also hard to switch off? It’s also your weakness.

Duco: Yeah. It’s also a bit the weakness, like if you overrun yourself. But I think it’s rather the strength. Like my brother joked at my wedding that I actually only have one talent and it’s discipline. So that could also be, it’s like a bit of a mix of discipline and obsession.

Jeroen: I love his analysis. So future, you know, it’s very clear what you want to do now. I think it’s my words, but you just want to make Duna really big and a great company with all the different principles, if I would call them that, you’ve put into this business and you want to share the success and all that. But let’s look a bit further ahead. This company has become really big. There comes a point where you just become too much of a manager, which you probably don’t like. So you’ve sold it or it went public or just didn’t go anywhere. I don’t know. It could be anything, but I assume it’s becoming really big. What are the things you would love to do in the long run? Because you’re very young, you’re 38, you said in the beginning.

Duco: To be honest, my plan is now just Duna and afterwards I’ll see. This is my only plan. So, you know, we just have to work obsessively hard to make it a big success, and that’s what we’re working on every day and night. And then in the future, I’ll see.

Jeroen: What does success look like ultimately, five years from now or 10 years?

Duco: Success: very happy customers, very happy people working at the company, and also very happy shareholders. And we’ve taken good care of the world around us.

Jeroen: And global player?

Duco: Yeah. But don’t pin me down. We could also be a very big European player and still have outstanding results on all of these four axes. But I’m more there from the Rheinische Modell, the Rhineland model.

Jeroen: Stakeholder model.

Duco: Yeah. Where I believe that the best successes come from aligning all stakeholders. And if you in the short term screw over people working at your company or society or you screw over your investors, then you don’t align what’s best for the long term. Same with your customers. So if you deliver a great product, your customers are happy and the people working there are happy, then the revenue should go from that and the shareholders’ return should go from that.

Jeroen: The last question I’ve always asked everyone: I’ve asked you so many things, but is there anything you would like to share that we kind of missed or you’re kind of disappointed we didn’t discuss?

Duco: Yes. So there is actually one thing that I would still like to touch upon, which is I think Dutch politics and the general media sentiment are way too negative about banks. The reason is that whenever there’s talk about banks or bonuses or ideally both, it really serves like a piece of red cloth to a bunch of bulls, and the whole rational debate and content argumentation are gone. Everything is bad. We’re just against bonuses. We’re just against banks. And it totally forgets that banks have a very important role to play in society and an important role to play in making our economy work. It’s almost like energy, and people just think that banks only exist to screw their customers and do negative stuff.

When you then look at the compliance aspect of this, there’s also a general sentiment from the audience like: oh, banks are not good at compliance and you’re doing all of this badly and you’re a bad kid and we’re not happy with you. And I think that should be turned around. And let me illustrate that with an example. The Dutch government is responsible for its customs and for avoiding, for example, the illegal import of drugs. We did not make KLM responsible or liable for somebody taking drugs onto an airplane. We also did not make the Port of Rotterdam responsible that every ship that goes here and that has a container with drugs in it, you need to check it, otherwise you’re liable. But with our banks, we did make them responsible for this.

So then our big banks need to look at billions of transactions and pick out what is being money-laundered and who the bad actor is, whereas our government can do it the other way around. They go to a criminal, they have taken the criminal, then they see where the criminal banks, then they can follow the trace the other way around. Not from the billions of transactions, but from the one fraudulent transaction, and they can reconnect the dots. And this has come to rise because in the 1990s and the 2000s, our government was of course not able to do this. So they delegated this to the financial sector. And I think it’s a bit spoiled that we as society and politics have delegated this to the financial sector, and that the sector has now invested billions and billions in this, but I have never, ever heard a politician give a single word of gratitude for all the billions our regulated financial institutions are spending on combating money laundering and fraud.

They’re only complaining when something goes wrong, but guess what? Cocaine is coming into the ports of Rotterdam and our country like there’s no tomorrow. And there’s a lot of hypocrisy, I believe, on this point, where I think we should be more grateful to banks and to the financial institutions who are spending. They’ve done it wrong in the past. They have corrected this and now they’re spending a lot on this. And now is the time to also say: thank you. You’re placing your house in order. We’re actually grateful that you’re doing this instead of society or the taxpayer doing this.

Jeroen: I still think you could go into politics as well, if needed. Such a strong argument. Or work for a bank lobby interest group. It’s a very, very fair point and a very interesting point to debate. Thanks a lot for adding it. Anything else we should have discussed on the same note?

That’s it. Thank you so much, Duco, for taking so much time to speak to Leaders in Finance. We debated just before we started. You asked something along the lines of whether people want to listen to very long podcasts. I said: people do. We have over a hundred thousand people listen to our podcast every year and they’re all very long.

But I always want to give a couple of things back to you. First of all, I really enjoyed this wide-ranging conversation, all the business stuff, all the personal stuff. You were willing to talk about all of it and you never said, I’m not going to share, apart from the Pokémon, which is still annoying to me, but fine. I recently interviewed Anthony Scaramucci in a side interview to Twan Huys’ interview with him, and his son has just bought a Pokémon card for 16.5 million as an asset. So that made me think about the Pokémon.

Duco: The Scaramouche.

Jeroen: The Scaramouche.

Duco: Shortest-serving employee in the White House ever.

Jeroen: Exactly, 10 days, comms director. But I really enjoyed that you were willing to be vulnerable and share all these personal things as well. I really enjoyed how you’re very proud of Duna and how you want to grow that business even faster.

Duco: We still have a long way to go.

Jeroen: Fair enough, but you have a good start, right? We mentioned in the introduction that you only started in 2023. So it’s only a few years. And most of all, I really enjoyed that you’re really, really focused on things. I really liked that. And the best of all is the humor. So that was my little thing to give back. And that meant that every single second of this podcast, I was really on board. I really liked listening to you. So I’m the first listener and I really enjoyed it. So thank you so much for taking so much time, Duco.

Duco: It was a privilege. Thanks for the invitation. I really appreciate it.

Jeroen: Wonderful. So after we say goodbye, I have a small present for you to stress the fact that I really liked that you took so much time. Thank you. Thank you. You’ve been listening to Leaders in Finance. We hope you’ve enjoyed the episode and would love to hear from you. What’s on your mind? Who would you like to hear next? Let us know in a review, an email, or get in touch via our social channels. We’d greatly appreciate it. Finally, we’d like to thank our partners for their ongoing support: EY, Mogelijk Real Estate Finance, and Lepaya. Don’t forget to check out all the other things we do at leadersinfinance.nl. Thank you for listening.