In this episode of SaaS Unscripted, host Nick van Eeten talks with Matthijs Metzemaekers — founder of Carv, an AI company for recruitment, who previously co-founded and exited the hiring-tech company Harver. Matthijs shares how he started out in field marketing at Pepperminds, built and sold Harver, and why he chose to start from square one again with Carv — plus his views on AI in recruiting, hiring a high bar of talent, and building a career in SaaS.
Nick: Welcome to SaaS Unscripted, where we follow people’s journeys through the SaaS industry. In today’s episode I’d like to welcome Matthijs Metzemaekers. Welcome, Matthijs. You have an interesting career — you’ve exited two companies and are building a new adventure. Maybe you can introduce yourself and give us a quick summary of that.
Matthijs: Where to start. My name is Matthijs — since we’re doing an English podcast, I’d probably say “Mat,” because Matthijs is a difficult name for people outside the Netherlands. I’ve been in the tech industry for the past decade. I co-founded Harver, a high-volume hiring-technology company that we built out in Europe and the US, and we exited that in 2021. Now I’m focusing on Carv, which is an AI company — so it’s back to square one: being tired and frustrated, and having the small successes too, which is awesome.
Nick: I saw that you started your career at Pepperminds, according to your LinkedIn. Was that your first job?
Matthijs: Not my first job — I started, like everyone in the Netherlands I guess, working at the grocery store. But it was my first serious job, and I think it’s one of the most exciting things I’ve done. For the people who don’t know it, it’s a huge field-marketing company — we had a group of 100 salespeople working for charities and newspapers. I was leading a team there. It was an awesome experience, with so many great, talented people.
Nick: Why did you start your career there?
Matthijs: It wasn’t a very purposeful move — I just wanted a side job, not a main job, and I started doing that work a few times a week. For me it was more the energy of the people that worked in that company that I was really excited about. People were really driven. I’d show up, get an hourly wage, and that was it, but I felt: hey, I need to grow here, I need to perform. You always look up at the leaderboard — am I improving or not? I loved that feeling. The training and coaching, learning skills in that specific setting — you need to have a lot of fun to actually continue doing that work. That’s always the case for me when doing something new: I want to really have a lot of joy and fun with the people and the work itself. Any other part is just persistence and personal leadership, which was really helpful — to go door to door and sell in the Netherlands is super tough. Every time you start at zero again, and that was something I definitely enjoyed.
Nick: Fast forward — you moved to another recruitment company, and from there started Harver, the company you mentioned exiting. How did that happen?
Matthijs: My former boss at Pepperminds started it — we were friends, we went on holiday together, and he said “I’m going to quit my job.” Okay, cool, I’ll do that too. We started doing something together. Some people really have a plan — “this is what I’m going to build, this is what I’m going to do” — and I didn’t have that. I just had the feeling of: I do something, I’m in a comfortable position again to grow myself. Back then it was 2012, social media was popping up, companies were going onto social media. So we had a simple idea: we’re going to bring companies onto social media — Facebook pages, advertising, helping them get visibility. Now everyone is doing it, or maybe not even anymore, but back then it was a way to start and to get yourself into the field and start building for yourself. I always say: if you don’t know what you want, you end up in recruiting. We knew some people who founded a Dutch sourcing company, we had an idea in sourcing, and we teamed up with them — really cool people, learned a lot. Through that company we had clients, and that’s where I met Barend. We had a common customer, Randstad, and that’s where we met each other. I had a great connection — I think that’s the red wire: it’s about the people you meet. Intuitively I felt, hey, we need to do something together. That’s how it started.
“I always say: if you don’t know what you want, you end up in recruiting.”
Nick: I’m curious about that period — you met Barend, there was a professional click. He’d already started Harver?
Matthijs: He’d already started Harver, but there was no real commercial traction yet. We started talking about positioning, about what it could be, and we started collaborating. At some point he said to me: I’m going to quit all my other activities, let’s build a super team and start building. We moved to the US quickly and started building the company.
Nick: How did you grow it there — was it also more difficult to get funding at the time?
