Interview with Jürgen Ingels, Author and Entrepreneur

Another magical guest with us this week, joining us on Dawn of a New Era podcast, we have Jürgen Ingels. And the reason that we have invited this amazing guest to join us today is partly to do with your entrepreneurial experience, but also your new book. And it caught my eye. This is why we got in touch with you.

We've been connected on LinkedIn, and it's all about 50 practical ways that entrepreneurs can really maximize their business and take it to the next level. Now, Jürgen, you are a venture capitalist, you're an entrepreneur, and now you are an author, and your book is now available in English. It's done very well in Belgium, I believe, so far, and only came out in October. It is a pleasure to welcome you today.

And yeah, we're going to be talking to Jürgen about his entrepreneurial journey. And I think one of the things that fascinated me, Jürgen, was that when I was reading your bio and we were looking at the different businesses that you're involved in, Clearpay was one of them. Tell us a little bit about how you got into the career you're in, because I think one of the things that people always see is, you know, we see someone on LinkedIn and we assume that they set out in this journey to become whatever they are now. Was it a natural progression into this world, or where did you evolve from?

It's actually my father who's responsible for me becoming an entrepreneur. I think when I was 16 years old, I wanted to go out, and my father was quite strict, so he said to me, Well, you can go out, but you'll be home at 12. And I'm like, It only starts at 11. So I knew that if you want to get stuff done, you have to be creative.

So I went back to my father and I said, Listen, if I organize the party, can I then stay longer? And he basically thought about it two seconds and he said, Well, if you organize it, at least you learn something, so you can stay longer then. And I started actually by organizing a party once a month in Belgium. But then the other weeks I was back at home in the weekend, and so I started doing two parties a month, three parties a month, four parties a month, different cities.

And then I actually, between the age of 16 to 20, I organized all kinds of concerts, parties, and I learned a lot by doing so on the entrepreneurial side of things, because you have to deal with budgets, you have to find people to come to the place, you have to do communication, marketing, you have to work with a team and motivate people. And so that's the way I got rolled into entrepreneurship. And then later when I was at university, I actually worked during my studies. I didn't have time to go to the classes always, but I saw that there were these girls in front who always had very good notes from the professor.

And so one day I had to deal with one of these girls to actually commercialize the notes that they had. And again, at university, I started very small with my faculty, and then I went to other faculties. And by the end of my, let's say, career at university, I had like this two million, three million copy small business that I then later on sold. So that was my first small business.

So I think entrepreneurial things have always been inside myself, and I've always done this crazy stuff. So I think it has to be a bit in your blood, being an entrepreneur. You've always found a creative way into it. So I think what's interesting is that you've covered probably a lot of the operational dynamics of a business by doing the parties, you know, and that probably has set you up, you know, amazing foundations for business, because it's one of the hardest bits to learn, the end-to-end, and to get experience.

So when you decided to write your book, does this share the journey of you as an entrepreneur and how you got into your current role, or is it the highs and lows? What's it about? Yeah, it's about—the title is 50 Lessons, but it's not really lessons. It's more 50 experiences that I had in really setting up my own company from the start.

So actually, from a beer cart, I started my company from a beer cart, and I actually started my career in private equity. So I was responsible for a Belgian bank investing in private equity in the '90s. But then, beginning of the '90s, nobody really knew what it was. So I went to the States to learn there, and I got the opportunity to really run the private equity arm of the bank.

And while we were investing in the U.S., from time to time we had to send money between Belgium and the U.S.

And the money, when I was in the U.S., it always got stuck somewhere. It took a long time to go to the other side.

And then when I called the guys at the bank and said, Well, where's my money? they said to me, Well, it's somewhere in the financial system. And I said, What do you mean it's in the financial system? And so they said to me, Well, I still remember, it's like the financial system is like a big black box.

You just do an entry of a payment, and then you wait, you pray, and you hope it pops up on the other side. That's funny. So I went to see the guys at payments and asked, How does it work? I came up with an idea, no rocket science, just to do it differently in '99.

