The media mogul turned tech start-up accelerator
LOCATIONS: Amsterdam, Netherlands and Ibiza, Spain
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: Dutch, English, German and Spanish
CURRENT ROLES: Chairman and co-founder, Startupbootcamp and The Innoleaps Group
PREVIOUS LEADERSHIP ROLES
Co-founder, The Talent Institute
President NBC Superchannel,
NBC Co-founder, Sky Radio,
Radio 10 and RTL Nederland
DJ, Radio Caroline
BOARDWAVE ROLE Angel Investor
Ruud Hendriks is a man who, by his own admission, had achieved everything he wanted to in the media industry by the time he turned 50. His list of accomplishments was impressive: on reaching his half-century, the Dutchman had anchored TV programmes, introduced the Netherlands’s first rolling news radio format, and steered the production company Endemol (famous for TV shows including Big Brother and Deal or No Deal) through international expansion. As Hendriks embarked on the next chapter, he was on the lookout for a new challenge.
“I had done everything from editing, directing, and presenting programmes all the way to producing and selling them, and then broadcasting them,” Hendriks says. “I thought, I’m 50, I havea network, financial means, and I still have the energy. If there was ever a moment I could decide to do something completely different, then this is it.” While contemplating his next move, Hendriks looked back to the beginning of his career. “I’ve always been a bit of an entrepreneur. Before I started my legal career in broadcasting, I used to own a pirate radio station. I didn’t have the faintest idea how I could get hold of the amount of money I needed to launch it,” he says. “But I’ve always loved starting new projects.”
It seems fitting that the project he started after his 50th birthdayin 2010, Startupbootcamp, was one that helped entrepreneurs get funding and achieve success. It is now the largest start-up accelerator in Europe, and ranks in the top 10 globally. Its success meant that Hendriks added two businesses to his portfolio following Startupbootcamp: Innoleaps, which Hendriks founded in 2014, brings the concept of a start-up incubation to the corporate world by helping firms set up new ventures; and The Talent Institute, launched a year later in 2015, which finds and hires out “talented, bright people” between the ages of 25 and 35.
Everything that Hendriks learned during his distinguished career in the media industry has helped shape his businesses – and informs the advice he imparts in his start-up programmes.
“The main reason that start-ups fail is they solve problems that do not exist,” he says. “We can easily resolve that becausewe find out pretty early on and then they make a pivot and move into another direction or to another business model.” The second is due to problems within the team. He explains that the hard-working, pressured environment of a start-up can trigger many arguments among the founding team. “Perhaps one of them becomes a parent and can’t spend the same time on the company as they did,” he says.
It’s for that reason that Startupbootcamp approaches founders as a marriage counsellor might. “We make certain that those team quarrels are solved before they even exist by doing pre-mediation. We have professional mediators who sit down with the start-up founders on a monthly basis, find out what irritates them and they discuss it.” As a result, 70% of Startupbootcamp’s firms survive beyond four years – compared to Europe’s success rate of around 50%. “That’s exceptional and I consider pre-mediation to be the main reason for that,” Hendriks says.
Making (air)waves
Spanning four decades, Hendriks’s media career was a distinguished one: he progressed from reporter to head of current affairs at Veronica TV, then founded media network RTL Nederland before spending seven years at Endemol. But his journey had a rather unorthodox start. As an 18-year-old rebel with a love of spinning decks, Hendriks became a DJ for pirate station Radio Caroline, which operated on a ship in the North Sea. “I have always been a bit of a rebel in testing the waters and seeing how far certain things can go. I’m not too fond of authority,” he says. In fact, while he was involved with Radio Caroline, Hendriks faced the full force of the law. “Early in 1978, we were all standing on the deck and this DTI boat came up to us within five or six metres. Once these guys got closer, we all turned around and we dropped our pants.”
That mooning incident came back to bite Hendriks on the bum when he decided to take his career “legal”. “Two years laterI was working for legal public broadcasting in the Netherlands and I did a report on pirate radio. I had to do an interview with the man responsible within the Dutch Justice Department.
I walked into his office and introduced myself and he asked me about being a DJ on board Radio Caroline. He said he had some interesting pictures of me with my pants down.”
Hendriks looks back on his time with Radio Caroline fondly. Working in such an unconventional workplace – he could be on board for 10 to 12 weeks at a time – taught him some valuable life lessons. “I learned to pick and choose my battles because, when you’re on a ship that is two metres long, you have to learn what to argue about. You learn a lot about people too,” he says.
