In this episode of SaaS Unscripted, host Nick van Eeten sits down with Jelle Visser — CEO of ValueBlue, the company behind the enterprise-architecture and transformation-management platform Blue Dolphin. From working on farms and DJing indie music to taking over as CEO of the company his father founded, Jelle shares his path to leadership, how he balances being a CEO with family life, the charity program he built into the company, and his vision for transforming how organizations run projects.

Nick: Welcome to the show. We follow people from the SaaS industry and their personal and professional journey. Welcome, Jelle. You have an incredible journey all the way up to CEO of ValueBlue, and today we’re going to discover how you got there. Who are you and what do you do?

Jelle: My name is Jelle Visser, I’m the CEO of ValueBlue. I’ve been with the company for close to 10 years — nine and a bit right now. I’m not the founder; the company was founded in 2011 by my father, and back then we founded it as a consultancy firm. Over the years I’ve been involved in the development and commercialization of our product, and grew into different roles until I became CEO in June this year, so that’s quite fresh. Apart from that, I’m 31 now, I live in Dordrecht with my family — my partner and two kids.

Nick: Congrats on that. We met a couple of years ago — you and your dad — back when you had just raised your first funding round, and it’s been exciting to see your journey since. But before we go into the SaaS stuff, can you tell us about your youth — how did you grow up?

Jelle: I was born in Delft, and when I was very small we moved to a place near Utrecht. I lived there a few years, went to elementary school, and then we moved to where my parents grew up, in the north of the Netherlands. I had a very good, protected youth. The most impactful thing was moving from one place to another, which is very big when you’re six — you’re 100% sure you’re going to see your old friends forever, and then a year later you don’t see them anymore, but you quickly get a new group of friends. I did all the way up to high school there. It’s a small place, big enough to have something to do, but once I turned 14 or 15 I started to find it boring, and I always told my parents: as soon as I turn 18 I move out and go live in Amsterdam, because I want a little more adventure. That’s what I did when I started studying.

Nick: Before you moved to Amsterdam, did you have any jobs?

Jelle: I always thought that if you want money, you have to work for it. When I was young I did all these little jobs around the neighborhood — raking leaves, cleaning up garages. The first somewhat serious job, when I must have been 13, was working on the farms — there’s a lot of farmland around that area. I worked with flower bulbs, cleaning them, picked and planted broccoli and cauliflowers, a lot of agricultural work. It was quite hard work, and nobody really liked it because you had to get up really early, but for that age it earned quite well and allowed me to buy the stuff I wanted. Later I had jobs in supermarkets, which were a bit easier. The first time I did something more for myself was when, together with a guy I worked with, we started a platform reviewing music — indie garage rock kind of music — and out of that we started DJing, playing the music we were reviewing, going around the bars in the area. We made some money with it. As a side job next to high school it was pretty good.

Nick: And you escaped the small village in the north to move to Amsterdam. Tell us about that time.

Jelle: I had a small room in Diemen. When I got there, my parents came to look at it, and my mother was like, “why are you leaving our house to live in this little prison?” She completely didn’t understand, but for me it was like a castle — all for myself, it fit a bed, I had a TV, a PlayStation, I’d go out every night. It was paradise. Living the dream. When you start studying, a whole new world opens up — you learn things every day, meet a lot of new people. I did a lot of completely different jobs. I worked for an Uber-like app that went bankrupt, on the central line picking up the phone at night from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. I worked in a large luxury hotel in the banqueting department, serving the football teams that came to Amsterdam — Real Madrid, the Turkish squad — they slept there and we had to service them. You learn about all these different kinds of businesses, not really with anything in mind for later, but they were definitely shaping experiences.

Nick: What changed?

Jelle: I was two years into my studies when one of my friends said, “hey, I’m thinking about doing a minor.” As usual I was not super engaged — it was eight weeks before we should start and I still hadn’t selected anything — and he said, “I’m going to do something called entrepreneurship, where you have to build your own company during the studies, and that’s the only assignment.” That sounded pretty cool, so I enrolled. It started with a week-long boot camp in a castle, where you had to form a group, come up with an idea for a potential company, and then build that company from the ground up over the next six months. That was the first moment I realized this is the coolest thing you can do. We started with a group of four, and I was one of the younger ones — there were people with much more experience and a more defined path. I came in like, “yeah, I don’t like school, I’m not sure what I’m going to do here,” and one day in I thought, whoa, this is awesome.

Nick: So that was a pivotal moment.

Jelle: If there’s one moment that really sparked my interest, it was that one week. Before that, I knew it was a possibility to start a company, but I didn’t really know where to start — I was focused on “you have to have studies first.” Suddenly I realized you don’t have to wait until you finish your studies; you can just go ahead and do it.

“I realized you don’t have to wait until you finish your studies — you can just go ahead and start a company.”

