Voice-over: This is Leaders in Finance, a podcast where we find out more about the people behind a successful career. We speak with the leaders of today and tomorrow to discuss their motivations, their organizations, and their personal lives. Why? Because the financial sector could use a little more honest conversation. We’d like to thank our partners for their ongoing support. They are Kayak, EY, MeDirect, en Roland Berger. Our guest this week is the CEO of a company that has helped almost 100,000 employees from companies like ING, Mollie, Microsoft, KPMG, and Bol.com develop new skills. Why not just learn from practice?
René: We’re not always aware of what great looks like and where our flaws might be. So this is how we can help people identify: if you were better at X, your life would be better and easier. And that smile at the end of the day would just be slightly bigger when you cycle home.
Voice-over: And why is he such an admirer of Richard Feynman?
René: What we really need more of in this day and age are leaders who can, on the one hand, get people to go along with them, but on the other hand, do so based on solid facts.
Voice-over: And his unusual hobbies are exceptionally on-brand.
René: I tend to want to learn new things and develop myself. When I was living in Asia, I thought, let’s do diving because it’s beautiful here. I immediately went ahead and got all the certifications.
Voice-over: Our guest this week is René Janssen, founder and CEO of Lepaya. Your host is Jeroen Broekema.
Jeroen: Welcome, listeners, to a new episode of Leaders in Finance, today with the CEO and founder of Lepaya, René Janssen. Welcome.
René: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Jeroen: Yeah, I’m very happy you’re taking the time to speak to Leaders in Finance. Thanks for joining us. We’ll speak about Lepaya, about talent, about upskilling, and how you view HR and financial services. And of course, I would like to speak about you as well and your background. I’d love to learn more. Maybe we should start with that—who is René? What’s your background?
René: Who is René? Well, I’ll keep it professional to start with. I started my career like so many aspiring young professionals on the good old Zuidas in Amsterdam, not knowing what I wanted to do. I got the offer to work with a multitude of companies on a multitude of challenges and joined a consulting firm. I thought, it’s a great way to start your business career. I’ll do it for a year or two. And as often happens with these things, I ended up spending five, six years there. Then I thought, well, this is way over my two-year threshold. I’ve seen a lot, I’ve advised a lot, I’ve had a lot of opinions. Maybe this is the moment to actually battle-test and assess my opinions and whether they hold in real life.
So I decided to make the jump—kind of an extreme jump—and moved to Southeast Asia. I started in Singapore, where I helped build an e-commerce company. Smart people with a lot of money, typically coming from Germany, had figured out that there were half a billion people living in the nations south of China and east of India who probably also wanted to shop online but didn’t have the Amazons or Alibabas of this world. Why not build that? I thought, if nothing else, it’s a great opportunity—maybe again for a year or two—and I’ll join them and build it.
And it was probably as far removed as possible from Excels and PowerPoints. The reality of trying to ship physical goods between nations consisting of tens of thousands of islands—where, at that time, most people still paid with physical cash—was a whole different world. So when you had a $6 package over there, you still had to ship the $6 back and get it into the hands of the merchants.
Jeroen: Yeah. So what’s the most important thing you have to learn as a person?
René: Operate.
Jeroen: Operate. What does that mean?
René: Making things happen. Showing up, making sure that your team executes on deliverables. That you, one, give them the freedom to do what’s necessary, set a clear direction, but also intervene when things go off track. And really, if you make it very practical, comparing that to, let’s say, a somewhat high-end consulting company where everyone is motivated, everyone is excited, and you basically call someone up to pick up the phone and get going. Well, you enter a warehouse in the Philippines or a distribution hub in Indonesia, and people are mostly watching their watches or their phones to see when their shift is over. So really making sure things happen, really managing, leading teams, steering for success, and trying to figure out how to turn growth into reality is very different from sitting on the computing side.
Jeroen: And now you run one of the most successful—I would say most successful—startups, but it’s not a startup anymore. It’s clearly a scale-up business. But before we go into that, if we just go way back, was there an entrepreneur in you when you were a kid? Were there some signs of entrepreneurship, or not at all?
René: Yeah, that’s a good question. So I never saw myself becoming an entrepreneur, and even while joining the Asian kind of team, they asked me one of the questions: why don’t you start for yourself, and why are you joining what was by then also a scale-up? So it’s not my gig. It’s not what I do. I like to work under some umbrella, work with others that have the vision in mind. So I think it’s something that probably was unlocked a little bit more over time. I will say that I probably have had the benefit and the luck to come from a family where taking opportunities and doing what you wanted to do—as long as you gave it a real push and real effort—was always encouraged. So I think that part was there, and there was definitely no push to just go for the safe route or the safe direction. But I think it’s really something that developed over time, more than something that I knew I was going to do when I was three.
Jeroen: But I guess you totally see yourself as an entrepreneur now? Or do you still see yourself as a consultant, for example?
René: I definitely don’t see myself as a consultant, not at all. Of course, you have to consult these tendencies. You’re all kind of like, this should be different, or that can be different.
Jeroen: You’re still annoyed when slides are not made the way they should be made, in your view?
René: Numbered bullets should have the right colors. Of course, outlining is important. Double spaces are hell. But let’s put it this way: I think consulting is a great school to really try to look at issues holistically, which I do think—definitely not all—but there’s a reason a lot of entrepreneurs come from backgrounds where they look at larger-scale issues or try to solve larger problems and look beyond their direct scopes. And I think that’s important. Consulting is, of course, one great school where you get taught a lot of skills very quickly.
Jeroen: Right. So what was the very first moment that Lepaya was an idea, or somehow you thought about maybe starting something like what it has become now?