And then I started my company, Clear2Pay, in trying to build this kind of back-office infrastructure for international payments. And it was a lot of fun. I mean, very naive, I have to admit, because I didn't know anything about payment systems as such. Obviously, I knew a bit about software, but I didn't have any references.

And working in big banks with big financial institutions without references, very tough. It was really fun. Started in '99, built the company in 15 years into an international business. We had 23 offices all over the world.

I think of the 50 largest banks in the world, roughly 40 use the technology and still are using the technology. And then in 2014, I decided I wanted to do something else, go back into private equity on the one hand, and sold the company to FIS, which is an American fintech quoted company still. So it was a good deal for the shareholders, for everybody involved. And while doing so, I actually went from nothing, from an idea to an international company, raising capital, raising equity.

So it's all of that experience. How do you do M&A? How do you deal with the team? How do you manage people?

All of that stuff, but in a very practical way, because I read a lot of books and I always find some of these books interesting, but at the point in time when you say, now I'm going to learn something and now I would like to apply what they say, the book actually stops. So I wanted to write a book that's very practical. Okay, you take the book and you can do something with it. And I also had the idea, my children, I have a son of 19 and a daughter of 16.

If they ever want to become an entrepreneur, which I doubt, I don't think it's in their blood, but that's a different discussion. But if they ever want to become an entrepreneur, I'll tell them, you have to do in life what you want, but please read my book first. So that's a bit the way and why I wrote this. So it's more potentially giving something back to my children if they ever want to become an entrepreneur, but also entrepreneurs to say, okay, if I would have had this book before I started, I probably would not have made the mistakes I've made.

Yeah. So, I mean, it sounds such an exciting journey, and you hear these stories so often from entrepreneurs about the successes. I mean, what you've achieved is pretty mammoth, and I think a lot of people will perceive it kind of unachievable. What would you say in terms of obviously, you know, highlighting some of these head in hand moments, these bumps along the way, what are the challenges that you face that people can kind of relate to, you know, as entrepreneurs themselves?

Oh, there's, I mean, I've done good stuff, but I've also done really bad things in a way. And one of the things that I always found in an international context is the cultural aspects of things, and I have a good example of that. After I sold my company, I had a small shop in Belgium, a chocolate shop. So we're Belgians, we're crazy about chocolate.

And I also worked in Sweden, where I was on the board of a company, and I saw that Swedish people ate chocolates, bar chocolates, but not pralines like they eat in Belgium. And I thought, well, maybe there's an opportunity here. And in Sweden, the price of a praline was twice as high, and the cost of the personnel was only 25% higher. So your margin in Sweden was far better.

And so with a friend, we said, this is probably a golden nugget here. Let's do a market research. And we've done a complete market research of everything you can even imagine. We had people taste it.

We had looked at the packaging. Is the color right for Sweden? We asked everything you can imagine. We did a lot of price setting examinations.

And so it was all very, very positive. And we said, well, this is great. We're going to open three shops in Sweden. So in Stockholm, we opened three shops at the same time, which is, looking back at it, completely crazy, but that's what we did.

And in the morning of the opening of the shop, there was a line of like 50 people standing outside of the shop, waiting, wanting to come in to buy the chocolates. So I thought, this is magnificent. And so the first person in Sweden comes in. He looks at the chocolates and he orders one chocolate, one.

And I'm like, one chocolate. And the second one comes in and orders two chocolates. And so for like half an hour, it went one chocolate, two chocolates, two chocolates, one chocolate. Now I can tell you, in Belgium, if you ever go into a Belgian praline shop and you ask one praline, they basically kill you.

I mean, it's not done. We buy half a kilo or a kilo of these things, and then we put them on the table and we all jump on it and we eat it. And so the mistake here was that we, I looked at it from a cultural perspective, from my Belgian cultural perspective, and haven't even bothered to ask the question, would you buy half a kilo or a kilo? It was so obvious for me that I didn't really...

And that's, for instance, some mistakes that I found that I had on the cultural aspects. There's a couple of examples, and maybe another example. It's called the Turkey Syndrome. It's also a chapter in the book.

