Duco van Lanschot opens by reframing entrepreneurship. He tells Jeroen Broekema the freedom is really deciding which 80 hours of the week to work, because the work never stops. When he and co-founder David Schreiber started Duna, they wrote down four goals: work with smart, fun people; make something socially useful; build something intellectually complex; and aim for scale. To prove goals mattered more than money, they gave one third of incorporation equity to a nonprofit foundation and created a large employee equity pool, deliberately different from Silicon Valley companies that switch to money when it appears.

Duna grew from more than a decade of watching business onboarding fail. At Stripe and Fourthline, customers kept asking for business verification, but van Lanschot saw that most banks and insurers lacked either engineering resources or execution muscle for automated onboarding. The name comes from the Spanish dune keeping bad actors out and the Danube enabling trade. He describes banks taking 50 or 60 days and losing 15 percent conversion with every extra request. Duna recalculates the full risk model after each data point and uses AI to flag bad documents. Compliance should be a hygiene factor, after which onboarding should drive revenue.

Trust and fundraising came step by step, first fintechs and marketplaces, then banks. Introductions through former Stripe executives led CapitalG to investigate Duna's customers before investing, even though the company had not planned to raise. Most of the money sits in money market funds and deposits as insurance for bank customers who need to know Duna will exist in five or ten years, while around 80 percent of spending goes into research and development.

Van Lanschot runs Duna with unusual transparency. Salaries, share information, meeting recordings and emails are open internally, and colleagues can run large language models over those records; one built an automatically generated daily Duna podcast. Job levels are named after Pokémon to avoid hierarchy, though he will not reveal his own card. He believes open pay forces fairness and consistency, and says anyone who leaks the cap table would be fired with the reason made public because trust goes both ways.

Van Lanschot also talks about intensity. He won a student cabaret festival, toured the Netherlands and once performed half an hour in Assen where nobody laughed, which he says still gives perspective. He entered the Marathon des Sables without ever running a marathon, finished 45th and lost toenails, learning that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. On careers, he urges young professionals to overweight network, market growth and optionality and not to overvalue titles or cash. He closes by criticising Dutch politics for demanding that banks police money laundering without expressing gratitude, unlike customs or the Port of Rotterdam.