René: That really came from my Lazada days. When we were scaling very fast on the e-commerce side, we noticed—or I noticed very personally—that the speed at which we were growing the team versus the speed at which the business was growing, we didn’t really manage to decouple that. So we ended up hiring over 5,000 people in the first five years. And you can imagine what a mess that was, because that literally means there were 40, 50 people starting every Monday morning, and they had to go in different directions. And the complexity just started to increase manifold. I was leading one of the biggest markets—I was leading Indonesia—and started to suffer from this. I felt we were just not getting the best out of people for two reasons.
One, the productivity per additional person was probably declining faster than we were hiring new people, which is not a scalable business. And secondly, we were losing great people because they started to ask: “Hey, I do increasingly little. I am more firefighting than really building something long-term. So where should I go?” And they left. So we started to have a retention issue.
Well, long story short, there were ample debates with the leadership in place at that time about this. To some extent, they thought I was just complaining and should execute a little bit harder. The turning point was when we were sold to Alibaba. They loved many things about the company—otherwise, you don’t invest a billion and quite quickly another billion into a five-year-old company—but one thing they were very clear on was: “Given your size compared to the mothership, the Chinese Alibaba, from a revenue perspective versus the number of people you employ, you need to decouple that.”
So they said, “You can keep your budgets, but stop adding more people to the pool and make the people that you have more productive—potentially also, of course, by upskilling potentials instead of just bringing in new people.” And I think the CEO thought a couple of things at the same time. First, I really wanted to get out of Jakarta. I can recommend many things—it’s a good place to work and live for a while, but don’t do it too long, it drives you insane. And second, he probably realized I had been talking about this issue for a while. So he asked me, “Why don’t you go back to Singapore, take up the HR seat, and start addressing that productivity issue?”
I think that’s when the topic really came to mind—something I felt I wanted to address, and I got the opportunity to do so. During that journey, I learned I was probably not the only one suffering from this. But there weren’t many solutions or players out there fundamentally helping businesses make their people more productive and effective. So, after doing this for a couple of years in-house, I came back to Holland—also partly for personal reasons—and started Lepaya.
Jeroen: How did that go exactly? I mean, you said, “I started it,” but did you raise money, or did you start alone? Do you have co-founders? Were other people involved? Did you first discuss it with a friend or with former partners at your consulting firm? I’m just raising a lot of possibilities here—it could be all of them or just one of them.
René: Yeah, I can probably spend the next two hours talking about just that first couple of weeks. But I have a wonderful co-founder who balances my kind of thinking big and seeing opportunities with being pragmatic and to the point. So we had always been in touch to potentially, at some point, start a business. And at some point, things come together. I mean, it also needs to fit in your personal life, and you need to have both the space and the opportunity to spend some time taking, in the end, a sizable risk because most companies fail pretty early on. So he said, well, if we are serious about this, let’s then really, while we’re still employed at our previous companies, take a week off. And here’s this wonderful book with what Google calls their design sprint, which is kind of a tested methodology to validate product ideas. And he said, if we’re serious, let’s then also be solid about this. And Monday morning, 9 a.m., we meet. I flew over from Singapore, where I was. He was here in Amsterdam. And we met. I have a spare room in my house. We met there. And we spent the whole week, because it’s a five-day program, kind of validating this idea. And we set it up properly.
So day one, you kind of distill your idea and make it very practical. You really call up prospective clients straightaway and say, hey, can we validate that this is a need? Can we validate that this would solve some real business challenges? The next two days, you really start to build something which you can touch and feel, so the tech isn’t ready, but you have a designer—yeah, they put something in your hands. And on day four, you go back to the same clients and say, hey, this is what we discussed on Monday. This is a prototype. Assume that this would work. What’s the feedback you would give if someone was pitching this to you? And would you just say, great idea? Or would you actually spend money on it?
Jeroen: And would you be able to— But these were basically sales conversations.
René: These were tested, yeah, tentative sales conversations, really, to test. And I think at the end of the week, the response was overwhelmingly positive, really kind of saying, well, you know, if you can do this, come back and pitch. And yeah, there’s money available for this. So I think we were a little bit wide-eyed. We looked at each other on Friday and said, that went actually better—maybe not better than we hoped, but better than we had realistically anticipated. There’s probably also still the realism part of entrepreneurship in our blood. Well, we said, let’s sleep over it. I had to fly back to Singapore anyway. But a couple of weeks later, we got together again, went to the notary, and did the very practical work of actually starting the company, agreeing on a start date, and, for me, moving back from Singapore to Amsterdam.
Jeroen: And then full-time directly, or did you still keep working with your approach?
René: No, so we really said, if we do this, we do it for real. So it can’t be a side gig. Of course, there are always companies that can get started on the sidelines. But no, if we do this, we commit. And I think one of the things that I’m still very happy with is that we both looked at each other and said, let’s really give it a proper shot. So I think we gave each other—and the company—nine months to just say, hey, we want to make sure we really have a product ready that we can ship. We want to have some clients. We want to have some money. We probably need one or two employees to make it happen. And within those nine months, we’re not going to look back. We’re not going to look at mistakes; we’re going to look at opportunities. But we’re not going to second-guess every week, are we doing this right?
But if we don’t realize these relatively modest milestones after nine months, then we pull the plug. And I think that gave us both a lot of space and time to really focus, not second-guess. That was also clear: we wouldn’t pay ourselves any salaries—we didn’t have money for that anyway. But it was also aligned on all home fronts. So it really gave us the peace of mind to dive into this journey without any second-guessing. Well, and clearly, we succeeded by then. But I think that was one of the more important decisions we made early on. We give it a shot. We give it a real shot. And we know there’s some kind of upfront set of KPIs or targets that we want to hit. And if we don’t hit them, we’ll seriously reevaluate.
Jeroen: An amazing structural approach, right? You get this book, you work your way through it over a couple of days, very clear commitments. It’s almost as if you do it exactly as it was written down in a management book or something, right? The whole process. Was it really that rational, or were there complete ups and downs in that first phase?