Again, my son, I was with my wife on a weekend, and on Saturday I called my son, and I said to him,

Listen, we're coming back on Sunday. Would you mind going to the butcher and buy one and a half kilo of turkey? And so my son, okay, I'm going to do that. So on Sunday I come home with my wife and I want to prepare like a pasta, and so I prepare the sauce and all of that, and tomatoes and so on.

And so at a certain point in time I grab and go to the fridge. I open the door of the fridge and what do I see? Like a stack of this, with all slices of turkey. But obviously I couldn't do anything with that in my pasta.

And that has me been thinking about in a company, it's really very, very much the same. It's the turkey syndrome when you have people as an entrepreneur, you don't have time, you have your collaborators, you need to explain something quickly, and you explain it and you presume that people actually know what you want to say because it's in your head, but not necessarily in their head. And so making sure that your communication inside the company and the way that you communicate, but also taking time to communicate is really essential. And that's, for instance, another thing.

So cultural communication, there's heaps of examples of that. It's so true. I mean, I think one of the things, and you'll have found this probably when you wrote your book, as an entrepreneur, there's so many challenges and pitfalls that you've probably experienced along the way that you kind of want to front-load them and make sure that others don't obviously fall foul to them. But in all honesty, entrepreneurialism, it's the highs, the lows, and there's so many.

I think one of the things that I see a lot, and I've experienced myself, is about time. What does your perfect day look like? I mean, I remember when I first started my business, I was very hands-on. I was doing everything until obviously I can employ a team.

But then it changes, doesn't it? It morphs as you delegate and you grow. What does your day look like now versus your day when you first started? Yeah, well, maybe time is an interesting aspect.

It's in the sense that I always, people sometimes ask me, what are the ingredients for a successful company? And if you read, like, magazines and stuff like that, or books on it, you always see, okay, what do you need? You need a great team, which is obvious. You need a product, you need a market, and you need money.

So those four always come back. And for me, time is the fifth element in being successful, in the sense that I found in the digital way or world that companies who actually can squeeze time, who can reduce time, are much more effective. And squeezing time is something strange, but it basically comes down to the fact that you don't have to go through a learning curve on one hand. So you use people who have that experience, and on the other hand, you use technology.

And so, just to maybe come now to your question, I mean, I always work in a way where I always try to, how can I squeeze time in this thing, or how can I squeeze time in doing it more effective? So, in other words, anything I do that I don't necessarily are very good at, I try to actually give to other people because I'm more efficient at it. And so in that way, I squeeze time, and I'm able to actually free up time to do other stuff that's more interesting. But if you look into my agenda, it's very much packed in all different directions.

And that's also one thing that I describe in the book. It's the principle about parallel working. If you look at people, there's a lot of people who actually, when they start their career, I call it a kind of serial career. They do and they go, they improve in their job, but they always stay within the same sector.

And I don't think it's bad, but I've always tried to do other stuff also in other sectors, because things that you apply and learn in other sectors, you can sometimes apply in your own sector. And by using creativity, also speed up things. And so this notion of parallel working actually helps you to improve a lot in the way that you are. And if you then compare people At the start of their career, one who works serial, the other one works parallel.

After a while, after three, four years, the guy who works parallel will be perceived as much more brighter. People look at him and say, Hey, that's a smart guy. But you're not necessarily smart. You have more experience.

Yeah, or diverse. Or fortunately, yes. Today, people mix sometimes, or they mix up experience and intelligence. And so for me, parallel working allows you to have more experience.

More experience helps you to reduce time. Reducing time helps you to be more successful. So there's a kind of logic in that way. And so for me, if you look at my agenda, it's all over the place.

I do stuff in technology, but at the same time on the board of a construction company, and I help a friend who's doing HR stuff. And I really like it because it actually mentally, it helps me to be more creative. And for me, creativity is like... Very much the ground of an entrepreneur.

It's not just about the practical part of things. It's much more about the creativity part of things. I'm with you so much on the delegation side of things. So for far too long, I think it's very tempting as an entrepreneur to hold on to things because you have this belief that you can do it better.

But then you suddenly realize that, you know, empowering the people who are passionate about doing something that you've been procrastinating over, it is a far better option to go for. And I love the aspect when you think about the time, the tactics and tools. It's something I'm very passionate about and believe fully, that when we address things like profit and you look at businesses and the structure, it's often just the knowledge and having these efficient and effective ways or automation within a business. But then that also empowers the individual because we don't like repetitive.

