Stefan van Duin

In venture capital you see hundreds of founders come by. And you notice how often the outcome has little to do with the numbers.

A founder with the right network gets a second meeting. Someone with a less polished story drops out. At Borski Fund we deliberately backed the entrepreneurs the rest of the market skipped, which meant we couldn't afford to run on instinct. So I built a model to quantify what actually made an investment the right one, instead of relying on gut feeling alone.

It worked. Not because the model was smarter than we were, but because it made our decisions explainable. We could say why someone deserved capital, and stand behind it.

I moved into recruitment because I saw exactly the same problem there, only many times bigger. A CV and a recruiter's good feeling still decide whether you get hired, and almost none of it is measured. At Selection Lab we're changing that. We measure why someone genuinely fits a role, and what drives them once they're in it. As Head of Partnerships I make sure that happens at scale, by working with other players in the market so our technology fits the way recruitment actually runs.

As CFO I look at the other side of it, the return for our clients. Automating the process cuts cost straight away. But the real business case sits in quality of hire and retention, in the people you hire staying, and doing well.