What’s your backstory?

I’m Dutch, but I left the Netherlands 20 years ago to go and transform hospitality (and now I’m back).

When I first stepped into a hotel I just absolutely loved it — the food, the service, everything! So I knew from the age of 5 that I wanted to be a hotelier. And that’s what I did. After graduating from hotel school, I worked in every possible hotel role in the UK and South Africa, then settled in Prague 17 years ago to pursue my lifelong dream.

I worked at the Hilton for 7 years, where I was constantly promoted, ending up as Regional Sales Director. Over my hotel career, I experienced the many challenges hoteliers and guests face, and had strong opinions on how to fix them. I realised that doing that from the inside wasn’t going to be the fastest, and that technology was. But I studied Hotel Management, so I didn’t have a clue about technology. I just deeply cared about the problems hotels face.

I then met Richard Valtr in 2012, who was building a guest app originally. I joined a year later as part of the founding team of Mews. At the same time, because I needed to make a salary I kept my Sales Director job, on the side of doing Mews.

Take us through the process of building and launching the first version.

We lined up a first hotel to use our product before it was built, and we had a limited amount of time (4–5 months) to get an MVP out — an MVP that was going to run in an actual hotel.

We hired two students from a technical university to build it for us. They came in and out of our office between classes. I remember they took the first three months just drawing out the architecture on a whiteboard. At some point, I was like, are you going to actually code anything? Because this hotel is about to start using this! Then literally 4 weeks before launch, they started coding. They actually produced something that was somewhat operational (so we thought).

Then we went live and it was just awful! The system was down for most of the first day, the invoices it produced were wrong, and it just didn’t do the things it was supposed to. It was as painful as you can imagine.

But I think one of the main reasons we ‘made it’ is because we didn’t give up. We could have easily said, “OK, go and buy Oracle instead and you’ll be fine.” But we didn’t. We said yes we did an awful job of that first version, but we’ve got to fix this. We doubled down and got to work improving it. I think that’s really what made us — we built resilience. And it became one of our core values — resilience and just not giving up.

We learned so much from that experience. We didn’t even know there was a thing called product management in the early days of Mews. We just had no idea. We now have QA teams who test everything, we do discovery with customers, and we show them designs before we code anything. We don’t deploy things that are simply awful anymore!

Did you ever have an ‘Oh Shit!’ moment with Mews?

I’ve had many, many ‘oh shit’ moments! A very scary one was a few years ago when my CFO came in, white as a sheet, and said “Someone’s been stealing from us!” Basically we had onboarded someone in the KYC process, and hadn’t done all the proper checks. They’d been processing fake credit cards through our system, and we’d been paying them out for weeks before we noticed.

This was in the early days of Mews when we had very limited funding. So to see hundreds of thousands going out that you just couldn’t claim back, it was like shit, this is going to be our downfall!

But luckily, it wasn’t. In these crisis moments you figure out what you need to do. You figure out your KYC processes are broken. We did an after action review and we fixed everything. It was a massive learning, but definitely one of our scariest moments.

Another one was Covid-19 of course. The 12th of March 2020: My birthday. Not a happy birthday! Trump closed the US border, and the hotel cancellation rate was through the roof. Refunds were through the roof. Our burn rate doubled overnight because our revenue had plummeted, but our costs were still there. We had to pay back more money than we had. It was a nightmare!

We had to make quick decisions. If we did nothing, we’d be out of business in four months (because of the burn rate). We took two weeks out to decide what to do. We predicted (correctly) that the pandemic would last two years, and we decided we would need to make what cash we had last for two years. Because we wouldn’t be able to raise money until then.

It’s an Excel exercise initially, which is very cold. Then the human impact hits you a few weeks later, when you’re taking action. We halved our business, and had to let go of 220 people. It was painful, but we survived, and later thrived.

What are some strong opinions you have about business and leadership?

1. Transparency is key

I’m an open book and transparent in everything I do. I’m as open as you can imagine. I have very little filter and that’s become a key to our business. It’s at the core of how I lead Mews.

I don’t understand why people hide anything. If I give all the context, I believe my team is going to make the right decisions. So that’s really ingrained in our culture, my level of transparency. I think this very high level of transparency makes Mews a special business.

     2. Hybrid is best

Recently I find myself having a strong opinion that hybrid work is better (than being in the office full-time).

I’ve been to a number of conferences recently, listening to people like Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan talk about how they want everyone back in the office, because of the water cooler conversations. But I haven’t missed water cooler conversations at all. I think there’s much better and more modern ways of approaching cross-pollination. For example, offsites with a clear purpose drive much better conversations than the off chance of running into someone exciting at a water cooler.

We have 850 people in 20 countries — I have no idea where people are based, and I love that! I genuinely enjoy not knowing, and leaning into the challenges of the future. A lot of our team members moved out of London into the countryside because they can actually afford a house with an office space, instead of a cramped room sharing with housemates. We ask them to come into the office occasionally, and it works. People have better lives because of hybrid work, so we encourage it.

I also believe this way of working is going to last. What we’re doing so far is not perfect, but let’s figure out which iteration of it is going to work, rather than defaulting back to what we’ve done in the past. Because clearly, that’s not what employees want. It’s Gen Z who are driving this trend. They have this two year black hole (during Covid), and now they’ve chosen for themselves. Yes, they want to work hard. Yes, they want purpose in their life and work. But they don’t want to be told which specific location they have to do that from.

Could you name some influential books, podcasts, people, or other resources?

It’s mostly books for me. I really enjoy reading about other business leaders — through their biographies mostly. For me it’s important to get as many opinions in my head as possible. I don’t want to copy someone else’s history, I just want to have as many voices that can help me form my own opinion.

The most impactful book on me is also the first business book I ever read: Maverick by Ricardo Semler. It made me want to be an entrepreneur. In the book, Ricardo talks about how he took over the company from his dad, who’d run it in a very traditional way and he just transformed it. I often think about how he would handle some of the situations I run into.

I also enjoyed No Rules Rule by Netflix. It’s quite extreme in the way that they approached radical candour. But my own transparency aligns with theirs in some ways.

A book we started gifting last year to our whole team last year is: Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love. We collectively as a leadership team thought it was the right book for everyone at the company to read. We felt that if you’re a new starter at Mews and you read this book, it will give a lot of motivation about how we should create inspiring moments across our culture, and across our product.

At Mews we stimulate a really avid learning culture. A culture where multiple voices make for a better opinion. Richard and I share a huge amount of articles internally, and we have a ‘think club’ where people debate the books and things they read.

Where can we go to learn more about you and Mews?

The best place to find out more about me is on LinkedIn.

I’m an avid LinkedIn user — I’ve been building my network there for two decades, and it’s been critical to our success. We got our first investor through outreach I did on LinkedIn, and I still find customers there today. The network effects are real. Typical LinkedIn posts I do now get around 200K views, so the exposure is big. I feel every business leader should be leaning into this.

Other resources:

• The Techleap for scaleups Slack channel is the best place for community members to reach me.
• The Mews Website is the best place to find out more about what our business does.
• To get a real taste of our culture at Mews, check out our Instagram account @lifeatmews

I want to find employees on Instagram because there’s a whole generation of people on that platform. There we talk about all the crazy shit we do at Mews. It’s to get people inspired by our culture.

Awesome, thanks Matthijs! Great having you as part of the Community!