So when you talk about your day, variety is the spice of life. I think a lot of entrepreneurs crave that freedom, and we like working on different things. The parallel learning, I think, or parallel working is really interesting because we're probably, a lot of us are working on parallel projects that we don't maybe truly understand the influence on other things that we're doing. I know that when I started my podcast, that it was actually like a parallel learning because a lot of the things I was talking about, I was then seeing more in my day-to-day life and highlighting and performing and taking some of that through.

When you wrote your book, what was the main trigger? What was the compelling event that you just suddenly thought, you know what, I need to impart this knowledge? Yeah, it was more based on a bit what I said there. I mean, I've read a lot of books and I really wanted to have something practical, but I also wanted to share some of the experience because I think if somebody comes to you and says, Don't do it like this.

I've done that and it doesn't work. Just don't lose time. I think it's all about, again, squeezing that time principle. And I see that all over the...

Over the place in the company itself, I'll give you an example. Some companies, when they want to have an ERP system, so enterprise resource planning, typically they say, okay, we need to do that, and then they get people together from different divisions, and then they figure out what they need, and then they make a report to the board, and then the board says freeze of the budgets, and then they say, okay, now we need to see seven vendors, and they see seven vendors, blah, blah, blah, and then six months or nine months later they say, okay, we decide and we take that vendor. Now, in most cases, that vendor is, for a technology company, is, for instance, the same. There are only one or two that do the job.

If somebody would have told them in the beginning, don't go through this whole hassle and this whole process, just take this vendor, use this system and implement it and focus on your core and never mind, then they would have squeezed time. And it's all about squeezing time in that perspective because the same with raising capital. If you want to raise capital and you go to London to meet a VC, the first guy you see is the junior guy, and then if you're lucky, you can see the boss of the boss, and then the boss of the boss of the boss, and so on. And before you see the partner who actually decides on the investment, you may be three, four months later.

Now, if somebody that you know knows this partner and knows that your company is good and can put you in front of the partner, you again squeeze time. And so the squeezing time aspect is, for me, very important. And with the book, I also wanted to help people in a very practical way. Like, these are the things that you can do in a very practical way, not necessarily theoretical.

Again, an example: a lot of companies raise capital, but for me, raising capital is like a kind of language you need to learn to speak. Because if you just go to a VC, you might say things or you might give impressions or you might do things that give a completely wrong impression towards the VC. So what do you do? How do you do this if you raise capital?

How do your slides need to look like? I mean, there's all kinds of little small tips. That really practical can help you to achieve better, faster results. Yeah, because I think there's a lot of books out there, isn't there, that tells you the what, but not the level of the how.

And I think the thing is, is if we're learning all day long, but we're not doing anything with that knowledge, then we're missing the opportunity. So you're very focused on the implementation, and obviously you sound very pragmatic in the way that you approach things. As a business scales, I mean, obviously when a business in its infancy, it's a manageable animal. But when it scales and it becomes out of your control, there's obviously politics, length of decision making.

What's been the most challenging side of things as you've grown your business in terms of seeing that pivotal moment where it wasn't just kind of an entity that you were controlling, but it became other people's problem and decision as well? Yeah, I think, well, maybe two axes. The first axis, the axis I would say: entrepreneur versus manager. And people, again, sometimes confused.

They say in the newspaper, Oh, this is a great entrepreneur, but in fact it's a manager. Or they say it's a great manager, but in fact it's an entrepreneur. And I do think in the beginning of your company, in the first, let's say, 50 people, you need really an entrepreneur. And much more an entrepreneur than a manager.

An entrepreneur is also somebody who thrives in chaos, and you need to...

Because the chaos leads to creativity and to figure out issues and to overcome these issues. But at a certain point in time, the chaos is not good enough anymore. You need somebody who comes in and structures the whole thing. And so you need a kind of manager who says, okay, these are the rules, regulations, and stuff like that.

