With our fund with promise two things:
1) access to capital
2) a founder community

Last Friday it was time for our GEC Capital event, to bring together our community of (portfolio) founders and investors, and we had a blast!

An intimate crowd of 120 (portfolio) founders, (international) VCs and angel investors met at the amazing Leeuwenbergh in Utrecht. The topic of this event was ‘the art and pain of scaling. And that brought about a lot of great talks!

Keynote speaker Fouad Hamaidouch, founder of Restocks, shared with us very openly his amazing journey from first buying sneakers on Marktplaats, to scaling to hundreds of millions of platform revenue to bankruptcy, eventually. How did he manage to scale so rapidly? “Whether you’re a team of 4 or 50, connection is the invisible thread that holds your company together during hypergrowth. Like a vine running through your entire business, it connects every dot.”

During fireside chats with ‘lumberjack’ Arjé Cahn, Tamara Ciullo (Cariqa) and Jasper de Vries (Coolgradient) talked about scaling with impact. Most interesting question: When scaling, what broke first?

And there was the investor panel with Thijs Dijkman (Peak), Sophie Heijenberg (No Such Ventures) and Jeroen Arts (Speedinvest) moderated by Ytsen van der Meer (Cottonwood Technology Fund). They discussed the challenging market conditions for fundraising, and how to deal with them as a founder.

Thanks to everyone that attended and for being part of our community, hope you liked it 🙂 See you next year?

A big thanks to:
🎻 ConcertLab for hosting us
🛋️ Reliving for the cool stage looks
📸 Smiler for the great pictures (download here)
🚗 Slinger for the carpool app for attendees

Thanks to our sponsors Google Cloud, Bluebird Recruitment, Marble Finance and Osborne Clarke.