When Radio Caroline was taken off air in 1979, he got a job as a DJ in Amsterdam’s Red Light District, where he learned even more about people. “It was a swingers’ club. Couples came in, they undressed and they had sex in one huge space. And I was spinning records for them,” he says. “If you watch literally 30, 40, 50 people having sex with each other three days a week while you are just sitting there in blue jeans and a T-shirt, it doesn’t mean a lot to you. It just becomes another job.”
The rebelliousness and broad-mindedness that he had cultivated as a young man fed into his business plan for commercial radio in the Netherlands, which he launched when he became a co-founder of Sky Radio in the late 1980s (whenit was majority-owned by Rupert Murdoch). “We were beaming programming in from the UK into the Netherlands – like Radio Caroline was beaming from the North Sea into the UK,” he says. “When that worked, I thought, hey, maybe we can do the same with TV. We launched RTL from Luxembourg and created the number one commercial TV station.”
Before he could launch the business though, Hendriks had to face up to the Dutch government, which wanted to block the enterprise. In one of his run-ins with the courts, Hendriks had to fight numerous cases in order to expand programming.
And this wasn’t the only cause Hendriks has fought for: the Dutchman recalls helping start-up Tom’s Cabin, which was a second-hand marketplace for e-books. The firm was pushing the boundaries of legality – a position Hendriks knew well – and publishers weren’t impressed. The case ended up atthe European court of law. “We lost that case,” Hendriks says.
Despite Hendriks’s rebellious leanings, he became president of NBC Europe and transformed Superchannel into NBC, and finally CNBC Europe. He joined the TV production company Endemol as an executive board member in 1994. The firm operated in three countries when he started and by the time he left in 2001, it had expanded its offering to 21 nations. Its market value had grown from €135 million to €5.3 billion.
The phenomenal success of Endemol was, in part, down to an innovative and entrepreneurial business model. “We had a number of TV formats that we offered exclusively to entrepreneurs who already owned their own company. We bought 49% of the company, we provided them with our portfolio so that they could easily grow their companies,” he says. “Then, we would acquire another 2% a few years later and then after five years, we would acquire them.”
From culture to coding
Hendriks guided Endemol through its IPO and acquisition by Telefónica in 2001, and he took the financial model he had cultivated at Endemol to Startupbootcamp. “We builtit like a TV production company but instead of making TV programmes, we produce companies.” The start-ups he’s most interested in are surprisingly Fintech and Artificial Intelligence (AI), rather than media. “I think AI will revolutionise the world in an unbelievable way. AI is in all our lives and I think spectacular things will happen.” He warns that the media industry could be “sleeping” through the tech revolution, with the winners being the ones who are prepared to use tech innovations. “I’m a host of a podcast – the editing of the episodes is done in a few minutes and is fully automated with AI technology.”
Despite his interest in tech start-ups, Hendriks is still involvedin broadcasting. “News has always been a passion. I get up very early in the morning and I still have subscriptions to eight newspapers. I still read the New York Times when I wake up,” he says. “I know I sound like a grumpy old man but I sometimes miss that curiosity with young people. I was always curious and asking things like, ‘How can we break a media monopoly?’”
The fact that more and more young people are sourcing news from social media rather than traditional publishers concerns him. He also worries about the downsides of AI, in particular its ability to create fake news. “When I was on board Radio Caroline, I used to love watching the news with Anna Ford and Angela Rippon. But nowadays you can recreate them and you can feed them today’s news and they can read it artificially, without anybody noticing that they are not real.”
The risk of misinformation is “one of the worst problems of our time,” he says. “I think we need to tell young kids at the earliest possible age about the dangers of misinformation and how you can check facts.”
Hendriks is a very shrewd businessman but today he enjoys a slightly less hectic pace. He spends around three-quarters of his time in the Ibiza countryside, where there isn’t any mobile reception. Luckily, he is able to stay connected thanks to the invention of another rebel – Elon Musk and his orbiting Starlink broadband. It seems a suitably elliptical journey for a man who has himself beamed media around the world.
Tips From The Top
What are your tips for a successful business?
1. Just do it. Too many people don’t dare to start. There may be 50 reasons not to do it but, if you really want to build a business you have to just go for it.
2. Validate your riskiest assumptions whenever possible. Don’t just decide based on your experience. Build on data and interact.
3. Reflect at least once a year on whether your current role still fits you. Running a company with 100 employees is very different to a start-up with just a few collaborators.
How do you relax?
By lots of reading, walking and dancing.
Can you tell us something surprisingabout yourself?
I’m a pretty good house music DJ. I love to play minimal, progressive and techno.
Is there a piece of tech, other than your phone, that you could not live without?
My Starlink connection in Ibiza and my Tesla Model S in Amsterdam. But the piece I really love is my Pioneer DJM 900 NEXUS DJ mixer.
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