Matthijs: It wasn’t like today, where people are going crazy to get funding. I had angel investors who put money in early at Harver, and we purposely waited quite long with the VC money. The angels took Harver from zero, through phase one, to around a million. That was extremely important — not so much the knowledge or the network, but more the confidence and trust they had in the team and the product. Back then Harver was a digital hiring platform, and it was the advanced-analytics hype — everyone wanted to do something with data. You’d talk to large enterprises and recruitment firms and say, “we’re going to replace the resume,” or “you’re now hiring people based on a conversation and a handshake, but data and technology will help you make these decisions in the future.” Nobody believed in it in the beginning. That there were investors who actually believed in the bigger promise and in the team — that was fundamentally important.
Nick: And then, post-COVID, you exited. How did that go?
Matthijs: The market we’re in is not a big market — there aren’t many software vendors in the space, and you know each other pretty well. You compete against each other in big deals; sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But sometimes there’s this moment where you join forces. That moment came, we started talking, and in the end we merged companies. Harver became the leading brand — a few brands they bought were really strong. It was a really strong company.
Nick: How did it feel that there was interest?
Matthijs: Our investor always said: the moment you really want to sell, you’re not going to be bought; the moment you don’t want to sell, then it will probably come. I think that was the case, because we were growing and in a position to raise. But in the end we were also excited about building Carv with the same team we built Harver with, so it was almost more of a life decision.
Nick: Was it always the goal to eventually sell?
Matthijs: If you’re on a journey that’s heavily VC-funded, you know that at some point that’s going to happen.
Nick: You mentioned building Carv with the same team. Was it hard to stop at Harver, and were you already playing with the idea?
Matthijs: We didn’t go right after Harver — we stayed for a little while. The company was acquired in April, and then at the end of the year we started something new. In January, the new year, we started to build out the team.
Nick: Why start something from scratch again?
Matthijs: It’s a good question — I ask myself every day, looking in the mirror. But I’m definitely not done with building. Sometimes when you’re building something like Harver, it’s taking up all of your time and you don’t have your hands free to do something else. It felt like a moment of freedom — we have our hands free, we can do something new — and there was still that excitement to build again. That’s why with Carv we started pretty soon. But it’s 100% back to square one. You have your lessons and a better starting position, for sure, but coming up with a new idea, building something in a new category, getting to product-market fit — that is just a very, very tough journey.
“It’s 100% back to square one. You have your lessons and a better starting position — but building something in a new category and getting to product-market fit is just a very tough journey.”
Nick: What is Carv?
Matthijs: One of the most important things for us is that the content — the data you own as a recruitment team about an applicant — is going to be critical to letting AI work. Simple example: LinkedIn is a spam machine currently. You probably get 10 to 30 AI-generated messages a day: “you went to this university.” That’s not strong, because you already know AI is grabbing that from your LinkedIn and creating a message. But if you have all the context — interviews, conversations, public data — and you can profile an applicant and become hyper-relevant in your reach-out, then it can work. It requires a completely different approach. Carv initially started as a meeting platform. Before GPT — DaVinci, 3.5 — was released, I was doing QBRs with clients, and usually three or four people show up, but now 12 people showed up because people were working remote and wanted to be more engaged, and 80% of them didn’t say a word. So we thought: if we can distribute information in a better way — capture meetings, transcribe them, and distribute the information to the people it’s relevant to — that’s a great idea. Then GPT-3.5 made that capability available to many companies, so we decided to go more niche, because these new capabilities would not only let us distribute information better, they would actually allow us to literally take over human tasks — that’s what AI is capable of today. That forced us to think: in what type of verticals can we take over work from humans and create that human-AI synergy? With all our knowledge and experience in the recruiting vertical, more and more recruiting teams came in and started asking us: it’s nice that you can summarize an interview, but we actually think you’re ready to let AI do tasks like writing candidate profiles and taking over ATS admin work. That mindset — not executing tasks in systems anymore — is the infrastructure we’re building with Carv, and recruitment is one of our most important verticals: not just summarizing meetings or distributing information, but literally delegating tasks to AI. I have a strong belief that in recruiting a lot of the work we do today can be done faster and better by AI.
Nick: Can you give an example?
