Robbert van Os: From Startup to Scale-up - Key Auditing and Leadership Strategies

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Matt

My name is Matt and I will be talking with Robbert van Os about the key aspects of conducting tech audits, the common challenges faced by startups, and the importance of being open to feedback as a leader. You are really experienced guy in the tech, I would say very experienced leader. We, we just talked about it that you started when you were 16, so more than 25 years of experience. So you have seen out everything outside.

Robbert van Os

Unprofessional I would say. Yeah, good, good morning to you as well, Matt and thanks for having me on this thought provoking podcast. I think you've had a great lineup that I should try to succeed in to our predecessor. So happy to be here and let's share some experiences.

Matt

So let's start right away from the question. So because you do a lot of audits, you focus on the audits on the tech side and you help many companies. But the first thing that I wanted to check with you and discuss what are the typical things that you check during those audits and how do you approach them? What is your approach to it?

Robbert van Os

Yeah, that's always a very challenging question because I would always say it depends. But if you look at typical variables that come into play, of course it's the maturity of the company, so it's a startup or scale up or a more mature company, you ask different questions. Typically depends on the industry. So if you're more in the healthcare or the fintech, you probably won't easily say, oh, security, that's not that important. But at the same time, if you're just still validating a concept, it might actually be okay to take a couple of risks or at least not be a judge of that. And I think on average I would always look at at least five pillars and that's the team composition. So what kind of team skills do you have?

What kind of seniority do you have? What kind of leadership do you have in the team? Is that already someone who's experienced or. Or does it still be still someone who needs to learn a lot on the job? The second thing, and that's something that people often don't expect from me, is that I also look at the product development approach because nowadays with scarce resources around engineering, you can always say, well, let's just hire a couple of new engineers. But that's hard, that's really difficult to find. So that's the main reason why I typically look at how do they go about prioritizing their product features, their product development, to ensure that they only build what's really necessary and making sure that they're not just spending money and time on valuable resources that are hard to find.

And of course, what you do expect from a tech audit is reviewing the infrastructure and the software architecture. Some engineers actually really see the difference. To me there is a huge difference between the hardware, the cloud infrastructure and the software architecture. But that's definitely an important view to look at. And we can specialize that focus for particular more extensive audits, for example, data management, AI licensing management, are you using a lot of open source licenses, for example. And if we've covered all of these aspects, there's always the importance to review the operational maturity. So those are the five bullets I would say I would typically look at as an advice and actionable advice and insight for growth.

Matt

And last time when we talked, you mentioned something that you make roughly, let's say 100 of those outbids per year. So that's a lot. So you have seen a lot of situations, different organization industries. So I kind of understand why it depends like how do you approach the audit. But maybe do you see some patterns? I mean like what are the most common problems? And maybe you could give like some, some problem kind of solution tips that you have seen?

Robbert van Os

Yeah, yeah, there's definitely a lot of similarities. I would not say that every company is the same, every company is unique, that's, that's for sure. And every challenge is also unique. But I think the approach that people are taking is quite different. And looking at the, let's say roughly a hundred audits and maybe to clarify, I also do four times a year I help accelerate the programs and then we do a batch of 10 audits on one day. So that already comes up quite easily. But it's also to help them reflect on how they go about building their technology stack and whether they really validated that their technology or their solution is already clearly validated and that that's the part in technology that they need to resolve.

But I think the typical approach that most young founders take is that they have limited financial resources, so they also are not able to hire the best people, which is logical. Right? What you also see that if they go about hiring the younger professionals, they also are not always able to help the founders with particular challenges because they also don't have that framework reference. And what you then often see as a side effect is that first time entrepreneurs and even second time or serial entrepreneurs might still try to replicate certain methodologies for the market. So they'll often say to me, yeah, but that's easy because we're using the Spotify model, or we're giving the Google 20% a week so people can explore themselves. I see you responding and laughing a little bit. And that's also the typical thing that I try to hide from them because I love that they try to copy that.

But I'm also challenging them on. Do you also take that to enter out in your hiring process, for example, to make sure that you're not just putting a methodology on a team that they're not set up for? Because if you're not autonomous enough or you don't, you're not able to carry that responsibility. You should not go for certain methodologies. That. That's more of the organizational side and operational side. I think what I've also seen a lot is that I get a lot of yes, but responses.