René: So thanks to Peter for the structure, my co-founder. But to some extent, I mean, in the end, you’re probably, Captain Hindsight is fully right. It felt very structured. It was to some, so these things were very structured. I think the irrational part is in the end to believe. So some clients saying, we want this and we’ll pay some money for it. And then transferring, saying that we quit our jobs and we’re just going to go full-blown, and we can make a serious business out of that. And we’re going to convince investors to pour money into this is still a massive leap of faith. So that’s there. And I think, especially the first weeks, your emotional curve is a rollercoaster, it’s all over the place. You have to celebrate very small successes. Oh, there’s a prototype that kind of works, and the outsourced delivery company we’re using is producing something viable. And also, many things go wrong. We had found an outsourced company, neither of us are techies, so early stage, we want to just build externally and bring it in-house. Well, the first company we outsourced it to didn’t work at all. So after three weeks and, quite for that time, significant money, we pulled the plug and moved to a different company. So I think the upshot of all that is probably making firm decisions. It’s less about maybe a structured process, but being very rational. Yes, we’d outsource, yes, we’d invest, and if it doesn’t work, we move to a new company, structured plan. We need sales conversations, then let’s do the math. And we probably need at least X conversations. Oh, that means you need a whole lot of outreach. So I think what both of us hadn’t maybe fully realized yet was that the first month, we would spend the majority of our time behind LinkedIn, sending messages to people we didn’t know, following up on the phone, or anyway, just to get to those initial sales conversations, the real kind of groundwork or grunt work of building a company and getting it in place. Do you remember the first client, the first, you know, serious client? Sure, serious clients are still with us. And I can probably mention them. Oh, I thought I knew e-commerce. Well, I still knew e-commerce a bit. And there’s only one big e-commerce player in Holland. So we called up bol.com, also as part of those testing clients already, and said, Hey, we think you might suffer from these challenges in a specific domain. And we can potentially address that. And well, that materialized, and they have been with us from day one.
Jeroen: That’s great. And ultimately, what you wrote down in those first presentations you made and all those first notes and plans, it’s a product today, very different from what it was at the time you were having this week together.
René: The solution. So the pain we try to solve for our clients or we solve for our clients is very much the same. So how do you help people build these skills and workforces build these skills? They need at specific points in their tenure. How can you do that scalably? How can you do that measurably? That’s all there. What we did, the product that does that, I think evolved luckily quite a lot over that period and notably kind of broadened quite a lot, but the underlying pain point.
Jeroen: Exactly the same. Right. So I was curious, you already mentioned the word upskilling. I’ve been in touch with Lepaya for the last few years, once in a while, and this word is always mentioned—upskilling. So what exactly is upskilling? It’s basically teaching people the skills they need to be effective tomorrow. And is that something that you can apparently learn through reading, through doing courses, talking with colleagues, all of the above? I don’t know, but what’s the core of upskilling, of making it happen?
René: So I think you need to pull two things apart here. One reason why we, along with a couple of other players globally, have really been able to disrupt the $400 billion-a-year market spent on corporate training is because there has been a shift from sending people to training courses just because it’s good practice and what you need to do, to actually sitting down with clients and having them evaluate, with the help of good people leaders and their teams, what skills are truly needed. They step back and say, “Hey, if we want to be effective and competitive, these are the gaps in our workforce, and those are the ones we should proactively address over the next few years.” This concept is what I call quiet hiring. How do you avoid waiting until you have a skill gap and then scrambling to hire? How can you look at the gaps you foresee next year or the year after and develop those skills in your current talent pool? The second part of the question is: How do you effectively upskill people? I was fortunate in that, as we discussed earlier, I was thrown into the HR seat with a clear need to make people more productive but also without a budget to suddenly send people to courses. I was in Southeast Asia, with Singapore nearby, but I couldn’t just enroll 5,000 people in a leadership course at INSEAD. I had to think fundamentally about how to teach people skills and how to do it at scale. After some false starts and things I didn’t like, as well as things I partially liked but couldn’t scale, I tried to distill three key elements. First, what skills do I want people to learn? Second, how can I most effectively teach these skills? This was over a decade ago, when there were essentially two types of training. One was the traditional approach, where training partners would book a few days in a conference room or hotel, and people would attend a leadership course, then go back to their regular work with massive email lists and to-do lists, but not much would change. On the other hand, there were e-learning platforms like Udemy and Coursera (before LinkedIn Learning came up), which promised skill learning but didn’t deliver. The first-time leader who watches a couple of videos on leadership and suddenly becomes great at it still hasn’t emerged, so that approach didn’t work. What I tried to do was pull apart the components of learning. What do you really need teachers or facilitators for, and where can technology play a role? Instead of just focusing on certain skills, as is being done now, I tried to distinguish between what truly needs human teaching and where great e-learning tools can help. For example, one essential leadership skill is giving effective feedback. While you can learn the model and why it’s important on your own, without being in a classroom, you can also practice it with an avatar, a bot, or today, definitely with AI or VR, which feels very real. But the first time you have to give tough feedback and the person opposite you has an emotional response, there’s no tech way to simulate that—maybe there will be in the future. So, having an actor, coach, or facilitator simulate an emotional response to your feedback, and practicing the same situation a few times, makes a big difference. Even though it’s an actor, you can feel their emotional reaction. This is where humans come in. Then, of course, technology can bridge the gap between theory and practice. The holy grail of upskilling is ensuring that people apply what they’ve learned on the job, not just in a safe environment, and keep doing it. So it’s about understanding where great teachers, facilitators, and coaches are needed, and where technology can scale the learning process.
Voice-over: You’re listening to Leaders in Finance with Jeroen Broekema.
Jeroen: And when you talk about skills, are you mainly referring to social skills, like the example you just gave, or do you also include learning how to program?