And so in the book, I also describe that under the chapter like, Change a Winning Team, which is a bit strange. Why would you change a winning team? But in fact, there's like four or five phases between you go to a five- to ten-thousand-people company. There's four or five phases that you need to go through, and every single phase has a different kind of person, personality on the top or at the top.

And typically entrepreneurs always think that they are the right guy to go from zero to the IPO or even after the IPO, while in fact it's different people, it's different skills that you need. So that's one angle. And the second angle, which I also played around with or learned a lot through by doing, is the whole notion: if you grow, do you grow centralized or do you grow decentralized? In other words, where do you put the power?

Do you put the power at the center, where you say, okay, these are the rules, and then everybody obeys the rules, or do you put the rules in, like, the companies or the things that you acquired or whatever, decentralized? And I've done both ways. I've done the centralized way and I've done the decentralized ways. And my conclusion is the best way to do this is, which I call the decentralized centralization.

What do I mean by that? That centralized, you put like a kind of rules. It's like the playing field in soccer. You say, okay, this is the playing field, and these are the rules, the yellow card, red card, and so on.

And you can play the game as an entrepreneur. You can be the trainer of your own team and you can do whatever you want, but you have to obey by the rules. So centralized, you give them freedom to play the game as they want, but you set the rules, centralized set the rules, and decentralized, you let them play the game that they want. So that's also something I describe in the book.

How do you practically tackle that? Because that's also in growing companies, it's some things that always... Like almost goes from left to right, then they start decentralized, then they go back centralized. And the same with the matrix.

There's also a chapter on the matrix doesn't work and the matrix structure, because the matrix, if I have a matrix structure as a guy and I need to report into this boss and into that boss, it's the perfect excuse for somebody to say, well, if I have to do work for this boss, I have a perfect excuse for that boss to say I didn't reach it, and the other way around. So you open doors to allow people to be, like, well, not being responsible for their behavior and all these kind of things. So he looks at obviously all areas of operations and performance. I mean, you've obviously learned a lot along the way, but who would you credit for being sort of an influence or an inspiring mentor that's helped you in that journey?

Did you have someone in particular that you could say that helped you through? Yeah, there's one guy that I really like, but nobody's probably going to know this guy. It's a gentleman called Brian Acton. And so he was one of the—it's a very interesting story.

He's one of the first guys, members, employees of Yahoo. So he got a lot of stock options. Perfect. He sold his stock options, got a lot of money, and then he invested all of his money before the dot-com bubble into technology companies before the year 2000.

He basically lost everything, but he lost literally everything. And he said, okay, I need to rethink. And then he went on, like, to play frisbee. Like, he just played frisbee, traveled for a year, and then he thought, well, I need to find a job.

And then he applied with Facebook and with Twitter, and both said, well, fine, but you're just not good enough, which is kind of funny. And then he wrote a letter back to Facebook saying, well, it might be good that you didn't take me on because I had to sit in the traffic jam every day, back and forth two hours a day, so maybe it's good that you didn't take me. But then he's the guy, he's one of the co-founders of WhatsApp. That's a woman Twitter was bought by Facebook, and so I thought it was a very fascinating story because this is a guy who actually got money and who reinvested, which also I think proves a true entrepreneur like myself.

I got money, but then I reinvested that money into other technology companies. So a true entrepreneur is somebody who reinvests, but also somebody who doesn't—I mean, there's always opportunity. It's not because you failed or because it wasn't good or you're not good enough or perceived not good enough that you don't have a chance to become somebody or to do crazy cool stuff. And I really, I think he's not very well known, the guy, but I think it's an inspiring guy.

And if you had a chance to read about the story online, check it out, check it out. See, one of the more obvious ones that we probably see is like Reid Hoffman, and he's an interesting character. And I've always been really interested in investors, as you say, because you'll see that there's similar people all across that sort of investment platforms, and you don't realize necessarily the names or the faces, and then you start delving into the background and then you look at the journey. So like Reid Hoffman, he was like co-founder of LinkedIn, and then he was also involved in WhatsApp.

