From healthcare to high-tech: the journey behind Zivver's secure solutions
Zivver is an email security solution that supports compliance and powers productivity. CEO and co-founder Wouter Klinkhamer took the time for an interview to discuss his entrepreneurial journey, the missing link for "tech boys", networking as an introverted CEO and the real impact of company culture.
Before founding Zivver, you were a consultant in healthcare. Is healthcare where you got the idea for Zivver?
Absolutely, although I have to admit it was actually my co-founder Rick’s idea rather than mine! As strategic consultants in healthcare, we noticed that sharing sensitive data, like health and personal information, was often a challenge. From unencrypted USB drives and insecure emails to traveling across the country to retrieve encrypted DVDs, the process was either unsafe or inefficient.
When GDPR came into play, it became clear there was a huge opportunity: more data is online, a lot of it sensitive, and there was a growing need to share it securely. Email, the most widely used B2B/B2C communication tool, was never really designed to be secure, and people were making errors when sending or receiving sensitive information. The potential for a solution like Zivver extended far beyond healthcare: it’s crucial in various sectors, including government and commercial environments, where secure exchange of sensitive data, such as IP or annual reports, is essential.
You co-founded Zivver with Rick Goud, who you met at your previous venture. What is your advice on finding the perfect co-founder?
My advice would be to find someone complementary to you. Rick has a brilliant mind and a background in software (he has a PhD), always striving for improvement. He’s full of new ideas, forward-driven, and incredibly creative. I’m more focused on shaping the story behind the business, with expertise in business, law, and people management.
So, would a third co-founder have been an added value?
Someone with international experience could have helped accelerate our international growth. You often see this gap with the tech boys. They have great ideas and the brains to make them happen, but they don’t always know how to scale with marketing and sales into markets that they don’t know themselves. That’s usually a tough challenge.
How did you experience fundraising and pitching? What tips do you have for entrepreneurs in the same boat?
Rick handled most of the fundraising in the early stages. I have to say, it’s tough to talk about your own company as if it’s the best in the world: you’re often more focused on what needs improvement. But you have to do it. If you don’t share your story, no one will hear it. So, my advice is: just do it! You’ll fail a hundred times and feel awkward, and that’s perfectly fine.
Early-stage fundraising is very different from running a well-established business. In the beginning, it’s all about the promise; later, it’s about talking about your team and the mechanics of your company. Every time we pitch, we still need to gear up and get into the right mindset. Fortunately, it happens less and less often. For us, fundraising was always more of a means to an end, not a goal in itself.
To stay on the same topic… What do you think of networking? A necessary evil?
As an introverted CEO, I’m a bit of an exception. I find maintaining contacts can be energy-draining, especially with large groups or when I need to check in with someone regularly - it can feel a bit pushy.
Just like our previous interviewee, Zhong Xu from Deliverect, I’ve noticed that you strongly emphasize the importance of company culture in past interviews. Why is that?
It’s something we learned during the company’s growth. I studied business, so the idea that culture is important wasn’t new - I had read about it in all my books. However, I always found it quite abstract. I didn’t fully grasp its importance until Zivver reached around 30 employees.
Then, as we scaled beyond 100 people, especially during COVID, we began to see its true impact. Managing a team of 100 people is a unique challenge: it’s neither small nor large, and you need to balance the dynamics carefully. You bring in middle managers who hire people with different backgrounds and preferences, and while everyone has good intentions, things can start to feel disconnected. It’s difficult to manage, especially when different countries' cultures are involved. No one was doing anything wrong, but we were all approaching things in different ways.
So how did you handle that?
We launched a program to define the core values of the company and integrate them into everything we do. And we continue to highlight those values regularly. Each quarter, we focus on one of our core values during all-hands meetings. We also make sure to revisit them in our day-to-day work and give them a prominent place in our hiring process. This helped us create a more cohesive team. Even though we still embrace the necessary diversity in our people, we now have a great group that works well together, sharing the same vision and values.
Zivver is a tech-driven innovation. What technologies or innovations are you most excited or skeptical about?
When you're pitching, you often realize that what you're working on isn’t always the most talked-about topic in the market. When we started, blockchain was the big buzzword, and we had to constantly explain why we weren’t focused on that.
That’s why I’m skeptical about AI as a broad, catch-all concept. When something is that vast, it often lacks depth. Some companies offer AI-driven solutions that require such enormous resources, it feels like using a cannon to shoot a mosquito. They overlook the resource waste, the staggering costs, and even the environmental impact.
On the other hand, I’m excited about how AI can create specific opportunities. These can even be small, mundane things—like using machine learning cost-effectively to solve a particular problem. What else can be solved with such massive resources?
It’s not always about big, flashy innovations; sometimes, the small, efficient applications can make the biggest difference.