My learnings in 2019: Time to create a more impactful road ahead

I tend to live my life with no regrets and perhaps a little bit of FOMO. In my own humanity and mistakes, I’ve tried to get better at everything I do. Sometimes you start wasting time on things that do not matter and in the last decade, I really decided to eliminate negative energy from my life and surround myself with others that matter and exert the right energy at the right place and time. Looking back, it has more or less paid off. I like to say that I am on a path to being a millionaire of happiness for this reason. 

The last decade gave me a ton of energy growing startups and scale-ups and this was for a very good reason – I’m a cross between a creative and a builder, passionate about writing the rules of what good looks like testing and learning to help direct businesses at different phases of growth – creating new markets more than taking market share.

Since 2010, I’m proud to help cut carbon emissions and lean more towards the environmental impact side, but taking a leap over to creating social impact I have learned a lot this year. By making the choice in 2019 to build from scratch again, I was able to impact people and society more than I could have imagined in less than 6 months. From establishing Antler in Amsterdam a year ago, I have built a program to directly impact the lives of exceptional people who may never have looked towards entrepreneurship in this way. Without Antler we wouldn’t have unleashed new startups solving health, education, image-labeling and communication problems…to name a few.

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Here are some of my learnings and reflections on building impact over the past year

On working with exceptional entrepreneurial individuals:

• Facilitating the best environment for co-founders to identify a problem they want to solve 
• Business Coaching from an early stage was truly a skill I refined this year, not only on advising go-to-market/commercial strategy but also looking into the best fundraising strategies
• Thinking big and keeping founders on that trajectory
• Accepting that no question or idea is stupid (no matter what the circumstances)
• Putting a Go-to-Market framework hat which could be molded and shaped for a wider variety of business models across multiple industries
• Enabling co-founding teams to move forward in a structured way, when you are on the day to day it’s easy to lose focus
• Showing vulnerability and being down to earth when you don’t know and continuing to follow up to share your perspective when you are ready to provide advice

On building a new service from scratch in a new sector for me professionally:

• Always be humble 
• Continuing leveraging relationships as opportunities may arise between common contacts when you least expect it
• Being more open to admitting fuck ups and of course then fixing them ASAP
• Reflection is one big constant 
• My getting out of bed in the morning does impact the societal good and continue to remind myself of that

On work-life balance and boundary setting:

This certainly has become more a focal point this year than others, especially when you have an international family without extended family to support. You can only thrive by making sure you are sustainable yourself and after 10 years of seeing the good, bad and ugly of startups and scaleups this category has become a part of my DNA:

• Once setting boundaries then making sure to stick to them
• Being prepared to say ‘No’ more in order to balance my energy between work and play plus seeing improvement in this rather than the FOMO effect
• Setting non-negotiables around my family and mindfulness time
• Making time to do more of what makes me happy rather than squeezing in the happy parts to what is already planned

So where am I spending my energy in light of the roaring 20’s?

I will be sure to continue to harness the power of people that matter to me for the societal and environmental good. 

You should recognise how you are the collective average of the tribe of people you hold close to your heart.  I look to these people to help me become a founder and give me the confidence and sounding board to continue pursuing my purpose.

On that note, this decade will see me pursue problems I want to solve and build my own global business. 

Watch this space …