And then when you look at the different business models, I think it's always interesting because tools like WhatsApp, you know, they never needed some of the traditional marketing models because they grew that fast that really the whole sales and marketing and promotion aspect was irrelevant to them. It was all around the operations and getting the company out there. What would you say in terms of, obviously, you know, the pandemic has had a huge impact on entrepreneurs, and I think there's a certain amount of fatigue out there. One thing that's inspired me is seeing so many businesses, because of redundancies, start in 2021.

What would you say are the key success factors in that first year? I mean, we've talked about tools, tactics, training to a degree, and obviously focusing on the money, but is there sort of a process or any advice you can give someone who is maybe in that infancy or is coming out the other end of the pandemic in maybe not as— Great positioning as they were when they went in. Yeah, I think, well, I'm very much a numbers guy, so I really truly believe in kind of preparing, like, your financial plan, but do it not in a static way, but in a dynamic way, where almost every week, if you would say, you can see the ins and outs of the cash and adapt. And I think the flexibility to adapt your mind, but also your choices, is very, very important as an entrepreneur in the beginning.

If you see that something doesn't work because your pricing is too high, because the product is not good, because it's not really the best product, change it. And what I see as a venture capitalist, between when I get a plan on my desk and I read the plan, and then maybe five years later, if you look at where the company stands five years later, almost in 90% of the cases, what they actually do five years later is completely different. Not 100%, but it's different than what they initially started with. And so the best entrepreneurs from that perspective are the ones who have the mental flexibility to adapt.

And that's not easy, because some entrepreneurs sometimes are like a bit ego. They have a bit of an ego, and they say, well, they so much into their idea that they're so much fixed on their idea that they really don't have any flexibility. And I think those sometimes go sometimes wrong because of the lack of that mental flexibility. And so, and that's why I think also Corona has—it's negative in terms, but it will probably help, because if you look historically back into time, you always see that tough periods always have been the seeds of a new renaissance or new stuff.

And so there's going to be something after this is going to be a kind of renaissance way, because people will look at certain things in a much more... Broader or different way. And I would say, if you ask me today, what could that be? I think purpose is going to be very important.

I think people start realizing life is short. You can die, actually. You're only 50 years. So the purpose of what you do stuff and the things that you do, and the purpose for why you're doing stuff is going to be much more important.

When I graduated, for instance, and we went to HR, the first question in Belgium was, What kind of car do I get? That was like the most important thing. And I see recently now, in the last six months, a year, that people that I try to engage for my companies, they ask me, What is your company doing for the climate? And so that might be strange, but it shows you that the timing and the way that people operate in entrepreneurship is completely changing, and the purpose part is very important.

So if you start, think about adapting, but also think about your purpose. What's your purpose in life? And not just making money, but what do you want to achieve with your company? So we're seeing a far more dynamic approach, aren't we?

And I'd say this, that in work-life balance, I think hopefully we will maintain and keep some of the positives. Like, you know, we don't always have to be in offices, we don't always have to be traveling, we can work from home, and we can have virtual teams. I think you're right in the, you know, if we don't have our health, we have no wealth, because people have been through such turmoil that a lot of people have lost people who are close to them. But I think it has definitely centered where we see our future is going.

I think one of the things I've seen is that there is a certain fatigue in business in terms of the pushing, because it's very easy as an entrepreneur to get tired. And I think what you say about having the objectivity, whereby you're so passionate about what you do, it's sometimes hard to

Where things are going wrong. Who has been your objectivity or influences that have maybe stepped in that you've been challenged by, good or bad? Yeah, there's actually—it's actually my wife, not to the extent my wife, but when I was 30 years, I was working a lot. I didn't sleep much, five hours, and working hard, 10 hours a day.

And my wife said to me, If you move on like this, you're gonna die for a heart attack if you're 50. And I thought, well, maybe she has a point. And so there's this guy, I think it's Tom Roth, I think is his name. He has this book, small book.

It calls Eat Move Sleep. It's a very simple title, Eat Move Sleep. And the guy itself, he actually got cancer, and then he didn't have long to live. But then he turned his life upside down and he wrote this book where he actually ties, in a very pragmatic way, the explanation, like the medical explanation, towards the storytelling.