Nick: What company did you build?

Jelle: We started something called Snel Voor Elkaar — which means something like “quickly taken care of.” We put the care products you can buy in the supermarket into a box, and you could take a monthly subscription on it and we’d send it to your home. The idea was that we, as students, always forgot to get to the supermarket — there were no delivery services back then — so why not get your toothpaste and deodorant delivered every month so you don’t have to think about it. We built a button to delay it for a month if you still had something left, holiday packages, and so on. We got it pretty far in five months — a working website, a way to order, the products, merchandise and branding — but we didn’t make any real money yet; we sold one or two subscriptions. We rented a desk in a co-working space here in Amsterdam. We renamed it to Grooms Day, which we thought was a bit cooler, and that business actually did pretty well at some point.

Nick: It’s cool that you had entrepreneurial experience before SaaS. You started working for your dad at ValueBlue — can you tell us how you transitioned into the CEO role?

Jelle: My father asked, “we’re starting to build a product — you have some experience setting up websites and marketing engines, can you help us?” I got a three-day contract for three months to help set up the marketing department around the product. Three months in, I realized I really loved this B2B SaaS product approach compared to the B2C businesses I’d done before. I find it more mentally, cognitively challenging — you really have to think about what the customer wants, make sure the product does it, and explain it to the customer in the right way, which is difficult because you have to understand their business model and map it to what you do. So I started with marketing, then added BDR work — we didn’t have dedicated people for that — and when I made an appointment, I started doing sales. Over two to three years I did all the commercially related roles around the product: marketing, sales, pre-sales, my own demos, learning to work with the product. I found out that the field we’re in — enterprise architecture — is one of the most interesting things I’d ever seen. We started building the product in 2014, signed the first customers in 2015. We started in 2011 as a consultancy, and the people in consulting were building the product based on real customer experience and the problems they saw in the market, so we transitioned more and more consultants into the product organization. Around 2016–18 we realized the product might be the most feasible thing to chase — we saw more and more pull from the market and that we could win from way bigger competitors. To pull that off, we needed external money, and that’s when we did our first investment round with a VC called Newion, around the time we first met. By then the team had grown — a dev team, the consulting team transitioning into customer success, some salespeople I was already managing. When the funding came in, in May 2019, we had to officialize things, and my official title became Chief Commercial Officer, responsible for commercial operations around the product. That’s what I did for four years, until June this year. During that period you learn a lot — closely engaged with the funding rounds, with the other C-level team members, and the team grew a lot. We’re currently a little over 100 people, so at some point you’re managing 40, 50 people with a layer in between. Then in June I transitioned to CEO, because my father is going to stop, and we’re preparing for another round potentially next year — you don’t want to do a CEO switch right before a round, and you want the current CEO to be able to stay in position for three to five years. My father was clear he didn’t want to go on for another five years, and that’s when I transitioned.

Nick: How does it work, working for your dad in such a high-growth company?

Jelle: I said “I’m really going to help you for three to six months and then go back to my studies and do something for myself.” That didn’t turn out that way. The big benefit is you have someone to talk to and ask questions — when you get into a company young, it takes time to get acquainted with how a business works, but I always had somebody who owned the business that I could ask all the questions I wanted, even during Christmas dinner. You get a lot of exposure to the content, which lets you learn really quickly. At the same time, it’s also your father, someone you know really well, so the communication style can be different — it’s easier to be angry at your father than at your boss. Things from your personal life can get into your business life and the other way around, but I must say we did it really well.

Nick: Would you say you got more chances than anyone else in the business?

Jelle: Difficult question. I’d like to say no — we’ve always tried to treat everyone equally — but it feels a little ignorant to say I didn’t get any additional chances, because in the end he’s my father, he knows me, and even if he objectively found I did my job well, I’m not sure I’d have gotten the exact same chances at any other random company. At the same time, I’m pretty sure I didn’t get promotions while not doing my job properly — I always overperformed, always made my target like the other people. So it’s a bit yes and no. Getting the chances, and when I was doing well there was always a next step available, is definitely a privilege. But it was not “here, have a promotion” — you have to prove yourself, maybe even a little harder than other people. The feedback and critique I got was very straightforward and direct, and I didn’t get two or three chances; it just had to be right the first time.

Nick: You mentioned your private life — a partner and two kids. How do you keep all that together?

