“Follow your heart more than your head. Do something you genuinely enjoy, because that’s what will give you energy and a happier life.”

Short biography
Hendrik Meesman is the founder and managing director of Meesman Index Investing, a Dutch asset manager dedicated to low cost, broadly diversified index investing for private clients. Raised partly abroad because his father worked as a diplomat, he lived in countries including Côte d’Ivoire, Tanzania and South Africa before studying Economics at the London School of Economics. He started his career in London at Accenture and Goldman Sachs, then returned to the Netherlands to work at MeesPierson and Robeco, where he helped develop investment propositions for retail clients. A turning point came when, while researching a book, he immersed himself in academic evidence on investment performance. The conclusion was clear to him: most active managers do not consistently beat the market, while costs reliably reduce returns. With few accessible passive options in the Netherlands at the time, he co founded Meesman in 2005 to offer a simple, transparent, long term approach.