René: I mainly refer to non-functional skills for the simple reason that functional skills are typically learned on the job. If you need them today, you can typically find great resources online or from your peers who can help. Leadership, however, is not typically regarded in the same way. I take leadership across the spectrum—from running large parts of an organization to self-leadership. If you’re employed for the first time in a workforce, you need to collaborate, ask for feedback, be coached, manage your time, and deal effectively with challenging clients. These are skills you can learn in a similar way. The behavioral element makes it less about the cognitive part and more about the behavioral part. Teaching behaviors requires a different approach than acquiring knowledge.
Jeroen: Yeah, because you also said that measurability is important for you. I think when you’re learning a hard skill, it’s much easier to measure whether you’re able to do it or not, or at least partly. Here, it’s harder, right? So how do you make it measurable? Let’s say I’m going to enroll in a training to become better at feedback, per your example. How do you measure that I’m better in half a year?
René: So the important thing is that we will ultimately not try to just measure whether you’re better, because then I have to do a full assessment on you, and it takes a disproportional amount of time versus the time I want you to spend on learning, on training, on growing, on applying, all of that. So what we do is really work across cohorts, so really work with groups of people where we capture a lot of statistical data, which is not about you, you, or you, but really about the group, and therefore be able to go back to clients, to heads of learning, to VPs of learning, to L&D team members, to CHROs and say, across your cohorts, this is the behavior we’re seeing. X percent of people are picking it up, Y percent of people are applying it in these types of situations. This share of people is not applying it in the way you want. Let’s discuss how and why, whether that’s the programs we need to improve, whether they don’t have that, this is not the right skill at the right time, and that’s really what we try to do. So also just lift it from individual development, even though there’s an important side of the coin, and people that get invested in typically are happier, are more effective, and all of that is there. In the end, we really come from the angle, how can we help change, transform workforces?
Jeroen: And do you ultimately go as far as saying to these businesses, your clients, like X percent is now ready at this level, this means this has turned into so much growth in your P&L, do you go as far as that, or just saying these are the people who are measurably now better at skill XYZ?
René: Where we can, we go that far, but in the end, it really depends on the type of relationship and the type of partnership you have with your clients, because then you really need to evolve from being a vendor into a strategic upskilling partner. What we try to do is take a level lower or one level higher, really say, okay, yes, every company wants to grow or something in the P&L, so that’s kind of standard. But beyond that, every company has a couple of strategic imperatives, whether that’s scaling into new markets or whether that’s becoming more productive in the market they’re in and just increasing their margins by that, or whether that’s because of sustainability or climate regulations, integrating their supply chains vertically, because they need to deal with waste in a different way that comes back. That you can typically translate into skills that people across the organization and across the pyramid need to have to be able to do that effectively. And that’s where we try to measure it, so implementing these strategic imperatives has various requirements. Part of that is the workforce angle. And there we can really come and say, okay, your workforce is ready or not ready, or these elements you need to focus on, because we also probably need to be realistic. Overall P&L, well, you just have a new American president and no one will know exactly what’s going to happen. You can upscale as much as you want, but if you get tariffs… There are macroeconomic trends that influence things beyond our control. So it’s trying to be kind of one level more precise. What do you want to achieve? How does workforce transformation play a role in that? And let’s target very precisely. So definitely away from happy seats. If people like it, they did not like it because it’s easy to influence, and into real measurable transformation initiatives.
Jeroen: So I was thinking actually, one of your best clients, one of your best prospects could be your own business, right? Because you’re clearly growing rapidly. I think, how many people do you have now? A couple of hundred now. Yeah. Yeah. From when did you start exactly? Seven years ago.
René: Seven years, so it’s fast growth. How do you upscale your own people? Yeah, what we indeed call, in the scale-up plant, they tend to say, eat your own dog food. We translate it into drink your own champagne because it just sounds a little bit nicer, but it’s exactly what we try to do. So what are our imperatives? And they also change, of course, with an externally funded company. Well, there’s more pressure on money and returns right now. We need to move to profitability. So efficiency is the game. So it’s really about translating. What do our business priorities mean for where our workforce wants and needs to go? And how do we upscale our population? And of course, we first try to look, where does that fit on the non-functional side into our curriculum? So our entire population has been through multiple programs because it benefits them. And because it’s, of course, great to get direct feedback. There are things you can improve. And of course, there’s also the non-functional side. How do you help people to get better at the functional side of their jobs that we also invest in?
Jeroen: One of the reasons why you’re so successful at the moment is that the economy is doing extraordinarily well. This is also a way for companies to show and retain their talent, but also to attract new talent to work with them.
René: Yeah, so I think it’s interesting. I was talking to some investors this morning, and they indeed asked me about some of the macro trends that we are benefiting from. I think there are a couple. So I think the rate of change that’s coming at employees and workforces is accelerating, meaning that to be competitive and effective, you need to invest in your workforce at a higher rate than ever before. And that rate is accelerating. Typically, there’s this metric out there, which is the half-life of skills. So how long does it take for a skill to go out of fashion? That’s dropped from 10 years to five years, and now it’s below three. And I always love the example of prompting. A year and a half ago, it was all about how everyone needs to learn how to prompt to work with AI. I think we’ve already gotten over that wave. We just need to be able to ask AI to prompt for us. And we’re there. So I think that’s a prime example of a skill that was probably hot for all of six months and is no longer relevant, or at least not that relevant anymore. But I think that’s wave one. So really, the important thing, and you also see that, where L&D to some extent, and I’m generalizing, was often considered an operational topic—yes, we need to train our people, yes, we have challenges, let’s solve that—has now become more of a boardroom topic. How do we get our workforce ready for the future? The second issue is, in the end, our population is going to peak. I think there’s a big debate about what’s going to happen with migration, but at least the trend you’re seeing today is that it might decrease. In the top 15 or top 20 economies in the world, aging will take its toll. Either it has already happened, or in the next 10 years, the working population is going to shrink. Now, if that happens, you just can’t attract people anymore. You can continue to battle for talent, pulling people from here and there, but in the end, the best people you have are the people you have today. So let’s invest in them. I think the overall macroeconomic figure we need to look at is productivity growth per FTE. In the 50s and 60s, the average FTE produced additional output every year of 5-6%. That really means the economy doubles every generation. People are better off, and things scale. What we’re seeing today is that productivity growth is, at best, 1%. The growth is 1% every year. There are sectors where it’s probably flat or declining. Effectively, if you just look at a workforce that’s flat over the next decade, and the output per FTE is not increasing anymore, there’s no investor or management team that’s happy with ultimately flat output. So it needs to come from somewhere. And the big lever is productivity growth, ultimately translating all these tech evolutions we’ve seen over the past two decades into more output. And I think that’s what we need to get right as a society.