And for example, the software architecture, I see a lot of startups coming with a response to, okay, so how is this technology platform scalable? Well, I'm using the cloud, so that is elastic and it will scale. And I often use the comparison say, okay, if you have an elastic band and you put it long enough and you stretch it far enough, it will also break, right? So you need to make sure that your elastic band is also strong enough. And that comes from the software architecture, that comes from how you deal with certain design patterns. So inefficient cloud resources, for example, typically lead to larger challenges as well. And if you're talking about cloud resources, that's another aspect that I often see, is that most of the time nowadays, if you're part of an accelerator, accelerator program or incubator, you get those cloud credits, right?

And you can spend 100 grand per year on cloud resources. And of course that's amazing, but it also has a downside. People get used to spending those credits and they're not that sophisticated anymore. On how can we best utilize our server infrastructure. We just spend it because we have the credits anyway, but after the year, they have to start paying for it. And that's something that I often see.

Matt

And regarding the situation that we have seen, I'm just wondering what was the weirdest kind of thing that you, you know, met during the outing? What you have.

Robbert van Os

Yeah, I have to be careful here because at first I don't think it's weird. People just don't have the experience. And it's also not our intention to judge people. We're here to reflect on people and we're trying to help them and they're in their journey, and every journey is unique. But it might be weird or Funny to share anecdotes like, for example, an investor coming to me saying, hey Robert, could you help us audit this particular scale up?

They're rapidly ramping up. We need you to check whether this technology is scalable. I was like, yeah, sure, I'm quite interested. And for the sake of protecting their identity, I'm not going to share too much of the details. But in hindsight, I actually did a remote interview with people and I was finding out that there was a huge startup growing indeed rapidly, where the investor was actually thinking that there was technology in place with a lot of automation. There were about 50 people in India that were just giving answers rapidly on the requests that are coming on the web portal. So there was something funny that.

Funny in the, in the, in the sense that I would not expect that. And typically if an investor hires me, that's actually at the end of a stage where they are already vested into doing the investment, but they're not completely sure to check all the boxes. So they need to do a couple of due diligence. So that's legal, tech and finance often. So that, that was a fun one. I think another one was also interesting that I was talking to a startup, was actually here in the Netherlands and he was already doing about 5 million revenue and he was also growing quite rapidly. But he was a solo entrepreneur working with a couple of freelancers and already had quite a significant revenue as well.

And when we started to talk about his infrastructure, he just answered to me, well, it runs on my MacBook. And I said, yeah, okay, that's your local environment. Right? So where do you host your application? And again he answered, it's on my MacBook. So seriously, I was astonished for the first time. I'm usually good with words, but I didn't know how to respond like, so you're actually running a production environment on your MacBook on your Internet connection and it just runs the web server on that.

So yeah, that's it. So these are really weird situations to be in and funny at the same time. If you're, if you're referring more to examples, for example, where you're seeking on what are weird things that you've noticed. Yeah, sometimes with less experienced people, you come into interviews and one of the interviews was all of a sudden with someone who explained to me, well, we actually never have any problems. Our application is always running quite well. But yeah, recently we had some issues that every time that we rebooted our server, we lost a lot of data. The fact was they were running a SQL lite database and did not set up their Docker containers to be persistent.

So every time that they rebooted the whole database was gone. And this was just something again they were not aware of. But it is funny because you can literally help them on the spot. You can directly help them say, hey, wouldn't this be.

Or this be the case? Because I've witnessed that myself as well. I've made those mistakes. Everyone makes those early starts mistakes. So I would answer that as, let's say, a bit of the weirdest or weirder things. Again, maybe it's not that shocking, but it is funny at least as an addict.

Matt

I think those are interesting stories, but I assume like even after those many years in the business when you, when you approach like a new audit or organization, there are some situations that are challenging for yourself. Right. Because I think like constant we, we are learning and there are new things on the market and you constantly, it's not like always like, like a click that it's so easy to find out. Right. So maybe you could share like the hardest things that you have encountered during an audit and maybe recent, recently and how have you tackled it?