Matthijs: All the follow-up work out of interviews and intake calls, writing profiles — that can be done by AI faster and better, and it sometimes saves 20 to 30 percent of a recruiter’s time. But even in the sourcing and reach-out domain: instead of generic public data that everyone uses, imagine you’d have two or three interviews with a candidate, and the whole conversation is a source for AI to start doing relevant reach-out. That’s going to be a new way of engaging with people that might even be better — not fully, because as soon as people say “I’m interested in the job, I want to talk,” the human should take it over. With Carv we’re building the infrastructure to use meetings and data to build profiles, and it will really change the way we recruit: it will need less human effort on the things you don’t like, with a better tool.
Nick: Is it a business-critical solution or more of a nice-to-have?
Matthijs: It’s difficult to say — you can build a great company on nice-to-have products. But in the end I believe our knowledge and our network are going to help us. If we zoom out and look at recruitment, I believe there will be new platforms. Existing vendors will still play a big role — the ATS, for example, will be much more of a backbone system — but the interfaces recruiters collaborate with will be different types of platforms. Not for every company, but for many. Nobody wants a “nice-to-have” product; you want to be mission-critical. The incumbents have access to these new AI technologies too, and they’re already in the ecosystem of mass users, so they’re much better positioned to just roll out AI products. That’s why I think, as a new company, we have a better chance if we say: which new problems do we want to solve? And then it helps to start niche, because you only have so much go-to-market budget and product roadmap. As a small company you need to prove success in a very short amount of time.
Nick: How does that go internally — deciding to go hard on a niche?
Matthijs: We pretty quickly decided to run experiments in different verticals and check where we see traction, where we see happy customers, where we can solve problems, and how to prioritize and message that to the market. We did an exploration phase of 90 days where we collected the data, and then together looked at it. It wasn’t a mathematical, business-consultant decision — in this case it just makes sense, because we know the industry super well and can lean on our knowledge and network. So many vendors pop up, and — I spoke with Barend in one of our podcasts about fundamental versus incremental innovation — we see a lot of point solutions that incrementally improve a process with AI, but our ambition is to fundamentally improve the way recruiting teams work. You just can’t be in three markets at once; you need to focus, and that’s what we did.
Nick: How do you keep improving the software?
Matthijs: It’s a combination: you have a vision you want to execute on, and you need to listen to customers and experts in the field. But in the beginning it’s a lot of intuition — nobody is going to tell you what the future will look like. It’s about having your own idea, validating it with customers and users, but also a lot of intuition and thinking through what it could be. That’s the hard part: whatever GPT or anything else comes next, what is the impact of that on the market?
Nick: What are you doing differently, or taking away from your first adventure at Harver?
Matthijs: It’s a blessing and a curse, because if you knew what’s coming the first time, you probably wouldn’t start. Now you know what’s coming — that’s also a curse. Hiring, for example: having a very high bar for the people in the company is something you definitely take with you. I’d rather have a smaller team that performs really well than more people who perform less. Raising the bar high for people is one of the most important things I take with me. And obviously network, access to funding, access to companies, and credibility in the space — that’s definitely there. But like I said, building it again, proving product-market fit, coming to a stage where you can be a global player with global clients, is super hard. Whatever it is, the blessing and the curse is that it’s hard work, disappointments, putting energy in that doesn’t work, tough clients, things going wrong. You have to accept constant change: if we do it exactly the way we did it in the past months, we would fail. So we need to reinvent ourselves, and that’s something you need to be very comfortable with.
Nick: You said the bar for talent is extremely high. How do you ensure that?
Matthijs: Recruiting people has many layers. You need a good vision for the product — if you have a good plan and a good team, that actually attracts great people. Hiring is always difficult; you never master it as a company, definitely not. But what you can do better than before is the starting point: being able to describe and formulate what you’re really looking for, and what is that one thing this person should do really well in the next phase of the company. That is much more important than saying, “we’re looking for role X, Y, Z, let’s go recruit and find people with this experience.” Experience is much more important in some roles than others. But that internal process — formulating what this person’s biggest challenge is and what type of skills we’re looking for to get the company to the next stage — makes the vetting much easier. In the interviews you can give people that challenge, and it works both ways: the person needs to get excited about that specific challenge, and you can actually challenge them on that specific topic. There are many examples where we made mistakes in the past — we’re still making them, by the way — but when I look at talent, it’s more an internal process of getting that right and aligned in the company.