Jeroen: A couple of questions about Lepaya. First of all, you raised tens of millions of euros—70 million in total, if I’m not mistaken. Why did you do that?
René: To accelerate, basically. The learning and development space is one that needs a lot of innovation. It’s also a space where people enjoy the relationships they have and tend to rely on partners they work with for a long time. There’s investment needed in tech, operations, and content. Even though people sometimes say it might not be the most technologically advanced area in the world, that’s correct. But I do need great content, and I need great operations to train the same program in Korea, New York, and Amsterdam at the same time, in the local language with the right content. So it’s really about, on one hand, building a product, and on the other, scaling ahead of the curve. It takes time to land a great client. Typically, they want to test you for a bit, then you need to build that relationship and expand it. So it’s really about the ability to build the company we want to build. And secondly, we believe there’s a need to revolutionize or transform the way corporate upskilling is done in this space.
Jeroen: I think I missed one thing, which is buying other companies, because that’s what you also did, right? Yeah, but in the end, that’s not a goal in and of itself.
René: It might be a means to an end. So I think there are quite a few great companies in the upskilling space that, for instance, have been leading on the content side and client relationships, but on the other hand, don’t have the wish, capabilities, or means to invest in the tech and operations that are required at this point in time. So the way we look at this is really: Where can one plus one be more than two? How can we combine this and ultimately bring more value to the joint set of clients and people we have, and ultimately benefit society?
Jeroen: But you always have a view on like, these are particular companies that we may actually want to acquire at some point. We tend to keep our eyes very open. Let’s put it this way.
René: Which countries are you active in now? How many? So, there are two answers to that. I have teams across Western Europe—UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, and Switzerland. But from a sales perspective, we tend to work with clients that are headquartered there. One of the things the market needed, and what we focused on, is serving those clients globally. Over the past two years, we’ve served learners physically present in 104 markets. I might be slightly off with that number, but it’s really about global reach. The markets we’re in are really where the decision-makers of our clients are based.
Jeroen: Yeah. So, what are particularly interesting industries for you? I know financial services is one, and that’s one of the reasons why I invited you. Also because I love the story. But what are the particularly interesting sectors for you? I guess scale-ups, like businesses that grow fast, or is it particular industries that are extra relevant for you?
René: Ultimately, the industries where the workforce has a disproportionate impact on how successful the companies or the industry is, are most relevant for us. Those are the industries where investing in the workforce makes the most sense and has the highest payoff. Realistically, that’s often professional services, where people are typically the product. Financial services is also in that group; money makes the world go round. There’s a reason the smartest minds have gone to financial institutions for a long time, and continue to go there. How they deal with money flows is important. Scale-ups, tech companies, it’s the same there. Beyond that, we work in a broad range of other industries, where it’s about whether companies and industries believe they can make an impact by disproportionately investing in the workforce. In simple terms, the answer is always yes. But there are typically the faster movers and those who wait a little longer until things are proven or markets are ready.
Jeroen: Financial services, 20, 30% of your business, or more? No, that range. I’m just making it up now.
René: No, financial and professional services together make up over half, and that’s probably split quite neatly in the middle.
Jeroen: The Dutch Financial Daily 2023, I think, said about 50% of your turnover comes from the Netherlands. Is that still the case, or is it?
René: No, that has dropped, and that’s all by design. I mean, I’m Dutch, my co-founder is Dutch, and we started here in the Netherlands, but it’s probably down to about a third of turnover now. We’ve really been doubling down on the Dutch and French markets. Again, this is from where we’re selling the work, where the head offices are. If you look at where the learners are based, it’s probably even less. That doesn’t mean the Netherlands isn’t still a key market. We’ll continue to invest there. A large share of the team is based there, but ultimately, you want to continue investing in tech, data, and AI. The larger your base is, the better you can invest. So, ultimately, the Netherlands is still a key market. It makes sense.
Jeroen: What’s the market you absolutely want to crack?
René: So, there are two answers to that. I think we have a very good footprint in Germany, and it’s six times the size of the Netherlands. I keep telling the team, the moment those markets are on par, we’re not doing well enough in Germany to start with. To some extent, the story is similar for France. Right now, many players in the industry are facing less cash availability than before. Profitability starts to make sense at a certain scale. So, let’s really double down on the markets we’re in and accelerate our footprint. France and the DACH region are the most important ones. Of course, if you look more broadly, 44% of the 400 billion euros I was talking about—sorry, dollars—is spent in the US. So, from a financial point of view, doing work there is key. Looking from an impact angle, out of the 3.3 billion global workforce, 2 billion people are in Asia Pacific. These tend to be regions where upskilling isn’t yet at the same level, at least in terms of spending, compared to the Western world. But if you want to make a global impact, that’s where you can really make a difference. So, I have my short-term goals, which are also company-building goals. It always takes time to build, but we tend to keep our eyes on the global prize, both from a value perspective and an impact angle.
Jeroen: Yeah, that makes total sense to me. So, you’re focused on the financial services industry. Ultimately, this is Leaders in Finance, so what’s your take on it from an HR upskilling perspective? Let’s look at the Netherlands, for example. How do you look at the sector? Are they skilled enough, or not, for example?