Robbert van Os

Yeah, again, I think typically the, the hard parts are not really in the technology or in trying to discover what's the, how the code is being set up or the architecture. But I think for example, a couple of months ago I had an audit with a company that was really not keen to share anything or not a lot. And if you do that, you have to keep in mind that I'm actually the scout that is being sent up front by the investor and the investor expects me to dig up all the dirt, if you want to call it like that. I'm trying to look at it from what's the opportunity cost here instead of looking for risks. But this company was really hesitant to share any code, share any architecture design pictures. So they were really scared of being duplicated and it was not strange in their situation. It was a bigger company trying to acquire them.

So I would hold off as well. The downside is how do I deal with that? How do I get the information that I need to come up with the right summary for, for the investor and have the right supports to, to challenge them. If you don't have access to the code base, if they're not willing to share it even on the screen, I was sitting next to them. Again, I respect everyone's position, so I'm also respectful in that. But I think the most important thing there is that a, it is then my role to Be more of the translator to that startup, saying, hey, I really want to help you and I'm hired as an independent professional to look at it, review it and help you create the right perspective for the investor. But this is really hard because as another example, the investor, the acquirer, actually wanted to know what kind of software libraries were used and if those software libraries are allowed to be used for commercial purposes.

So looking at open source libraries, not all of them are allowed. So I had, I had to figure out how I could dig up that, that insight. Typically I would, I would use Black Dog, for example, just a solution that would fetch all of those libraries. I can look at that. And now I had to spend about three days figuring out with my team what Wardo libraries used, trying to fetch that from their queries. A lot of duplicates in there. So that's probably, I would say that's the hard part because I need to gain confidence of those startups or scale ups, but at the same time need to do my job.

And I think that's typically 10 times more difficult than going through a code base which you don't know. And you think, okay, I need to get a bit of a perspective on this. Whether that's scalable or not. Code is typically the last thing that we look at because especially in growth phases, we know that if you get money on the bank account, you are now able to hire the right people to fix that. The abstraction there though, that's the most important thing. Have you set up your architecture in a way that it is ready to be replaced or certain components are ready to be replaced? So that's, yeah, that's always a bit of our approach plan there.

Matt

Based on my experience, I work with stakeholders a lot. Right. They have different positions, they have their own egos, they are founders. And my experience is you really need to be gentle with like some people don't appreciate it, but you always need to share the feedback, like critical feedback, really gentle, like professional matter. But it's not always easy because of the ego. So I assume like your audits are full of like kind of tips and hints, like what should be changed, what is not. Not okay. Right. So especially maybe for the CTOs, this might be really tough.

So I'm just wondering, how do you approach it? How do you give this feedback, like to be, you know, acceptable by those guys?

Robbert van Os

Yeah. Yes. Then I'm probably going to repeat myself a little bit because I think delivering critical feedback is, is a delicate situation. Of course, but it's. We're not just auditors we're translators, we're trying to translate what is the opportunity and what does the opportunity cost and what is still required to move to a next stage, to, to, to grow to the next stage. So for me, it's really important to explain to the startup company or scale up company, why is it important that certain aspects are reviewed and why isn't it something that is meant as a negative aspect of your business, but just to put it on the roadmap? And it could be the roadmap for, let's say, six to 12 months from now.

So to be honest, I'm Dutch. Dutch are known for their Dutch directness. Being brutally honest, I would say tempered with a little bit of professionalism, being direct, but be clear with the explanations. And sometimes some of those engineers or founders I talk to, I already know during the interviews that they're really trying to defend everything that I challenge them on. And I always find it my role to explain to them upfront, saying, hey, I noticed that you're actually defending a lot, which is great. And you should be proud of what you, what you built and you can be proud of what you built. But please bear with me.

If we're in the debrief, call next week. Make sure that you're also open to the feedback, because that's the part that the investor typically looks for. Are those people that I want to invest in the right people? Are they happy to reflect? Are they happy to learn from others? You don't necessarily have to agree with that, but at least you, yeah, you need to be open to it. So I think in summary, it's framing the right feedback, but putting it in perspective of the company goals.