Nick: You said you’re still making mistakes — is there anything different in how you go about them?
Matthijs: It’s more a thought-through process, part of what I just shared: do more internal work before you go out, before you just post a vacancy.
Nick: For aspiring entrepreneurs listening to this podcast, what advice would you have on how to build a successful SaaS company?
Matthijs: When I walked in here, I had someone on the phone who said they want to start, and I said: if you have that feeling, just do it. If people feel that excitement in them, then they should just go — that’s my only advice. And many people will tell you not to do it, because that’s their perspective, but if you have that inner flame, go.
Nick: Should you go solo or with co-founders, like you?
Matthijs: It very much depends on the person. I really like to do it together. It’s funny how there are many moments where you balance each other out — when one is on a high, the other is on a low, and the other way around. It’s a very natural process. For me and Barend, doing it together is a very fun experience. But there are people who are much more solo — and there are a lot of founders who build something, sell something, and start something on their own.
Nick: How much effort do you put in — how is your work-life balance?
Matthijs: It’s taking up almost all of my time, but I definitely try to balance it out more. I try to implement small things in my life. For example, going to the gym — I have an ambition to go three times a week. Before, I’d think “I work too late, I hope I can work out in the evening,” and now I prioritize it in the morning. I’d rather be 30 minutes late at the office and put in the morning workout, because I know it makes me a better person, it’s much more relaxed, and I see the impact it has on me. It’s important to implement what you learn, and if you travel a lot, to make sure I’m very aware that I need to take care of my health, physically and mentally. Then I can just enjoy the whole journey.
Nick: Any hobbies outside of work?
Matthijs: Absolutely. I love playing piano — I started teaching myself, and it’s something I really like to do to relax. And I like playing poker, though I don’t have too much time for it; maybe later in life. With those things I really feel in the flow. With piano, for example: you’re in your head all day, so I try to be more in touch with my feelings sometimes. No phone, just that — it’s almost like meditation.
Nick: I speak to a lot of people who want to go into SaaS. Do you have any advice for careers in SaaS?
Matthijs: Why do they want to work in SaaS — usually to be successful, to earn a lot of money, to build a company in the future? I’ve hired a lot of people, also in sales, and the people who enter the software space just to make a lot of money are usually not the most successful ones. They can be, but I think having the ambition to have a career in SaaS is not an ambition in itself. It might feel like an open door, but it’s really important to find a company where you feel engaged with the leadership — where you do the interview and feel “wow, this person is going to take me to the next step.” Just meet people; I had the luck myself to meet some people like that. Even if the product might not be perfect, if you feel the trust that this team or leadership is going to take you to your next stage, or you have that engagement and feel with the problem the company is solving — that’s what matters more than the “SaaS” or “make money” part. In the end, SaaS — sales, for example — is so tough, such a grind, that if you don’t like it and don’t like the industry, it’s hard. I know great salespeople who moved to different companies for a lot of money but didn’t like the industry, and they’re happy to step away, work with a smaller team again, and work with a product they can talk about with passion at a weekend birthday party. Work becomes part of who you are — we can debate if that’s good or not, but people want to be proud of the product they’re selling. We use the word “SaaS,” but really people want to work on innovative companies that are shaking things up.
Nick: Have you ever spoken to a candidate who said “I want to work for the stunning business that’s going down”? You see a lot of people move towards what’s hot.
Matthijs: We also live in a bubble — I shouldn’t be too judgmental. You can learn so much and get a lot of personal development; it can be an amazing career. But I’m not sure if chasing what’s hot makes you more money, a higher position, or more happy about your job. It’s that bubble idea: in New York everyone works in finance, in Amsterdam people make money in SaaS. I like the business model, I think it’s cool to solve existing business problems with new technologies. That’s satisfying for me.
Nick: Thanks a lot, Matthijs — I really loved the conversation. Is there anything else you want to share?
Matthijs: If you’re a recruiter, agency, or talent manager, you can try Carv out — just go to carv.com and try it free, or get a demo.
Nick: Thanks very much. Thanks for joining us on SaaS Unscripted. To explore the latest career opportunities, visit our website, nobelrecruitment.com, and don’t forget to subscribe and leave your review. Until next time on SaaS Unscripted.