So interesting book to read. And he talks about what influence does good food have on you, what influence does sleep have on you, and what influence does moving have on you. And I read this book twice here. I've given it away, I think, 300 times to collaborators, people that I see while they're coming a bit—they should be a bit more sporty or whatever, in a polite manner.

Yeah, but it's funny because we all have these first of January, I would like to do something about my body weight or whatever, and then we do it for two weeks and we forget about it. This book has the same effect, but a longer effect on me because it's so pragmatic, interesting. So in other words, now I sleep eight hours. I really sleep eight hours.

And I try to move a bit. I have this bicycle, stationary bicycle that I use, and it's small things, but I've learned it the way that it also has an impact. And that's something that you don't learn at school. In Belgian schools, it's not given the effect it has on you.

I don't think children are really realizing it, and entrepreneurs, they don't realize it. They work hard, but they don't necessarily take enough care of them. And I think there has to be some kind of equilibrium between working hard on one end, but also at the same time trying to take care of yourself and enjoying also your life. I'm hoping that the self-care, which has become a bit more centralised during the pandemic, is something that will sustain.

And I think the fact that when we were only allowed one hour's exercise, everyone was the most exercised person in the world. But in all seriousness, I think it is. For me, I definitely travelled a lot, probably didn't sleep as much, and you're probably running more on adrenaline. You don't realise when you're in it until you step out.

And when the pandemic hit for me and I wasn't travelling, I actually found that myself, like, thinking, Oh, this is a very different pace, and one that I definitely will be, you know, taking on board. Fully agree. In terms of, obviously, reading, do you consume sort of audiobooks or podcasts? How do you continue your day-to-day learning?

Yeah, I follow this extra mile principle by, on Saturday morning, typically at seven o'clock I wake up because I'm in the house, it's very quiet. There's no emails, no nothing. And if you do that for 50 weeks, five hours, that five hours is almost like 10 hours in the office, so you have like 500 hours more that you can be productive. And doing that, I try to read a lot of books, and I read a lot of history books because, I mean, I'm interested in it, but also I think if you understand—it's definitely in my job, I'm a venture capitalist.

You would say, What has history to do with venture capitalists? But I found it interesting to know if you read a lot and you know about history, you can also have a very good idea where the future goes. And my job is actually to try to figure out where society is going, not just on a technological level, but also philosophical, sociological, how will people interact. And I'll give you an example.

It's a funny example. When I saw the first news about COVID in China on the Belgian television, like the first thing I did, I bought the stock Zoom. So I bought the stock because I thought, well, historically, if you look into the plague, it's not obviously the plague, but what happened into society and how it actually had an impact on people not being able to move around and so on, I thought, well, technology is going to help. What kind of technology is going to help?

It's going to be like Zoom-like. That's funny because technically at that point in time, everybody could have bought that stock and it went obviously, it went up very, very high. Same with things like Peloton. Yeah, but it shows you that, yeah, it shows you if you understand a bit what the future has brought, you could transport it to the future.

So I read a lot about history. I find it very fascinating to read. I think it's a really interesting approach. I mean, I think the whole thing that we're getting through this is being pragmatic and really sort of implementing what you learn, but also the focal point on performance, not just in a business but as a human being, because clearly, you know, if you're not getting sleep and exercise and things, you're not making good judgment, you're not making good decisions.

Is there a time in your life that you think back to and you think that you were probably not operating at the best time or decision, or a decision that you regret that you maybe would like to go back and change? Well, there's obviously a couple of things that I regret. I regret that maybe I should have sold maybe my company a bit earlier, which is quite funny because I could have done other stuff. But on the other hand, I've always been very much, from when I was younger, I still remember that I focused on my talents, which is strange because I sometimes give the example: if you have a son or a daughter and she comes home with her school results, and let's say she has a six on ten and a nine on ten and an eight on ten and a ten on ten, typically a mother looks at it or a father and says, Ah, the six on ten is not good.

And we actually are in a way raised like that. I'm raised like that. The mother says the six is not good, so what do you do? You put effort in the six and try to get the six to an eight.

