A founder can be surrounded by people all day and still lack the one thing they need most: someone who can ask the difficult question without an agenda—and stay long enough to help find the answer.
In March 2025, I joined a group of Techleap founders and CEOs for a week in New York. We attended sessions on scaling in the United States, the recurring challenges of fast-growing companies and keeping your eyes on the prize in a landscape that never stops changing.
There was also a surreal moment: seeing Soly—and my own name—on the Nasdaq screen in Times Square. It was visible, celebratory and easy to capture in a photograph.
But the part of the trip that stayed with me was less visible. It was the value of being around other founders who understood the weight behind the title.
Surrounded is not the same as supported
Founders operate inside a web of relationships. Employees look to you for clarity. Investors expect progress and control. A board needs reliable information. Customers and partners want confidence. Advisors help within a defined mandate.
All of those people can be valuable. None of those relationships is completely neutral.
The founder is expected to hold the bigger picture, absorb uncertainty and make the call. As a company grows, more people become involved in decisions, yet the number of people with whom the founder can speak completely openly can actually shrink.
That is why a trusted peer network matters. Not as another networking event. Not as a room for polished success stories. As a small group of people who recognise the situation, understand the pressure and are prepared to be honest.
Three things only the right peers can provide
1. Context without a long explanation
A founder who has raised capital, entered a new market, missed a forecast or rebuilt a leadership team understands the emotional and operational layers behind the spreadsheet. You can move quickly beyond the headline and discuss the actual decision.
This shared context matters. It creates space to admit doubt without first defending your competence. The conversation can start where most formal conversations end.
2. Challenge without organisational politics
The best peer does not tell you what you want to hear. They ask why cash is getting tighter while revenue is growing. Whether a new market is a real opportunity or a distraction. Whether you are keeping someone in a role because they are right for the next phase—or because they were important in the previous one.
Those questions can feel uncomfortable. That is their value. A founder needs people who have permission to challenge the story before reality does it for them.
3. Answers built from scar tissue
Challenge alone is not enough. Founders already have plenty of people who can identify a problem. The valuable peer also brings options: how they structured the decision, what they measured, where they went wrong and what they would do differently now.
That is not theory. It is pattern recognition earned through experience. You remain responsible for the decision, but you no longer have to invent every answer alone.
The questions that protect the company
Looking back at my own journey with Soly, I increasingly value the questions that cut through momentum:
- What are you assuming to be true? Growth plans often rest on assumptions that have stopped being tested.
- What would you do if the next funding round were delayed? The answer reveals whether strategy is supported by resilience.
- Who can tell you that you are wrong? A leadership team without real challenge creates confidence, not necessarily control.
- Which decision are you postponing because it is personally difficult? Delay rarely makes a leadership issue smaller.
- Are incentives around the table truly aligned? Shared ambition does not automatically mean shared interests.
- What does success cost—and can the organisation carry it? Every growth opportunity adds people, cash, governance and execution risk.
These are not questions to reserve for a crisis. They are the questions that can prevent one. The right time to build a founder network is before you urgently need it.
Build a personal board of founders
A useful peer network does not need to be large. It needs to be deliberate. I would look for a small group with different experiences: someone one stage ahead, someone facing similar complexity, an operator who sees execution clearly and a person who is naturally willing to challenge consensus.
The conditions matter more than the format. Confidentiality must be real. Meetings should be recurring rather than crisis-driven. Successes can be celebrated, but the agenda should make room for the unresolved issue, the uncomfortable doubt and the decision that has no perfect answer.
Most importantly, peer support must move beyond conversation. A good session ends with a clearer choice, an experiment, a person to call or a decision that can no longer be avoided.
The Nasdaq moment was special. I remain grateful to Techleap and the founders and CEOs who made that week memorable. But the deeper lesson was not about visibility, New York or even international expansion.
It was that founders become stronger when they stop treating every difficult question as something they must answer alone.
Patrick van der Meulen
Founder & Operating Partner