So if it's a really young company, it's probably less severe or not, but frame it in that perspective. Try to highlight the strengths, of course, and then maybe add to that a couple of areas of, of improvement. So then it's also a more positive story because you just acknowledge that it's positive. But there are possible improvements to be made. And I find it extremely important that this debrief you do with all the stakeholders. So the investor knows what I'm sharing with them, but the audited company also knows that. And that's how you get the best alignments together.

And I typically describe it as a marriage. They decide to get married together, so I'm not there to throw dirt at them. They need to have a happy marriage, after all. So it's my role just to maybe stop a little bit, try to come up with opportunity cost and and share it with them so they can come up with a plan so everyone in the end is willing to learn. I think that's not the issue. But putting that into context, that's the most important thing.

Matt

I think that the wine sentence that you mentioned about the lesson learned for the co founder and maybe technical co founder like to be open to the feedback in front of the investor, right? Because this is something that the investors are looking forward to, right? If the people have ego too high and they are not open, they are not open to listen and, and for sure they don't know everything, they need to be open if they want to build, rebuild the business. So I, I think it's a great lesson for everybody listening.

Robbert van Os

So I think especially if you're becoming a little bit older as an entrepreneur, it's always harder to receive that feedback. I noticed. So some people have been in the business for let's say 30, 40 years, have been building everything in Delphi because that's the language that they used in the early days. They're still using it. But if you would then discuss with them a cloud infrastructure approach and how they should go about that, that's typically something that just because they're not comfortable around that topic, they also start pushing back. And again then it's, it's more explaining why it is relevant in this era to be familiar with that. Because trying to find people that still use that language, for example, is also an important aspect for growth.

So again, putting your reality and exchange that in their reality and trying to sync that, putting that on the same wavelength, that's basically our main role. But that's the same thing as you just explained as a lesson for the founders is that they should be aware that they're not always speaking at the same wavelength.

Matt

Let's talk about a bit about the situation in the recent years in a big tech because I think it was crazy. Hyperdement. It's like a hyperdement. Last year it was like everything was down. I felt that the whole business stopped, especially in a tech and a software business. And now like this year I kind of feeling that it's getting better. But still the companies are, they have lowered the budgets, they have more focus on what they are doing, they have less projects.

And I feel like, I don't know, I was discussing it with, with one of my friends yesterday. So in my business before 2020, it was always like this, that the July and August were the months where like the business is stopping. So like people are going on a vacation, they have like that really calm silent time. And I feel for the first time like during those vacations we have the similar thing before the COVID so we got back to normality. So I'm just, and I'm just in general, I'm positive about the future. I think like Q4 and Q1, 2025 should be better and we should get back to the business. But I'm always like to ask and to see like your perspective.

How do you feel? What do you see maybe what are your thoughts here?

Robbert van Os

Yeah, well, definitely I think big tech is really in flux nowadays. And not just nowadays, but especially in the past month year I think it has driven rapidly advancements for example, especially on AI. I think some of the buzzwords as I call them are the buzzwords that investors also tend to follow. Right. So even without often the deep understanding of it, they have fomo, the fear of missing out. They want to be part of AI. So let's invest in that.

I think that was last year and the year before that. I think this year is already changing that investors are starting to understand that everyone can apply AI. The uniqueness is becoming a little bit less. So they're now more focused on what are the true differentiating factors. How is that more becoming more domain specific? Because think about it, if you use a domain or a language model nowadays, I think whatever language model you use, I think the output is almost similar.

Why is that? Because the language models are not particularly trained yet for particular domains or industries. And I think that's one shift that I slowly see happening is that that's, that that's changing, which I like because that means if you're creating a language model about software audits, you could put all the emphasis and focus on what do I need to do to build the best online software application and answer without too much hallucination, but really focus on actual experience of people. So I think that's one of the things that's, that's definitely going to change as a key trend. Voice assistants definitely in combination with AI. I already see that you can actually talk to AI and probably not even notice that it's. It's a bot that you're speaking to.

