Happy Sunday!
Welcome back to Founders Feature, a weekly newsletter all about the journeys of young startup founders.
For this week's edition, I interviewed Andreas De Neve, co-founder and CEO of TechWolf, an AI-powered HRTech company based in Belgium.
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Here’s what TechWolf is all about:
🏠 The Basics
The Problem:
A lot of organisations are facing transformation today. People are more important than ever and people are also a big part of this transformation. But in general, many large companies have very little understanding of their people. They don't know what skills and what skill gaps they have within the organisation.
The Solution:
We have built technology, the skill engine, that companies use to map the skills of their workers, based on data points that are already present. So, based on the groups that you're in, projects that you've worked on, previous roles that you had within the company, and other data points, we will interpret all this information and infer the skills of everyone in the company.
The Team:
We're a team of three co-founders and are all very good friends. We met at university studying computer science. Our CTO, Jeroen, went to Cambridge for a year for his Masters, while Mikael and I studied in Ghent that year, but remotely we all kept working on the problem. Once we got back together, TechWolf really took off. Right now we raised two rounds of funding, and we're a team of 20 people.
🚀 The Journey
How did you come up with your startup/solution?
Our initial journey started with us trying to solve a personal problem. We were computer science students and we knew how to code, but every time we wanted to make some money on the side, our only option seemed to be to work in the hospitality industry as a waiter or so. We thought this was crazy, because we had all these IT skills and could contribute to companies who are desperately in need of IT talent, but somehow you don't find each other, and you have to fall back onto jobs that don't pay well, and that don't teach you any new skills.
This is when we built a matching software to match students with relevant jobs. This matching software evolved to find the right candidate for a position among a group of candidates. But as we started talking to customers and prospects, we quickly learned that finding the best candidate was no longer an issue, because there were no good candidates available with the war for talent. Because of the difficulty in finding external talent, companies started to look inwards towards the employee base that they already had to see if there was some hidden talent there that could maybe be upskilled. And so, we found out that that was the more interesting and bigger problem to solve and that's how we got to where we are now at TechWolf.
Why is this the right time for this problem to be solved?
It's a combination of two things. The first one is the size of the problem. 20 years ago, the rate of transformation in the world was not as big as it is right now, and computers and everything digital has had a really big impact on the labour market. The war for talent is at its peak and so, we have arrived in the situation in the last couple of years, where the availability of the right talent is really low. So, companies are really stretched thin and have a really hard time finding the right people.
The problem became urgent very recently, and also technological advancements in natural language processing make it possible now to infer these skills and to contextualise these skills from text. This was not possible five years ago. So, it's a combination of a problem that became really big, and technology that became available, that really created this problem-solution pair.
What is a recent success you are proud of?
Closing our first six-figure recurring Enterprise Client was a very big milestone. It's instant validation that your idea is not trash, that your team is not trash, and that your product is not trash because they start paying for it, they start using it, they love it, they start recommending you. So that was definitely a huge success.
What is a recent challenge you have faced?
The greatest challenge we face, and this really goes hand in hand with our success, is learning how to do enterprise sales right. People often think that once you have come up with a great idea, people will stand in line to buy it. That's not true, even if your software is amazing. People will be skeptical. People will still fall back to the status quo. Our biggest challenge at TechWolf is that we're a bunch of 20-something-year-olds, trying to sell software that costs six figures a year into enterprises, where people are double our age and come from a different world and completely different understanding. So for us, understanding their world, understanding how these companies buy software, and how to actually sell software and the entire commercial side of things is really difficult, especially with a founding team of engineers.
What do you wish you knew before you started and is there anything you would have done differently in hindsight?
If I knew how tough sales can be, and how much effort would go into sales I would have spent a lot more effort on it in the beginning, You spend a lot of time in a startup on stuff that is somewhat important, but not really important. There's a lot of stuff that you can do that keeps you busy and feels like it's all an essential part of the process but doesn't really add value, while doing sales really adds value.
Investors and mentors actually told me this early on, that "Sales Sales Sales" is key, but I thought they were exaggerating. It turns out they weren't, and I really wish I had understood that sooner.
🧠 The Lessons
What is the best advice you have been given recently?
When we were raising our last funding round I was challenged to think bigger, and this is a lesson I think is worth passing on to others. We were looking to raise 300k, 400k, half a million at most, but people challenged me to think bigger and in the end, we raised a million euros, allowing us to execute at a different scale now.
If you think bigger then you will automatically act bigger and your chances of success will increase tremendously because you will start doing different things.
What advice would you give to other young founders?
My advice would be to make sure that if there are things within the entrepreneurial journey that don't give you energy, find a way to fix them before they burn you out. For example, if there is an employee who is just sucking your energy, or a client who is keeping you up at night for all the wrong reasons, find a way to fix that situation. Being a founder is a big responsibility. It's a long journey, and if you're successful, it will be a decade of hard work so you have to make sure that you have enough power to walk the entire journey. Don't get burned out by things that were avoidable.
What is the biggest lesson you have learned so far?
I realised this year that doing sales, raising funding, and hiring, are really all the same thing. Three times sales. And if you're good at one as a founder, then you'll probably be good at the other two as well. So there's no reason why you shouldn't be doing the other two because they are very important. So, I was pretty good at fundraising, but I wasn't too involved in sales, even though when I was involved in sales, it all went very well. But for some reason I didn't involve myself in sales, and when I look back at it, it's a really big missed opportunity. So if you're good at one out of three, the other two will be very manageable.
✨ The Inspiration
Who inspires you?
I have a pretty broad network of mentors who I look up to, but besides those, my two co-founders really inspire me, because we complement each other very well. I have traits and strengths that they do not have. But on the other hand, they have strengths and specific personality traits that I really appreciate and look up to. They're definitely a big source of inspiration and help me become a better person.
What book do you think everyone should read?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team - Patrick Lencioni
The Bed of Procrustes - Nassim Taleb