It might not work because you're not very good at it, so the six goes to seven. But while you're doing that, your nine and your eight also go to seven, and so you can become average, which in past time it was not bad to be average because you were competing with people around the church and some people from three churches further, and that was fine. But today you're competing with the rest of the world, and so technically being average is not good enough anymore. You have to really focus on what you're good at, your talent, put all your effort in trying to become the best at that talent and work with other people who also are very good at their talent and build the best talented pool of people to build the best talented company.

And I think so, focus on your talents. Don't waste time in something that you're not so good at. I mean, if you're not so good at it, acknowledge it, fine, but try to find people who are far better at it so that they can do it for you and focus on what you're good at and try to really become the best in the world at that. And it's a mentality that I found companies—well, parents are not necessarily there yet.

They still are saying to children, You have to do this and that. Average companies are by far not very good at it either. When I was working at the bank, Belgian bank, so we speak Dutch, we speak French, we speak English. Okay, fine, but French, I wasn't really interested in French.

I mean, okay, fine, French, I have to read it and I know it, but I don't have to be like Voltaire or something in French. So I didn't do any exercise anymore to improve in French because I didn't want to spend time on it. And HR in the bank, they said, Ah, this is very, very bad because it shows you that you're not willing to... But I said, I know that I'm bad at French and I don't have any intention whatsoever to improve.

I really would like to become better at what I'm good at and really become far better in that and put all my energy in that. And, you know, to be honest, they didn't grasp that. They didn't understand that. And so I've always done this, focus on my talent part and forget about the rest.

And so far, so good. And I think that's probably in the time in the future, people will be more focused on the talent part. Yeah, I think this is it. And I'm a great believer in doing what you want, not what you need to, what you think you need to, because there's a huge perception out there, isn't there, in terms of what is a good entrepreneur, what is a good business person, you know, what is a good school kid's grade.

It's about focusing on what you're passionate about. And I think this is the true dynamics of an entrepreneur, doing what you love and taking that and impacting other people's lives. Is there a phrase or a quote that you would like to leave our listeners with that you feel is important to your life? I would say no regrets.

Just even if you do things as an entrepreneur or as a person and it doesn't work out the way that you like it or it doesn't really work out well, I mean, fine, but at least you have the experience. And in life, for me, it's much more about experience because through the experience you learn and you can improve. And so if you don't do anything, you're not going to have experience. You're not going to be able to improve either.

So even if things go wrong, and even if now in this COVID time you have your company and it going wrong or whatever. Your value for the market is actually improved because these days, large corporations, they kind of look at entrepreneurial people. So even if you're entrepreneurial and you have not been successful as an entrepreneur, your value has increased into the company's world. And I think that's important.

So focus on experience rather than just success. All the rest will come. If you really enjoy what you're doing, that's the name of the game. And that will shine through.

I love that. I like that. I like the fact that you've got a very normalised, grounded approach to business in terms of a lot of the things that we see and hear in the press is that you have to forge...

And you have to be good at this, this and this. And I think a lot of us have been in business, what, like 20 years. I think there's a fear sometimes that when you wake up and you're doing something that you can't change. I think what you're basically saying is that, you know, literally wake up, assess where you're at, and focus on the things that you know that you're going to be good at and want to do, because it's going to accelerate your success, yeah.

So everybody has a talent. Everybody has a talent. Yeah, and understanding you and what drives you. If people want to find and connect with you, Jürgen, what's the best platform, LinkedIn?

Yeah, I can be found on LinkedIn, so no worries. Even just drop me an email on LinkedIn or a message or something. Start Grow Sell if you're interested, and please read it. And if you don't agree with things in the book, drop me a mail.

Happy to adjust it for next iteration. Oh, thank you. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure, Jürgen. I've really enjoyed chatting with you today, and I think we share a lot of the same principles and values.

So it's been a pleasure to have you on Dawn of In You Era podcast, and I can't wait to read more of your book and find out more about these 50 practical ways. So, yeah, if you want to connect with Jürgen, guys, remember LinkedIn, Jürgen Ingels, and he will gladly connect with you and answer any questions from his book. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, and don't forget, I'm going to be with you each and every week.

So download and listen on DawnMcGruer.com or on iTunes, and come and join us in our Facebook community too. All the details are on the website, and I'll see you next week.