René: That’s a yes/no question, which I’ll probably answer in a roundabout way. So I’ll answer it this way. I think there’s a reason we do well in that sector and do a lot of work, working with all the leading players, a bit more than others. And that’s because there tends to be a general belief that investing in the population is important and key. There’s already probably broad consensus that from an HR strategy perspective and upskilling perspective, we keep our eyes on 2028 or on 2030. There’s going to be a shortage of labor and how do we set our teams up for success then? Well, I think there are some leading players, and I won’t name names here, who are looking from that perspective, and there are still some players who fundamentally believe that investing in teams makes sense but could probably take a step or two, or three, in really linking that to business strategy. Also, just being mindful that if you’re not doing that and your competitors are, you’re probably being hit by a two-edged sword. So it’s definitely not the industry I’m most worried about lagging in any way, but given the dependence on great talent and the way to get it out of the market, and probably the shift in the population where 10 or 20 years ago, maybe 10, everyone wanted to go work for these large institutions, and now either tech or let’s say the impact side of the industries are attracting more talent, I do think from a competitor’s point of view, it makes sense to double down on this even more.
Jeroen: I guess it’s everywhere, always the story that costs are extraordinarily important, but, you know, definitely, it is in financial services, the only industry I know. And is it also sometimes a way to sell what you do, to explain that ultimately it can lead to lower costs? And if so, how does that exactly work?
René: I think there’s two sides here. So one is indeed the strategic side. I mean, if you manage to get, you’ll know how many people are employed in the financial services industry, let’s say in the Netherlands only, if you manage to get one or two percent extra productivity out, that’s just divided by the average wage you’re spending on someone. You can invest quite a bit in upskilling that individual. Caveat: you need to upskill them in the right way because there are certain things that really drive productivity and certain things that are great to learn but probably less effective. But in the end, it is typically an ROI question. That’s why I talk so much about productivity. Then there’s that big second angle, which is just about reviewing what you’re spending your money on. There’s a lot of spend today on training people. There are massive budgets being allocated to that. And I think still today, for only a minority of these projects and that spend, it’s clear what the ROI is on that and why you’re doing it. And that’s why my push is to link it to strategic imperatives and try to measure. It’s not to say you can drill everything down to a single number, but we need to move away from happy sheets. Did people like it? Did they enjoy it? What did you apply on the job? To really say, okay, these are the skills that are important for this team, this function, this business unit to be more productive. Let’s measure that and let’s continue to tweak. I always give the simple example of that Booking.com landing page. And without wanting to offend anyone, it looks horrendous, right? And no smart designer would have designed it in such a way just on a blank sheet of paper, but it is the page that converts most actively. Well, a workforce and how to develop people goes the same way. I think too often, we’re still there a little bit in the past when it’s about experience. This is how you develop people, this is how you train people, and not about this we’ve tried, this is the data we’re looking at, we’re tweaking it like this, this is how it’s working, this is not working, and we continue to optimize. There’s massive space for that.
Jeroen: Where is the Dutch financial services sector from your perspective? Are they behind compared to other sectors in terms of upskilling their people? I’m also using your word now. I know you’re not owning the word, but still, are you using it a lot? Or are they actually more ahead of the other sectors?
René: You see me hesitating a bit because I think the answer is probably a bit mixed. So if you compare it to the general population, they may probably be in the first or second quarter, at least in the upper half of the echelons. I think, and why I’m hesitating is that I see a massive difference between players here. Some players are really saying, we are now, we might not even be a financial services player anymore; we’re a tech player, and our technology, our people, and of course, our balance sheet— but that’s what makes the difference. I think there are a couple of players that are still fundamentally a little bit more old-school and say, we’ve done this for a long time, change is coming, but often not to that extent in the financial services industry and typically in some sub-segments of that.
Jeroen: The tech players are actually more invested in this? I think they are. The more tech-oriented players?
René: Yeah, I think they know very well that talent ultimately is the driver of success. So are they, from an overall industry perspective, behind the top front? Probably a little bit in the middle, but given the industry that they are in and the heavy reliance on great talent, they probably should do a little bit more.
Voice-over: You’re listening to Leaders in Finance with Jeroen Broekema.
Jeroen: So Leaders in Finance is very much focused on content, but also on the person behind the success, as we tend to call it. And these are the only questions I’m going to post to you now that I’ve given you before, let’s be honest about it. And they’re called the five unusual questions, and they’re really about you, not about the business.
So you’re speaking as René now and not as the CEO of this business, first and foremost. So the first question is, do you have an unusual hobby or something special that you do in your spare time?
René: So I found this straight away the hardest question when you answered or you sent this to me. I think if I ask at home, they will probably ask, when do you have time for hobbies? You’re happy to have you around, and otherwise, you work. I think what came to mind, and that’s more related to how you started also on the personal side, I tend to want to learn new things and develop myself. When I was living in Asia, I thought, let’s do diving because it’s beautiful here. I straight away went up to get all the certifications on diving and ended up being a rescue diver. And I’ve never really rescued anyone, which is the concept of not just floating around in the sea but kind of getting there. I enjoyed it. Same at some point, my sister, who works in financial services, at some point said, hey, we’re spending a lot of time behind our laptops, and let’s do something with all our five senses. We went for a wine course, and then ultimately, we ended up taking four or five courses and ended up sitting with some of the sommeliers of well-known restaurants in our lovely capital, who took the same level of courses to be able to serve their clients. I think that’s probably more the angle. If you do it, referring probably back to my parents as well, do it with a vengeance. And that’s what I tend to do.
Jeroen: Right. Does it also mean that you’re tough on yourself, that every day you think, I should have done this better or I want to become better in what I do?
René: Yeah, I think being an entrepreneur, and especially with a sizable team that depends on you and looks at you, I think a very tough trade-off, which I still struggle with every day, is on the one hand trying to be clear, setting a direction, and portraying vision and all of that. And on the other hand, also knowing that I make as many mistakes as everyone else and that I try things, learn from them, and adjust course. And how do you balance these two? And I don’t think you get the balance ever right, but that’s really something I, on a very personal level, struggle with.
