TL;DR B4

Being a Medium novice I will probably make some faults. My promise to you, Beloved Bibliophiles and Bedazzled Believers in return for my dunglish and pore structured post, I’ll trade you an authentic story straight from the heart.

I am a big fan of mnemonics, metaphors & acronyms. In this case helping me to structure my thoughts and summarize the topics I want to share with you in this story.

• Building Homes (equation with the startup world)
• Bridge Startups & Corporates (mission of Maecenas Group)
• Buy Bpost coins instead of Bitcoins (to me, technology is a means to an end, reproducing relevant relations)
• Bond of Talent (determination to hire and inspire the best people in the world)

A building (house, condo,..) becomes a home when the construction gives you a permanent feeling of comfort & trust.

Building a home

Let’s start with explaining the similarities between Building a home in the tangible world and how code can become tangible, building a tech company.

Before a Real Estate company can sell the project it needs architects, craftsmen, project leads, financial partners etc..

The same goes for building startups into companies.

Speaking of architects; My parents, educated us in a creative, comforting yet challenging way. Thanks to their deep interest for aesthetics in arts & architecture, I got fan of the self-teached architect Tadao Ando.

The simplicity of his architecture emphasizes the concept of sensation and physical experiences, mainly influenced by Japanese culture. The religious term Zen, focuses on the concept of simplicity and concentrates on inner feeling rather than outward appearance.

“Peace of mind when it comes to shipping” told Guy Kawasaki refering to finding your startup mantra. I think and feel the same about technology. Tech should provide ‘zen’ state for its users.

18 november 2014, a final dot happened. After walking my dog Kobi, missing my shipment in a time frame of 10 minutes, frustrated by the fact how this is possible, I felt the urge to make sure nobody had to miss his or her parcel again.

The idea of Parcify was born. My partners at Maecenas Group (Our platform for structural entrepreneurship where we build digital scalable product companies) shared my enthusiasm. Bram Pieters my friend and one of the best tech architects, immediately start thinking about innovations in the geolocation space, while Pieter Hayen (I call him often Petrus as our rock in the maecenas foundation) challenged me to prove the idea could be turned into viable business case.

As lead ‘architect’ I started researching, 2 months later we had build our first scale model. (Called a maquette in my mother language, sounds fancy hè)

Looking at this scaled model (prototype), discussing / validating discretely our first models with trusted friends Hans Similon and Gert Gijbels, I realized we needed more talent on board. Another type of lead architect was introduced by Gert. After a couple of months of dating, I was sure we had discovered a unique co-founder, Patrick Leysen. He combines his logistics background with a great managerial talent. I believe this young padewan will lead one day a famous company, perhaps even a Bel20 Logistics company ;-)

Summer 2015 we launched both the app and the company called Parcify. Had great fun at the Pukkelpop festival, shared many pains, had our discussions, but we never ever stopped being respectfull and open to each other. (Key point to overcome hick-ups and hostilities of the startup rollercoaster)

The foundation and basement was ready to scale towards the next level. To do so we needed extra money. Should we go for a pure financial player, a Venture Capital firm aka a bank, financing your real estate building, although taking more risk? Or should we look for a structural player, who knows the industry?

Emotionaly I wanted to team up with a Venture Capital player, having an oldschool impression of most logistics players. We studied and calculated different financial models and than, ratio kicks in, a structural partner would raise the possibility to success in an undeniable way. Thanks to Patrick’s network we got introduced with Bpost. Boy I was wrong assuming this huge corporate being an inert tanker and we -the startup- being the agile speedboat.

Learnings:

• share ideas & thoughts (= communicate internally and externally)
• share leadership (= sharing the pains and gains is fun and gives a rewarding feeling)
• share ownership (= if you really want to multiply, first learn to divide)

Bridge Startups & Corporates

Today statistics prove corporate venture capital is not only used in mature M&A tracks (Mergers and acquisitions), corporates anticipate disruption by investing in startups.