Actually I had the one last week that I was really astonished by that I was like wow, that's, that's cool that I didn't even notice. And they're now announcing that they're already servicing about 50,000 companies with a solution. But they're not, they don't know about it or some customers don't know. Not sure if not everyone knows that. At the same time, I think it also comes with a couple of challenges because if we take AI and regulatory pressure from different governments. Looking at the Netherlands or looking at a trip that I just had and come back from the States, I was actually surprised that the Waymo cars in San Francisco and LA in Las Vegas are now just driving autonomously. So those are the taxi caps that drive autonomously.

You can just call them with a, with a cap. I was astonished because I've seen that before in my previous trips, but I, I've always seen that additional driver next to it being able to control the car when, when needed. And this is, I think also a typical example of something that happens typically in Silicon Valley or in different countries. There are different legislation and I wish some of the legislation would be a lot easier in Europe as an example, but it's way more strict. So you get pushback by Europe rather than trying to accelerate the benefits of applying AI in Europe industries. And, and that's, I think one of the, the bigger issues. In combination, of course, with more of the geopolitical economic factors, countries that are not trusted, countries that bring out hardware or software solutions, you first need to check whether data is being sent over the line and whether that data could actually be stored or abused by others.

So the, there are a lot of different challenges I think coming, coming ahead. So cyber security is one of them. Cloud and edge computer needs to be adjusted to that to really ensure that we can scale that significantly. But yeah, I think we've seen that with cryptocurrencies it takes a while before it's being picked up and it's being sort of accepted. And only now, after so many years, you see that there are more and more countries adjusting and accepting that crypto should potentially be something that you could pay with. So that's in a nutshell. My take on the recent and future developments, I would say.

Matt

I really like the controversial stuff that are not the usual. We discussed it before. And I'm just wondering if you could describe me a time when you were part of controversial engineering decision, you know, and how this ended up. What did you do?

Robbert van Os

Yeah, I, I think this is, this is a, a difficult one because the, the example that I was thinking of really goes back a long time. And I think why I came up with the example is because I think it also hinders growth for a lot of companies and it is a good founder's lesson. And the example here is that in my previous company we had to scale to a couple of Hundred million users that we had to facilitate with games, Spill games. And this was an amazing journey, but also comes with some technical challenges because how do you deal with an infrastructure with such a vast amount of hits hitting your servers? We were not really in the cloud era yet, so we had the hardware, so we were really keen on building applications that could scale. We were just using the frameworks when I was also still evolving. But at a certain time our CEO said, well, we need to prepare ourselves for faster growth because we're going so rapidly.

How can we get ready for that? So what we've done is that we said, okay, let's, let's see how we can task our engineers finding the best solution. So we actually tasked three teams to come up with the next best architecture design for growth. Handling that amount of numbers. I think they spent about two to three months each just to come up with a better solution. That are more functional languages like Erlang being set up with a full stack. And they did a demo.

Look, if you pull out this court, it will still continue. Everything is set up like a telecom business. That we had another framework that was still in PHP that we were used to back in the day, so showed us a great performance. But in the end, looking at all the output of the dynamic requests that were done, we actually learned that all of that was not that important for our business. Why? Because we had a significant caching layer up front of that, that it would probably hit the caching layer 200 million times, but it would only be one request to the backend. So even if you could optimize it from 36 milliseconds to 33, it didn't really matter in the end.

And I think again, the reason why I think this is a good example is you can come up with all kind of fancy technology solutions, all kind of tech stacks. But I think in the end, it's really about being smart, about how you steer people in the right direction, how do you give them the right dot on the horizon? This is what we're trying to solve and then come up with the most pragmatic solution. And of course, this situation is different from, for example, a bank that needs to scale their businesses or health tech. But I believe, and I've learned in, in the meantime, that this can be applied to almost all businesses. You can come up with more innovative solutions, but you have to be smart about it. And I think one other example here maybe is that there are so many different companies that we audit that, for example, now apply AI, but they didn't separate concerns.

And I think every engineer at school learns how to separate concerns. And still every time under the time pressure that they need to develop something, they come up with a database that stores a lot of data and then they build some Python scripts and that pulls data from the database and they start building models and they start using machine learning on top of that. But it's not clearly separated. So often you notice that they start having scalability issues because they're all querying the same database. They haven't set up really an extraction transform, a load mechanism that separates those concerns. As an example, everyone, everyone there are, there are a lot of exceptions, luckily, but there are a lot of companies that typically just pull a solution from the marketing. We're going to use Kafka and then we're going to be scalable.