Jeroen: But does it mean that, back to the question, that you’re tough on yourself, that you’re like, every time thinking, I should have done this differently?
René: So there’s a lot of second-guessing there, of course. I mean, that’s why I was talking about the balance. That typically means you haven’t gotten it right. And very often, I, like driving here or sitting on my lovely bike back home in the evening, think, I should have done this, or why did I do it this way? Or should I have pushed harder? Or maybe I shouldn’t have pushed harder and should have let things run their course. So you never know when you get it right. But yeah, the head is always turning, the brain is always working, and it’s never kind on myself, let’s put it that way.
Jeroen: Thanks a lot for sharing this. The second one is, do you have a well-known person that you idolize or see as a great inspiration? And I’m looking, again, for someone well-known. So not your father or mother or brother or sister or anyone close to you, but just someone everyone knows. My mother is absolutely amazing, but let’s not go into that.
René: No, I always pick the same person. And I’m happy that after the Oppenheimer movie, he got a little bit better known. So the person I tend to want to call out is Feynman, who is a very well-known physicist from the 40s, 50s, 60s area, basically. And the importance is basically that I think he combined two unique traits, especially for physicists, but also in society. He was cognitively, analytically, functionally one of the best physicists out there. And he made a whole lot of breakthroughs that very few people would have been able to make at that point in time. But he combined that with a real ability to inspire people, to explain that to people, to get laymen kind of with him. And it’s rumored—and it’s just before my time—but that his university lectures were always oversubscribed and always ended with standing ovations. I’ve studied physics myself, and I’ll tell you, it’s quite uncommon to end a physics lecture with a standing ovation. And why that inspires me is probably because I think what we need more of in this day and age are leaders that can, on the one hand, get people to go along with them, but on the other hand, do that based on solid facts and principles. And I think that combination is getting maybe a little bit too rare at this point in time.
Jeroen: Real leaders. Third one, what’s the scariest moment in your life?
René: Yeah, I found that a challenging question, and I’ll not go back to the moment that I probably three decades ago sat in a movie theater and watched The Ring and figured out it was the first horror movie I ever saw. I think from a business perspective, we built this company fairly remotely, and especially when COVID hit us very fast, we turned scary things into something a bit more positive. I remember we had a big offsite sometime after COVID, and we had tripled or so the team during that period. And as so often happens, my co-founder and I were a little bit late to this offsite, so we had missed some of the events. We were sitting at the entrance of a place where the next phase of the event would take place, just having, I think, a beer. Then we saw this massive crowd of people walking towards us, and we looked at each other like, that’s, I think, the team we’ve built. And yeah, we’ve seen them on Zoom and on all these small screens, but it’s very different to finally, after about a year and a half, see them all together in one place in real life. It was super exciting, and on the other hand, it also was, for both of us, a bit of a realization. Hobby time is maybe over, because in the beginning, you know you could fail, and it’s very risky. At some point, you’re also tipping the scale where people are not necessarily joining a startup anymore, which is by definition risky, but are really also committing their future, their growth, their mortgages to all of you. I think that was really a moment when both of us looked at each other and said, on the one hand, we’re super happy and proud, but on the other hand, it suddenly feels very different right now.
Jeroen: But is it also scary, because it means you now really have to deliver? Because if it’s just the two of us and we fail, right, there are a couple of people that will find out, but now there’s a whole lot of money involved, a whole lot of people involved. It’s kind of, it’s going to be a success. And otherwise, you know, you may take it very personally.
René: Yeah, for sure.
Jeroen: Like in the beginning, it’s kind of, it’s always your baby.
René: But in the beginning, it’s your baby. And you know, the risks are very high. Maybe your idea wasn’t good enough for all of that. You’ve already talked about the investors, but of course, a massive team and a massive set of clients are involved. At some point, that really turns into, there’s a whole field of people that have believed in you, and going back to the pressure that you do feel and sense.
Jeroen: You’re given 200 million today, 200 million euros or dollars, and you have to spend it within a month. Where would you spend it? And not for the business, personally, where would you spend it? Because for the business, I have some ideas, and you’ve already raised a lot of money, not close to 200 million, but 70 million, but just you.
René: Yeah, but I mean, I could spend, if I talk to my girlfriend, we’ll be able to find nice holidays.
Jeroen: Yeah, but you don’t spend 200 million, right? I mean, maybe. Well, I don’t know you and your girlfriend, but…
René: Exactly. Let’s try. No, she will not. So, what I wanted to say is, it’s not necessarily about this business, and I’m not sure how we would spend it, but what I really want to do is go a lot more fundamental, even, and that’s why I need a lot of money to spend because no one will fund it. I think we have a massive gap between what we teach today in schools and what people need in the workforce. We teach all these very practical skills, and we teach all these very practical things, and then people enter the workforce for the first time and kind of look wide-eyed at what’s being expected of them and how they should deliver. Especially the way our school system is set up and how it’s funded, we can’t change it overnight. We looked at it. So, I would really love to start investing in that and help people make that transition much more smoothly. Yeah, that’s a very good question because it isn’t there, because I think we need to build it up, but this might not be a company because the question is, who’s going to pay for it? So, let’s set up an NGO that does that, but really making this transition smoother, I think, will help society and all these people that are now either 16, 17, 18, coming out of high school, or 20 to 25, coming out of colleges or universities, really helping them be much more successful. I think that’s what we need to do, with simple programs that replace some of the stuff we’re now doing. I think it’s super, super key.
Jeroen: The full 200 million or 199 and one for something else?
René: I tend to donate quite a few things, so I might send a little bit of stuff to Ukraine and all of that. I think there are some refugees there that could probably use some short-term support.
