I spent more than ten years building, growing and transforming a company. Today I want to help other founders go further, faster, without paying the price I sometimes paid.
For more than a decade at Sortlist, I lived what building an ambitious company really means: finding the first clients, hiring the first teams, speeding up growth, opening new markets, structuring an organisation, getting through crises, making acquisitions, and taking decisions that the future of dozens of people sometimes depended on.
I knew the extraordinary moments. When everything speeds up, when an idea becomes a company, when the teams grow and ambitions come true.
But I also knew the other side.
Hard decisions taken alone. Nights spent thinking about the next step. The feeling of having to be everywhere, understand everything, decide everything. And the moment you realise that the company you built to be free has come to depend on you to move.
Looking back, I understood something essential: founders don't lack ambition or talent. More often, the systems around them stop letting them grow.
Over the years I tested, built, sometimes dropped, then improved dozens of methods to steer growth, align teams, make better decisions and make the company less dependent on its founders.
And I found that most of the results came from a small number of principles, decisions and systems, well executed.
You don't need a hundred methods. You need the right ones, at the right time, applied with discipline.
Ten years ago, I would have loved access to that experience.
I would have loved a founder who had already been through these stages to help me find the real problems, avoid some mistakes and put my energy into what actually creates value.
Not one more consultant. Not theory. Not yet another program full of concepts nobody can apply.
An operating system, tested in the field, to know where to go, what to measure, which decisions to take and how to move the whole company in the same direction.
FounderOS is the program I wish I'd had beside me.
I have condensed those years of learning, successes and mistakes into a concrete execution system, built to help B2B founders reach their next stage of growth.
In six months, the goal is to see the real brakes on growth clearly, take the decisions that matter and put in place the systems that let the company grow for the long term.
But my ambition goes well beyond the numbers.
I deeply believe that talented founders should not have to sacrifice their health, their family or their confidence to succeed.
I want to help people with gold in their hands turn it into solid, profitable, ambitious companies. Companies that create value, know how to capture it, and can grow without everything resting on their founder's shoulders.
Because success as a founder is not measured only in revenue or valuation.
It is also measured by the freedom you have built, the people you have helped grow, and the calm with which you look ahead.
That is why I built FounderOS.
To pass on what I wish I had learnt earlier. To help other founders avoid some of my mistakes. And to help build a new generation of European companies that are ambitious, high-performing and able to grow without wearing out the people who built them.
Thibaut VanderhofstadtFounder of FounderOS · Former CEO of Sortlist