And yes, methodology wise, I fully agree with them. But it's always trying to read between the lines. You need to understand the problem that you're really trying to solve, not just commercially, but especially technically. And then it might be that event sourcing could have been so much easier if you just set up a quick and dirty solution which also works and later can be replaced by a more mature solution like for example, Kafka, because that comes with a learning curve. You need to find the right engineers, you need to have the right operational setup for that, etc. Etc. So that's a bit of the controversial approach that, that I've seen and, and learned from that I think is relevant for, for other founders to learn from as well.

Matt

Brings me to the next question that I wanted to ask you. It's what is the hardest thing that you have ever done?

Robbert van Os

I think I apply this to myself. A personal, I think character trait I have is that I'm really trying to balance empathy and harmony within a team. So making tough decisions for company growth is typically difficult for me because if I have to tell people, look, we're actually financially constrained, we need to focus on building revenue. Most people don't understand it. Again, that's because of the reality that's different. Their reality is focusing on building that application. My reality is I need to build a strategic vision towards the future.

And together with the management team, we built a bigger company. If that falls short, we need to act upon that. And I think my, my biggest challenge is a little bit of that internal conflict. My internal character would say, well, I would like to please everyone, but I really had to learn how to make tough decisions. I really need to learn how I can gain headspace to realign my personal goals with what's important for, for the company. And my personal goal at that time was I need to ensure that I use as much of that empathy and sense of harmony building as I can. But I need to ensure as well that the company can grow further.

So that means that I need to talk to those people, help them understand our reality, our perspective and take them along. So yeah, I think in the end that even led me to make the decision that I didn't want to be that CTO anymore because um, the lack of headspace and always being fully strained and pushed under that operational pressure was not the best me that I could get. I need to reposition myself and instead helping others is so much easier because you can take a bit of a distance, you can review it, challenge them and there's much more value in that. So that's what I started doing in the end.

Matt

That's a really interesting thing that you're talking about. I was reflecting about the similar thing. So I run a business, we have 100 people and we are bootstrapping from three people to 100, right? So I remember the time still like 50 people. We were really afraid about talking about the financial, about the financials, like how do we make money, what are the rates, you know, everything related to the business. Because we thought that we need to like filter everything to the people. So like the businesses on us as a co founders and everybody else, they should focus only on building the stuff.

But my view changed over the years, right? The company gets bigger and I think it's super important that the people are on the same page that we are building a business and the bigger company gets. You need to be more aware of that because it's so important for the stability of the company and the work of those people, right? Because when we make more, we cannot make like of course we need to have the empathy but we need to make like tough decisions really fast because like so many people depends on us, right? So either like the whole ship will break or you know, sometimes you need to rebuild the ship, but you need to be honest with that and the people needs to be aware. So like I think like I kidding what you're saying, but those decisions, and I fully agree those decisions are really, really hard. But I think this is the way it is.

Like this is the hard, the hard thing.

Robbert van Os

I agree, I agree. I think that's also the things that attributed most of my success is probably that I learned that trust is the most important thing. So I receive trust from my peers and I've actually literally passed that trust onto my team members and while doing that you actually become indeed more efficient because if you pass on that trust and people start feeling that they get full autonomy to do what needs to be done and they pass that on, there's a willingness to please, there is a pragmatic approach, there is creativity all of a sudden. And people I think also become more commercial savvy if they know that the company might actually charge this rate per hour or this is the amount of money that the customer is spending. Then you can also position yourself a lot easier in, in the perspective of the customer, why he is annoyed or she is annoyed about things are delayed. That's because they spend a lot of money on this and you're not delivering on time and this is delivering new challenges for them. So I think initially the focus was always on KPIs, for example, financial success.

I think if you build trust, you can really come up with building a success story, creating, creating value for the users of your solution, your product, and then the revenue will come from that. But it is still important that people understand what trust means in terms of what is expected, but also the responsibility that comes with it. And I think that's the main part as a leader that you should also be aware of. If I give someone the trust, are they also using it wise enough or should I at least help them support them in again putting a couple of new perspectives on the word trust so they really know how to apply that. Well.