I love to initiate; I love to invest in talents, I get inspired by the challenges they naturally come up with.
Bumping into a problem my restless sole gets a target and so I get in this unstoppable state, a drive where you not only point towards the pain but also come up with a solution. From this state, having this endless energy, you enter the stage where you have to look for talents (Gary Vaynerchuk calls it part of the hustle game)

After doing it more than 5 times, you get stamped with the label of serial entrepreneur, though I don’t feel like one. Maecenas Group started from my personal learnings & shortcomings and a shared vision. I am extremely honoured to have incredible skilled entrepreneurs (I mentioned Bram & Pieter before, but definitely keep also an eye Dimitri Vandormael -the force is strong in this one-) around me in this group, together forming a complementary skillset.

We all share the vision to build companies, to cooperate with other companies, bilding bridges between different breeds so you can both explore the competences on each side, needed to tackle problems.
Why you should do it too? Because the factor “time” is not in favour nor for the startup nor for the big enterprise. Together you can go so much faster.

• a Learning not only we @Parcify have, also Alexander Van Laer Moos Tits got the insight and are now on track with Poppy merging startup talent with corporate expertise / power

So we look forward to keep innovating together with Bpost.

Buy Bpost coins instead of Bitcoins

Alignement! All parties felt the same, it doesn’t make sence to brag about a certain dealmaking, funny (?) to see that most professional writers called journalists always want the juicy stuff. I get it, the sensational parts are interesting hooks to your article. However also misleading, distracting it from the core message (in our case co-creation and innovation).
I believe good journalism isn’t only limited to a deontology code but also contains the reflex not to pose insinuating questions or make irrelevant assumptions. To make it easy, to stay focussed on the next steps, we all agreed not to communicate about the dealmaking itself because we believe it is only a beginning. All stakeholders thrive on the urge to keep building an innovative company.

Big respect and thanks to the key management of Bpost. They talk with results! Impressive trackrecord of transforming this logistics company into an agile world player. They have a clear vision how first to start with the foundations of having a sustainable profitable company, than expose their own attitude creating an environment where logistics innovation goes hand in hand with ambition. The will to achieve.

This is atypical for Belgians, our modesty often suppresses ambition. Ambitions highly needed to fuel your growth engine, to tackle the(rat)race with other foreign companies who play in bigger homogene markets.

Therefore I loudly state: I am proud on Bpost because I trust the leaders within.

I hear you thinking, what is the link with Bitcoin? Ah, although I love technology and I feel myself ported back in time to the beginning of the internet era, Blockchain is giving me the same opportunities but in an exponential way. For the first time technology is crafted in the Tadao Ando style. Clearly I am not the only one who find inpsiration in the Japanese culture, Satoshi Nakamoto crafted trust = the architecture of blockchain not longer requires a “trusted” third party … etc etc..

However designing a new currency with an impeccable architecture is not always a guarantee to success. People consider the Bitcoin a success, I tend to disagree. No, I am not one of those disbelievers screaming it is overhyped, I just believe the current hype inflating the value of 1 coin to such heights, it becomes not usefull any more as a daily currency enabling transactions (= relationships)

So that’s why I prefer to invest in Bpost “coins” (shares). They have the architecture, they have the liquidity (agility), they don’t fear Uber-likes because their daily heartbeat has enough adrenaline pumping the company blood in the right directions guarded with lean corporate governance, yes I became a fan of this company and so should you. Open up your mind, believe in our own Belgian crown jewels and invest some bitcoins in Bpost. ;-)

Bond of Talent

I’ll be short on this last B; Because (ahum ahum) I am not only running out of time, earlier, I also refered in this post to the many talents crossing my path.

Thank you to all talents who have contributed or still are contributing to Parcify,
Special thanks to Eline Grouwels my wife, giving me the daily context of space to create.
Thank you to our early believers Thierry and supporters Peter de Keyzer & Olivier van Horenbeeck from Growth Inc. , Bart De Waele , Hans & Gert.

However Talent alone is not enough, determination, stamina, perseverance, in short grit or the longterm will to achieve should be present within each talent. If you , the talent, share this believe with me, feel free to reach out!! Because I love to build a bond of talent (association) generating impact by creating a never ending culture while curating commonsense. And by those 4C’s I foresee a nice future of human intelligence!