Jelle: The transition got harder when kids came into play. I got a kid during COVID, and my girlfriend already had a kid from an earlier relationship that really feels like my son, plus my own daughter. So you go from zero kids to two kids waiting at home, and at that time I was already traveling quite a lot. The dynamic really changes. When I didn’t have kids, I used to work till 7, eat some food behind my laptop, and go on till 10 in the evening. Suddenly I really started to value having dinner with the kids. So I put certain things in place — for example, in my agenda, between 5:30 and 8 I’m having dinner and bringing my kids to bed. I’m completely fine working after that, and completely fine working really hard up until that moment, but as much as possible I keep that time free to fully give attention to my kids. It’s sometimes difficult, especially when the pressure is high — it’s very attractive to have your phone next to you during dinner, watching the email come in. Another thing I do is, when I can’t make it home, I try to do as much work as possible in one day — rather than five 10-hour days, I’d do three 8- or 9-hour days and two 12- or 13-hour days, so the other evenings I have free for my family. Those little tricks make it much more doable. I love the job and the business, but I love my kids and my partner more.

“I love the job and the business, but I love my kids and my partner more.”

Nick: You have quite some people who rely on you — investors, around 100 people, a family. Have there been times it was just too much?

Jelle: Short answer: no, not too much. There have been times it’s been a lot, but as I said, I really enjoy the ride — I love the field we’re in and the whole idea of entrepreneurship. The pressure can get high, but I’ve never been very sensitive to outside pressure. I strongly hope our investors are going to be very successful, because they will be if the company is, but to a certain extent I’m not running the company for our investors — I’m running it to build something amazing and make the world a better place, because I enjoy it. So I never feel like I’m working for them or failing them. For the people in the company it’s slightly different, because they’re more dependent on our single company, so you feel some responsibility. But when I think too much about it, I tell myself: we have amazing, super-talented people — if I somehow fail, they’ll find another job in one or two months, because they’re smart enough to work anywhere they want. That doesn’t mean I’d like to lose them, but it gives me relief. Zooming out and putting things in perspective really helps, because those are exactly the things you can get into loopholes about if you keep working late nights and don’t sleep enough.

Nick: Do you have a specific challenging situation and how you navigated it?

Jelle: My most challenging times are mostly FOMO. You feel like you’re in this great position to succeed, but then one of your big customers is close to churning, or you see a competitor get a massive investment and think “how are we ever going to compete with that,” or they release a feature and you think “why didn’t we think of that first,” or your star employee walks away. Those things can happen, and then you really feel like it can only get downhill from here. Those keep me most awake at night — especially when you see it on email or LinkedIn right before bed, it can be really bad for your sleep, and I can wake up at 4 in the night and not sleep anymore. So a few things I do: there’s a moment in the evening, usually after 10 p.m., when I turn off devices and try not to look at anything, and give myself half an hour to an hour to rewind — reading a book, playing FIFA on the PlayStation, something to empty my mind. And there are occasions when you just have to talk to people. My partner is a great help — I don’t expect her to give me the solution on how to run the business, but the fact that you can explain it to someone from a more external perspective gets you better ideas yourself, and it gets out of your system. It can be hard to do that within your company or with investors, because they have a stake in it, so you can’t always be completely transparent about your doubts. Having people around you who don’t have a stake in how the business is doing, who can just give you an honest answer in a protected space, is very important for getting over those big challenges.

Nick: As the leader of 100 people, do you have an example of how you lead the business with purpose?

Jelle: One of the first things I did as CEO: we used to be a quite sales-oriented organization, which makes sense to an extent, but in our OKRs I don’t like to have financial metrics. I believe it’s important to talk more about the purpose you have as a company — what are we trying to achieve and how. So we now have much more customer-success-oriented objectives that are purpose-driven. In the end we need to make money to get to that purpose, so revenue growth is part of achieving the objective, but by not calling it the money goal — not saying “we want to go to 10 or 12 million” — it’s a way to get to your purpose. Another thing I introduced, even before I was CEO, is that we give a share of the revenue we generate to charity. If your company is becoming successful, you can make a big impact and you’re in a privileged position, and you should use it. We put 1% of quarterly revenue and 50 cents for every marketing-qualified lead into a pot. One team per quarter gets to provide three charities of their choice, related to the name of the release — our product is called Blue Dolphin, so the releases have dolphin names, and you have to make a story about how the charity relates back to that dolphin. It can be completely crazy — last quarter we gave it to a youth education fund, which has nothing to do with dolphins, but it was a great story. Then the whole company votes and we select one. I love giving people in the company the opportunity to give part of the money we make to something they care about. Half a year ago we transferred money to a very small local charity in South America educating tribes around a river where certain dolphins swim — they don’t get many donations, so they got 7,000 or 8,000 at once, and they sent us a video of the wildlife guy explaining what he’d do with it. If you can do something like that, it’s amazing — that for me really feels like purpose. We don’t use it for marketing; this is the first time I’ve talked about it publicly, because I don’t want it to become “look at us doing good.” It’s much more fun as an internal thing that gives people a good feeling.

Nick: What fascinates you most about being part of the SaaS industry?

