A chat with Nicolas Christiaen, co-founder and CEO at Donna

From a shoebox of receipts to Visma: Alexis Eggermont on building Accountable

"To ship our first prototype, I had to show up unannounced at our Serbian dev agency's door. Today? I'd vibe code the whole thing."  Alexis Eggermont co-founded Accountable. If you're a freelancer in Belgium or Germany, you probably know it. Visma owns it now, but Alexis has been with Syndicate One since day one. He sat down with Robin Wauters and walked through eight years of building from zero. Here's what jumped out.  * Alexis and Nicolas decided to start a company first, then came up with the idea later. They worked backward through three questions and landed on Accountable. * Exits aren't a single moment. The Visma deal took four years to pull off. After the sale? Same team, same product, just a bigger family. More gradual than sudden.  * And while AI is melting software moats, Alexis sees it growing the market, not killing it.

Building What Matters - Navigating the AI Era with Tanguy Goretti, CTO of HEXA

"Today is a good time to build - just make sure you understand the direction the market is heading before you start." In this episode, we sit down with Tanguy Goretti, CTO at HEXA, to unpack the new reality of the tech ecosystem. Drawing from his experience, Tanguy shares what he has learned, what he would do differently, and why he has never been more optimistic about what lies ahead for European founders. The real challenge today is not speed but relevance. Will what you are building now still matter as models evolve? With the barrier to entry lower than ever, every founder must honestly ask whether AI is helping them build something great or just making it easier to build more things. We also took time to look back and discuss what it really takes to build and scale a hardware company in Europe and what we can learn now that the dust has settled. Key questions addressed in this episode: * Will what you build today still matter as models evolve? * Is AI making it easier to build great companies, or just easier to build more companies? * Why is the CTPO profile, technical and product, becoming the most critical role of the next decade?

A chat with Séverine Nolf, CEO and co-founder at Pleasefix.ai

Robin Wauters sat down with @Séverine Nolf on the Syndicate One podcast.  "Every day building my own company is so many learnings. I really don't see it as a risk." 📍 Speed is the one structural advantage startups have over incumbents. Séverine's rule: be a first adopter in everything, without exception. 🔄 On being a female founder across tech, finance and consulting: she does not dwell on the barrier. When people underestimated her, delivering flipped the bias into a strength. 🇧🇪 Ambitious people in Belgium no longer need to leave to build something global. The risk is not starting. It is the compounding of learnings you miss by waiting.

A chat with Sébastien Deletaille, CEO and co-founder at Rosa

Robin Wauters sat down with @Sebastien Deletaille on the Syndicate One podcast "I like the idea that with few people, you can build something that scales and impacts millions." 📍 Great teams on the wrong market go nowhere. Sebastien watched sharper engineers than him get outpaced by someone on a better wave. Market choice, he argues, is what separates the top league from the rest. 🔄 On picking investors: skip the success stories. Talk to the founders who returned one and a half times. They are the ones who will tell you what a fund is really like when things get hard. 🇧🇪 On ecosystems: cities work because proximity creates serendipity. What Ghent built, Brussels can replicate, but it needs participants, not just leaders.

A chat with Laurent Hublet, Brussels Minister for Employment, Economy, and Digital Economy

Robin Wauters sat down with Laurent Hublet on the Syndicate One podcast: "I have 1,200 days to deliver impact. My focus is making the best out of every one of them." 📍 Laurent Hublet got a call on a Friday the 13th and had an hour to decide whether to become Brussels Minister for Economy, Employment and Digital Economy. He called his wife from a client call and said yes. 🔄 Six weeks later, his team had compressed a three-month budget process into five weeks, hired staff from scratch, and launched a government that Brussels had been waiting 18 months for. 🇧🇪 Brussels is one of the five largest power centers in the world, which makes what happens here on cyber, AI and democratic governance matter well beyond the city limits.