Jeroen: Last of the five unusual ones, if you could change one decision you’ve made in the past, what would that be? You said before this conversation started, you said you prepared three out of five, so this is maybe one of the five you haven’t prepared.
René: No, that’s a very good question. Listen, I think I was talking before about how I make many mistakes and do many things right. I think the one trait in myself, from a business perspective, that I should probably change is that I tend to be relatively loyal to people. Especially the ones that have been with you for a number of years, and then certainly the business outgrows them, because that’s the challenge you see with a rapidly scaling organization. People who did very well when you had 50 people might not be the right person anymore when you have 150 people or when the team is doubling again. How can you then make the tough call and say, you’re amazing, you’re great at what you do, but we need someone else for this role at this point in time? It’s very hard to do on a human level, and it’s very important to do on a business level. I know I’ve made some of these decisions probably too late, to the detriment of both the business and the person involved.
Jeroen: And the crazy thing is, there are even businesses at some point, when you keep growing like you do now, that maybe they even at some point in the far future, need another CEO. For sure.
René: And I want to avoid one thing that my ego gets in the way of that. So that’s one discussion I typically try to have very openly with the board and not say, hey, I’m here, and let’s build the rest around me. I think we’ve built a great business. That’s why it’s not just marketing speech when I talk about the society or impact we can make. I think it’s super important what we’re doing, and we need more of that in Holland, in Europe, and in the world. And as long as I can accelerate that, let’s do it. I also really believe that at some point, people will be better than me. And at some point, again, fresh eyes might be relevant. So, I think you should always review that. I think we all know some tech CEOs globally who probably should have made that call. I think then there are much more fun things and impactful things you can do with your life.
Jeroen: Makes sense. And at the same time, the founder’s mentality is something you cannot buy. It’s just something extraordinarily important. I think there’s even this book, right? Founder’s Mentality, and it shows you, you probably know it. Last three questions from my side. Tips is one. Tips for starters and for Dutch financial institutions. Do you have a tip for both? So let’s start with someone who has just started their career at Lepaya, or at a bank, or somewhere else. Do you have a tip? Yeah.
René: Make a very practical career goal. So where do you want to be in two years from now? But then distill it down to yourself. What do you need to learn for that? And very actively go after that. And if you don’t know what you should learn for that, find three people who are there. Give them a ring or reach out to them through LinkedIn. Everyone who you reach out to and say, I just want to learn from you because I think it’s cool what you’re doing, will pick up the phone or answer that message and ask them what the most important things are that you have learned very practically and to the point. And what did you do to learn that or what would you have wished you had learned and didn’t? And make that very practical. In the end, I can do what I want. Companies can do what they want, but in the end, people are in charge of how they spend their own time. So they need to see the importance of upskilling. I think for financial institutions, it’s really about helping people with providing that insight. Because many of us, well, let me make this more personal. When I started to lead a team for the first time, I thought I was a pretty good leader. And then a few years later, I was leading leaders and I thought, hmm, maybe I wasn’t that great back then, but now I’m a pretty good leader and maybe I’m a bit more reflective, but I’m pretty aware of what my flaws are. And probably in a couple of years, I’ll still say they were bigger than I thought today. But I think what many people, especially on that non-functional side of your capabilities, of your skills, we’re not just that aware of what great looks like and where your flaws might sit. So not kind of losing yourself in massive analyses, but getting a sense of, okay, this is where we see workforce gaps and this is how we can help people to identify, okay, if you would be better at X or be more experienced in Y, this is how your life, just your life will be better and easier. And that smile at the end of the day will just be slightly bigger when you cycle home. Good for the business, good for people’s personal lives, and really investing in that and making it practical.
Jeroen: Thank you. Second out of the last three. At some point, will Lepaya be a public business? Will you go to the public markets? Interesting question.
René: We might. So there’s still different, there are various paths for us, whether it’s being standalone. We talked about M&A. There are opportunities to get more companies under our belt. There are also, again, much larger companies that can then help accelerate us. There are great opportunities to stay private and to continue to grow. And then there’s the public markets. So it’s definitely a path which we’re not ruling out. It’s also not that an IPO for me is the route, otherwise a company has failed, not at all.
Jeroen: Last question. Is there something, I mean, I’ve asked you very many questions. I think you really, at least as a first investor, got to know you quite well, as a person also got to know Lepaya quite well, but maybe there’s something that we really have missed or you say like, well, Jeroen, you should have asked that or this or that, that we can add here. I just asked many questions indeed.
René: And I’ve tried to, by my own nature, I think I’ve answered quite a few of them quite elaborately. I think what I maybe just want to repeat is if we don’t get this kind of upscaling right and getting productivity of people right, I really do believe we’re going to run into a wall. There are many societies that have collapsed before, and this might sound like a doom scenario, but open the history books and there are many societies that have disappeared. That has happened through a lot of infighting. Well, I look at the political climate out there and I think there’s a lot of mess going on, but ultimately if there’s not a way where people are better off than their parents or their current generations, then it’s very hard to see and continue to see meaningful progress. Working populations are going to decline and at the moment, productivity is also declining. Let’s fix that.
Jeroen: Wonderful. René Janssen, the CEO at Lepaya, as well as the founder of Lepaya, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to Leaders in Finance. I said it’s going to be 45 minutes. I’m not sure I did well. Anyway, thank you so much. It was great. I really love the combination of the way that you’re very clearly explaining things. You’re not going around questions. You go very specific into the answer. I really enjoyed that. Also, it’s lovely to listen to you. You’re so full of passion and energy. Last but not least, I think it gives a great view on all the things you do. Thank you so much. I have a small present for you to give to you after this episode has ended. For now, thanks so much for taking the time, René. Thank you, Jochen. It was a pleasure.
Voice-over: 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? Tell us in an Apple or Google review, via email, or our social media channels. We’d greatly appreciate it. Finally, we’d like to thank our partners for their ongoing support. They are Kayak, EY, Medirect, and Roland Berger. Thank you for listening.