Jelle: Compared to the old world of perpetual licenses, you’re much more aligned with your customer. With perpetual, it could be very profitable to do amazing sales, promise all sorts of stuff you couldn’t deliver, sell the software, and the customer was stuck with it for years. In SaaS, you’re running monthly or yearly contracts — if you don’t deliver the value, the customer just quits. So you have to make sure your customer is happy. That alignment of value between customer and vendor is something I really love. The other thing is the speed — I love it when things go fast. I get bored quite quickly; not one day is the same as the other, it’s all about growth, and you have to change your business constantly. That whole idea of constant innovation and change really attracts me. Standing still is a waste of time.

“Standing still is a waste of time.”

Nick: What would your advice be for someone new to the SaaS world who wants a career like yours?

Jelle: My first and by far most important advice would be: go into a business that honestly interests you. Don’t start selling software just because you think it’s cool or because you want to go into sales, and don’t start coding just because you love coding — that’s fine, but also make sure you work for a product, a team, and a vision you really believe in, because in the long run that’s going to make the difference. You can do sales anywhere, but if you have a passion for what you sell, that’s great. Same in engineering — you can code anything, but everyone needs to feel a little bit like a product owner, like it’s your responsibility that you’re selling your customer something awesome. So truly feel for the solution you’re selling, and don’t just go for the highest salary or the coolest job title.

Nick: Any tips on how to get promotion after promotion, like you did?

Jelle: First of all, do your core job first. If you’re not making your targets, not writing your code, not finishing your plannings, that’s the first thing people look at — your hard numbers have to be right. Sometimes you hear people say “but I’m doing all these extra things, helping that person” — it’s all great, but only if you finish your own job first. Then, getting promotions is about showing you’re willing to put in the work to solve problems. One of the most important traits I look for in someone we promote is: it’s not about spotting a problem, it’s about solving it. A lot of people can spot what goes wrong — “we have to improve this and this” — and the next question is, how can you do that, and when are you going to start? Few people also know the solution and implement it. That’s how you stand out.

Nick: And what skill is that?

Jelle: Proactiveness, and taking responsibility. One of our core values is that you take full responsibility for what you’re doing — if something fails, it’s not the fault of the customer or the colleague who didn’t solve the problem, it’s your responsibility, so start solving it. Proactiveness, responsibility, growth mindset — that’s really important, and it’s quite a rare skill; people find it hard to do.

Nick: How do you assess that in hiring?

Jelle: It’s really hard, because everyone will say they’ll do it and very few actually will. You ask about previous experiences — one thing I like to look for is people who’ve had promotions at the companies they were at before. And I ask things like, “if you saw this problem in the organization, whose responsibility is it to solve it?” I always like it when they say “it’s mine.” It’s also a combination: having a strong purpose and mission, and finding the people who believe in that purpose, because not everyone believes in the same one.

Nick: What’s your future vision?

Jelle: It’s really important that companies get better at transformation. The total spend on transformation projects was projected at $2 trillion in 2023 — every company has to do it. But research from parties like IDC and McKinsey shows that 70% of those projects run out of budget and time, and most of them, once finished, don’t deliver the value that was expected up front. To me that’s not just a business problem. Here in Amsterdam we have the North-South Line, a beautiful example of something supposed to be finished early that took 15 years longer than expected. That’s not just a problem for the government — a lot of people depend on public transport to get to their jobs, their kids, their family, and by having that line finished, you allow a lot of beautiful things: grandparents getting to their kids more easily, people getting to work more easily. If we as a company can help companies be much more realistic in their planning, accelerate those projects and make them happen on time, we can make for a much better world. Right now in the Netherlands we’re quite successful — a little over 200 customers, one of the biggest players here, helping government organizations, large construction companies, hospitals. In those industries, doing projects on time doesn’t only make companies more successful, it saves lives. I’d love to do that all over the world. Our first focus is to make the same impact we have in the Netherlands in the US — and once you make it there, you can make it anywhere. The end goal should be no project running out of budget and time, and delivering exactly the expected value, for any company in the world. If we achieve that, we’re done — so we have at least 50 more years to go.

Nick: I cannot have a better ending than that. Thanks a lot for sharing everything, Jelle — how your youth transitioned you into entrepreneurship, how entrepreneurship transitioned you into ValueBlue, and how ValueBlue was the vehicle to becoming CEO of an international SaaS company. Is there anything you want to share with the listeners?

Jelle: Thank you, Nick, I really enjoyed the conversation. I want to get back to what we talked about: if you’re listening and interested in a career in SaaS, start doing it, and do something you truly believe in and love. And if the transformation business is something you believe in, feel free to reach out, because we can use some people.

Nick: It’s been an incredible journey of discovery today, Jelle. Thanks a lot for being part of SaaS Unscripted. Thanks for joining us — to explore the latest career opportunities, visit our website, nobelrecruitment.com, and don’t forget to subscribe and leave your review on your favorite podcast app. Until next time on SaaS Unscripted.