SERIAL ENTREPRENEUR JANNEKE NIESSEN TALKS ARCHETYPES IN TECH

Janneke Niessen is the Co-Founder of CapitalT, a leading European seed-stage VC investing in software technology companies.

She speaks with us about her experience as an exited founder, the importance of diversity and opportunities for women in tech.

What inspired your path to entrepreneurship? 

I don't really come from an entrepreneurial family but I always had this feeling that one day I want to be an entrepreneur. When I started working in tech when it was really new in online advertising, I thought everything is possible. Then the jump to actually starting my own company with a partner felt like a small step. So it's both the wish that I always had combined with an environment where you felt everything is possible and then just basically doing it. 

Can you tell us about the businesses that you founded and exited? 

They were both in online advertising and the first one was more focused on tech advisory because people started using all these management systems, but nobody had enough work to actually hire people for it. So they outsourced a lot of it and we handled all that for them and then started developing our own tech as well to analyse everything. The core of it was advisory on the technology people should use and operating it for them. For the second one, we built our own tech and that was really on the optimization side of things and allowing publishers, mainly in Europe, to build their own strategy around advertising and we gave them the tech to do it and optimise all the advertising streams. It was basically a competitor of Google double click with a European alternative. 

Did you know you wanted to exit your businesses from the beginning? 

For our first one, both my partner and I said we don't want more than 15 people because then it gets too big to manage by the two of us alone. However, we ended up with offices in South Africa, Brazil, a few countries in Europe, and 100 people, so it worked out very differently - but you grow with the company. The second one we weren't planning on selling, we were actually fundraising, but this opportunity came along in 2012 and it allowed us to execute our strategy and have a more secure future for the company so we decided to take that option. Looking back, that was a good one. When I looked at all our founder peers at the time, most of them didn't exit at all. 

Why did your peers choose not to exit? 

I think the market just wasn’t there. There are a few that did, but only a few, and not even all of them in the US. The momentum was gone for a lot of things that happened in advertising at that time. I think the dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon increased, so there was less space for independent players. 

In hindsight, it’s very easy to see the market, so how do you navigate that when you’re in it? Did you have a sense of it and other people didn’t? 

I think we just looked at the opportunities that we had and chose what was best for the company, at least what we thought was best for the company. And looking back, it turned out to be the best for us as well. But you don’t know, I think you need also a bit of luck there. 

It wasn’t a great time. The first time we were raising was during the Greek crisis. You know the opportunities you have in front of you, and look back at your company and think, how can we secure the best future for the company with our vision? It’s pluses and minuses, and then taking a decision.

I think if you ask ten people for advice, you get ten different answers, and at the end of the day, it’s the decision you think is best. Sometimes, you can only say if a decision was the right one looking backwards. It's looking at what you can have today versus what could be there tomorrow. 

You co-founded Inspiring 50, a nonprofit that aims to increase diversity and inclusion in tech by making more female role models visible. Why is it important to see more female role models in tech? 

We need more diversity in tech and that's women, minorities and in general, more diversity. It's necessary to build a more inclusive society for everybody. The enormous wealth that is created in tech is only there for a very small group of people. When different people get a part of that wealth, they will invest it in their communities, leading to more equal wealth distribution.

Diverse founders solve more diverse issues. Entrepreneurs start a company, often solving a problem that they face. For example, if you are a rich white man from Silicon Valley and you think your taxi is too late and invent Uber, if you grow up without clean drinking water, you start a really different company. We need both and everything in between. If you look at tech companies in themselves, if we have more diversity there, people with more backgrounds, then you build more inclusive products and services. So a lot of the problems with products and services that discriminate against certain groups of people have to do with a lack of different people in the team. If you've never experienced harassment, then you're less inclined to actually think about the potential downside of what you put out there. If harassment could be an issue, then maybe you would have maybe built-in solutions to prevent it from the start.

If you see people like you working in tech in different roles, you quickly feel like that could be me. If you have an image of boys in a basement coding, then you probably feel that's not for me, which is not true, but that's how things work.

You published a book about a 15-year-old girl discovering the world of tech, entrepreneurship and learning to code. Can you talk about some of the things that have come out of that since you published it? 

I felt for that age group, around 10-15, I need to create a role model for them - so that's why I created the book. It's about a young girl that learns to code, builds and starts her own company, and then experiences everything that comes with that, the good and the bad. It's based on a lot of my own experiences, and the only part we made up is that she gets hacked and then what happened afterwards. 

What was nice is that you have these girls email you things like “This is really great,” “I did all the tips that you put in the book” and “What can I do next?” I also created a whole program to give the book away for free to underprivileged girls with the idea that not everybody can buy a book, and if you want people from different backgrounds, you need them to have access to that as well. I also got inspired through a visit to South Africa with UNICEF, where I met a lot of girls that were part of a STEM program. The fact that they could join that program and a whole new world opened up for them, I thought it could impact your life if you know that you can do this, that this can be a career for you. I don't come from an entrepreneurial family, so a lot of the things that I know today, I had no clue about that they existed when I was younger. I know what it's like not to be part of the networks, to not know about a whole world that can change your life - so I wanted to make an impact through that as well. 

Do you ever get pushback in kind of creating these new stories? And what do you do when you encounter those challenges? 

I did get pushback because the book was about a fashion app and people said that's typical, and why not about a shipyard? I said I want to reach a broad group of girls, and no matter if you like it or not, a lot of girls like fashion. So if I want to create a story that appeals to them, this is what I'm doing. And if I write about a shipyard, there are a lot of girls I don't reach because, again, they don't recognize themselves in that, and they are not so interested. Sometimes to reach a certain goal, you need to take a certain approach. 

Have you had pushback in terms of “girls can't do these kinds of things?” How do you think about that when you tackle gender more broadly in terms of nature versus nurture? 

I don't buy that, so I always try to explain to people that's not true. There's a lot of evidence that boys and girls equally are good at those things, so I try to explain and give examples and research, but sometimes I also get very impatient. There are always people where you feel like it doesn't matter what you say, they just will never buy in. Then I always think, these are the dinosaurs - they will die out. Let's focus on the people that do want change, because you only need 30% of people to actually get to change. So there's always going to be people that don't believe it. I've also gotten pushed back, like go back to the kitchen, things like that. I try not to focus on them. 

Where does that 30% come from? 

That’s from research that if you have 30% women, for example, or minorities in your company, then there’s a higher chance that people will feel included, and you can keep it that way until you are all the way there. It’s also difficult because people will feel isolated, and it will feel less like an inclusive culture. 

The innovation industry by nature should embrace different perspectives and new ideas. Why do you think it is so traditional in many respects? 

Unfortunately, you would assume that, but pattern matching is a big thing in venture capital. They look at what they think is a successful entrepreneur and try to find that in others. I think that's a big reason and also people invest in people that they know and that look like them. Since venture capital is predominantly white and male, they invest in white men as well. So it's very natural for people to be biased. Women are biased too, but that's why it makes it so important to have a diverse team on the VC side, because then you have at least all the different viewpoints and you hopefully will look at things differently. 

What are your plans now with the fund? Having raised 50 million, what's next? 

What's next is we'll first spend the rest of this fund. We are halfway, and then we want to raise another fund. Our goal is that we are going to be hugely successful so that the people we invest in are the best founders who happen to have diverse backgrounds, which is actually the best strategy.