Matt

I agree, like we are constantly learning. This is something that I mentioned before and I'm wondering what are your current, current challenges?

What do you type in Google? What do you type in a chatgpt, you know, to find some kind of inspiration or the answers to your challenges?

Robbert van Os

Yeah, I'm not sure if I used Google the past six months, but I should look that up. Yeah, I've actually I tried to attend a couple of meetups a month. I like to reflect with other people, like minded people. And this was also a discussion that came up recently with a guy who actually set up an amazing company in the Netherlands, has sold that to Financial Times. And the difference that we were discussing is that okay, maybe we were kick ass back in the days 20 years ago that we didn't have a cloud environment where we could easily add resources and set up a vm. No, we had to build our own hardware and we had to build our own mainboards connected to a network and know how all of that shit works. But if you look at it nowadays you have to learn so much more because security, browser security has become more tight.

You need to know about cores, you need to know how to optimize for search engine optimization. You need to ensure that you support different browsers, although that became easier, I think, the past years. But there's so much more that you need to learn from and you need to have a strong vision towards the future. Because one of the things, things that I also heavily believe in, maybe that's also a trend. To answer the question that you asked earlier, I think search engines will, yeah, I wouldn't say will disappear, but we'll have a different shape in terms of a language model that you ask questions. But that also means how do we get the insights and the knowledge into that language model? Because now it's being scraped.

I think you want to apply that in a smarter way that you can feed the language models with the right validated content, that people also get better answers from that language model. So that's another thing that you have to keep in mind. If you look, let's say, 10 steps ahead, how do I ensure that my service online is also ready to be found in the future? And I'm more than certain that most companies don't even consider this, and I don't think they're too late, but this is definitely a trend that you nowadays have to think about. The developments are going so rapidly. You have to not take just one or two steps ahead, but you need to look five, six steps ahead in order to keep up. That also brings new opportunities because I think for startups wanting to be acquired, if that's an exit route or a strategy, larger companies will probably be very keen on acquiring that kind of mentality in a startup and still being able to innovate, as they call it, which is typically a different definition than I would have.

So I think all of the wisdom that you need to acquire nowadays, that's the biggest challenge. And yeah, what is your biggest priority is that building a content management solution, is that setting up search engine optimization, Is it really trying to use no code to set up a quick prototype and validate the concept first? That's something that became a lot easier again nowadays, but everything became, let's say, more difficult to keep up with the developments in the market.

Matt

I mean, and the last question that I wanted to ask you is like, can you recommend any books, resources, maybe conferences that have been particularly helpful to you as a, as a leader?

Robbert van Os

Yeah, well, I think I've already shared meetups and conferences. I definitely like that. I think There are, for example, in the Netherlands we have the next web conference. You have mobile web conference in. In Spain. There are so many different conferences that are interesting just for the sake of reflecting and sparring with other entrepreneurs. So I think that's my main goal.

I'm not much of a reader, although I've tried to push myself to read a couple of the books, but I typically just scan through it because I just don't have the attention span to do that a lot. So I'm more of a medium guy. I like to read articles I like, for example, substack, pragmatic engineer. I think Goros is definitely what I like and I enjoy. And I love podcasts. One that has recently been recommended to me is Machine Learning Street Talk, a deep dive into all kind of AI and machine learning topics. Definitely recommendation.

But also another podcast from Adam, Adam Horner. He created the CTO Playbook. So that's more tailored advice to CTOs and tech leaders. But I think again, overall I like to focus on networking, reading articles, so snappy content, I think that's also more and more people like to have snack content rather than reading a lot because you have to scan so much already. Newsletters I do like, but only a few. And podcast just to keep track of a couple of the thought leaders, I would say. But also try to learn from the smaller podcasters that just want to share more of a niche experience and try to balance that.

That would be my recommendation.

Matt

Awesome. Thank you, Robert, for all the recommendation tips and your experiences. It was really valuable. I think so. I appreciate.

Robbert van Os

Yeah, for sure. Good luck on the next ones. Thank you.

Matt

Thank you so much. Have a great day.

Robbert van Os

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