Meet Koen: Co-Founder Venture IQ

Please, introduce yourself…

My name is Koen van Engelen. Together with Alexander, I founded Venture IQ in 2015, after both of us having worked as investors for 20 years (VC and PE). I had loved being an investor, but it also felt a bit easy to tell entrepreneurs what they should do based on textbook knowledge, without ever having built a company myself.
Alexander and I both had the experience that many corporates were interested in the deal flow of technology companies we had been generating. Some corporates would invest millions in VC funds, just to get their hands on the deal flow that investors pro-actively generate, even when most of that deal flow would not even apply to them.

We decided that this would be the opportunity to build our company around. We would help clients proactively build their own dedicated deal flow tailored to their needs with software and services.  
Now we are 5 years in and we have built a software platform that automates most of the scouting work and we have a team of 10 consultants and analysts that can run highly efficient projects for our clients. We work for almost all the top 50 Dutch  corporates and growth is picking up.

What do you do on a daily basis?

As a founder, I’m responsible for growing Venture IQ on both a commercial and an organisational level. I spend a great deal of my time on improving the value proposition we provide clients and working out new feature ideas for Catalist with our development team. At the same time, I find employee well-being important and enjoy informal catch ups with the team members over coffee or while strolling alongside the Amsterdam canals.

What do you love about your job?

I love building an environment where people like to work. I think everyone likes to work at a place where you have people around you that you can trust, where you can work in an autonomous way, where your voice is always heard and where you are working for happy clients.

How would you describe VIQ culture in words?

Ambitious but not pretentious, hard-working in a relaxed atmosphere and where the diverse backgrounds from the team makes for interesting lunch conversations.