Georges van Hoegaerden

Managing Director, The Venture Company

Play a recent interview with Georges.

Mission

Georges' passion is to create a brand new economically renewable model for groundbreaking innovation that produces authentic social economic value and outlier investor returns.

Industry acclaim

Lauded by experienced entrepreneurs, CEOs, Limited Partners and Venture Capitalists Georges' no-nonsense writing on his blog has captured the readers of mainstream media from The Wallstreet Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, Business Week, Fortune Magazine, NPR and many others.

Experience

Born in The Netherlands, Georges moved to Palo Alto, California some 15 years ago for Oracle and the result of his leadership performance in emerging media products. He has since built the strategy and growth of a four person startup to a triple digit exit and has been the CEO, board director at three other early stage companies he raised money for and turned into high gear.

Alongside his work with startups and some of Silicon Valley's most well known technology companies, Georges became deeply familiar with the workings of Sand Hill Road (the "birthplace" of Venture Capital), acting as a part-time Venture Partner for a budding Venture Capital firm. Inside "the kitchen" of Venture Capital, the systemic and economic failure of innovation arbitrage quickly became apparent to him.

Georges began his technology career in the 70s, programming award winning applications on a HP-41C while still in school, writing a windows operating system in macro-assembler on a Harris-100 mini computer, maintaining structural engineering applications in Fortran 66 & 77, and developing windows and database optimization technologies in C++ and PL/SQL. He climbed the proverbial ladder from programming to systems management, to IT management, to IT purchasing, to pre-sales, to product marketing, to venture catalyst, to management, to serial CEO, to private investor, to (part-time) venture capitalist, to innovation economist.

The experience of having witnessed first-hand every corner of the innovation's business and the stubborn economic models that hold them hostage prompted him to write about and fix what once started as a thriving catalyst for groundbreaking innovation.

Personal

In his private life Georges cofounded and built a tennis-club at age 14, played tennis and basketball competitively and was an avid sailor, owning his own boat. Nowadays most of his free time is consumed in the company of his wife and 7-year old daughter, discovering more of the beautiful world around us.

Georges is an espresso snob and prefers Illy Cafe every day, a few times a day. When not completely submerged in work (that is also his hobby), Georges branches out on his own at times, creating and capturing yet another vision, this time in digital photography.