VC turned social impact founder, with Anieke Lamers, founder of Peekabond

Not My First Guess

After earning few thousand euros selling toasties at school, you may think founding a company would have been Anieke's first stop post university. But a horrendous hackathon experience initially put her off the no sleep, stinky side of entrepreneurship.
Instead, she started out in the corporate world, though quickly made her way into Venture Capital, where she invested in Social Impact ventures at Rubio.
Her desire to sit the other side of the table never wore off though, so she quit to start her own company, taking with her the VC mindset and key questions to ask when launching a new, high growth venture. Testing a few ideas in parallel, it wasn't until she made customers cry with her proposition to help people connect with much loved children remotely, that she doubled down on Peekabond.
In this episode she shares:

• How being a VC changed how Anieke approached founding a company
• The importance of early testing: including how making prospective customers cry convinced her to double down, and how Anieke tested the product with ppt and then no code before investing in build
• Running a co-founder dating process for both her co-founders, and the yucky questions you need to ask early
• And much more!

Links

• Try Peekabond here
• Read more about the Mom Test here
• Learn more about OnDeck programmes here
• Try 50 questions for co-founder dating here
• Take the Barrett Values Test here
• Build a clickable prototype on Bubble.io or Adalo
• Listen to Hattie's previous interview with Tessa Clarke here
• Read YC's warning to startups here
• Read Tessa's article on the need for a cockroach plan here
• Follow Anieke on LinkedIn here