Part IThe Story
The button was green, and nobody had bought it. Someone at Adyen had put it together by hand, zelf in elkaar geknutseld as the Dutch press later described it, a phrase that carries a faint smell of glue and a primary-school craft table. On June 13, 2018, the day the company's shares began trading on Euronext Amsterdam, it was pressed in front of the people who worked there. That was the ceremony. The traditional Amsterdam version involves the Damrak, a gong, the cameras, and a cake heavy with whipped cream. Adyen's founders skipped all of it. They wanted, in the word NRC Handelsblad chose, as little poeha as possible: fuss, fanfare, the noise a man makes when he would like you to notice that he is making none.
The shares had been priced at €240. By the end of the first day they had roughly doubled. "I hadn't counted on that," Pieter van der Does told two reporters from the Süddeutsche Zeitung some months later. He said it in an English the Germans described as having soft sch sounds. That night in the Amsterdam office there was a little champagne. There was no party. He wanted it that way.
Nobody at Adyen seems to have dwelt on the irony, though it is hard to miss once you see it: a button is the whole business. Someone in São Paulo pays for an Uber ride. Someone in Tokyo renews a Spotify subscription. A bidder in Ohio wins a pair of trainers on eBay. Each time, a signal leaves a button and travels a chain of strangers (merchant, gateway, acquirer, card network, issuer, and back again), and very often somewhere on that route it passes through software written in Amsterdam by a company whose name most of the people pressing will never learn. In December 2015 TechCrunch put a video interview with him under the headline "Adyen's Probably Touched Your Money At Some Point." Van der Does had spent the better part of two decades making sure that the moment of paying would feel like nothing at all. When it came time to press a button of his own, he made sure that felt like almost nothing too.
He is tall and spare. He is nearly bald. He is given to long silences before he answers a question and to a smile that, one interviewer noted, does not leave his face even when the subject turns serious. People compare him to Steve Jobs. He waves the comparison off: he is nowhere near the visionary Jobs was, he told the Süddeutsche, and he also doesn't drop telephones into water glasses to demonstrate power. When he visits the Berlin office he sits down at whatever seat is free at one of the long tables and opens his laptop. By the time that profile ran, a few months after the green button, Adyen was worth almost €18 billion, more than Commerzbank, and employed roughly 800 people in 15 locations. Bloomberg's Billionaires Index counted three new billionaires among its founders: van der Does, the chief technology officer Arnout Schuijff, and the former innovation director John Caspers. A company far from Silicon Valley had produced wealth on a scale the Valley considered its own.
None of the three had rung a gong.
By the Numbers
The Plumbing of Global Commerce
€1.996BRevenue, 2024
€925MNet income, 2024
€970.1BPayment volume processed, 2023
2011Profitable every year since
€240IPO price, June 13, 2018, which roughly doubled on day one
$43BProcessed over Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, 2025
4,345Employees, 2024
A Company Named for Starting Over
Adyen is a word in Sranan Tongo, the creole spoken in Suriname, the former Dutch colony on the shoulder of South America. It means, more or less, start again. Most founders name their companies for what they hope to become. Van der Does named his for what he was leaving behind.
The first attempt was called Bibit. He helped build it from May 1999, as its chief commercial officer, alongside Schuijff. It was a payment service provider for the first generation of serious e-commerce, and its clients were large: Microsoft and Dell are among the names that appear in later accounts. "The first time around, we were doing payments with large companies," van der Does told Institutional Investor in 2016. "We were an interface between the merchant and bank systems to make reconciliation smoother." In May 2004 the Royal Bank of Scotland bought Bibit, reportedly for about €100 million. Van der Does stayed on for two years as head of sales and account management. RBS sent him to a senior-manager programme at Harvard Business School's executive education arm. He worked, he later said, alongside Ron Kalifa, who went on to build Worldpay out of the RBS payments business. Kalifa would become one of the defining figures of the old order in British payments. Van der Does would go on to build the thing that made the old order look old.
What he watched inside the bank has become, over the years, a kind of founding parable, and he has told it often enough that the details have worn smooth. He has described the acquirer as a 120,000-person corporate giant, and within six months, he said, the energy that had driven the small team was gone. Engineers were flown to London for reward dinners when they should have been writing code. Managers who could not read code were making the technical decisions. Travel policies replaced trust. "It's surprising how quickly you can kill a culture," he said at a SaaSiest conference in Amsterdam in 2025, nearly two decades after he had left the room where it happened.
He left in July 2006. There was a gap, and he went to Brazil. "The total objective was to be bored," he told Institutional Investor. It did not work. Somewhere in that sabbatical, which by every account was supposed to be empty, he started planning another payments company.
The phrase reads as self-deprecation, a joke at his own restlessness, but it also says something about the man underneath. Most of the clichés founders tell about themselves concern hunger. This one concerns a failure to rest. He went to the other side of the world to have nothing to do and found that the problem he had left in Amsterdam had come along with him. Bibit had been a layer sitting on top of the banks. The next company would replace the layer with a foundation.
In December 2006 Adyen was incorporated in Amsterdam, with van der Does, Schuijff, and Caspers among its founders. Its name was a promise and also a confession: we did this once, and not well enough.
The Dike-Reeve's Inheritance
There is another Pieter van der Does, and he died at sea, or near enough to it.
He was born in Leiden on January 17, 1562. (One Dutch biographical register gives 1564, and the archives argue with themselves the way archives do.) He was the youngest son of Jacob van der Does, a schepen, an alderman, of Leiden during the city's siege by the Spanish. In 1587 he became bailiff and dijkgraaf of the Rijnland water board, the dike-reeve responsible for the earthworks and sluices that kept the North Sea off the farmland. He was wounded at the siege of Geertruidenberg in 1588 and wounded again at the siege of Groningen in 1594. In between he was made vice-admiral of West Holland, on December 23, 1588, and later master-general of the artillery. The States of Holland and West Friesland rewarded him with the fiefs of Vriesekoop and Rijnsaterwoude and the title of jonkheer.
In May 1599, during the Eighty Years' War, he led a Dutch and Zeeland fleet south to blockade the Iberian coast. On the way it attacked the Spanish possession of Las Palmas on Gran Canaria. The town was heavily defended and the attack failed. A Dutch engraving of the assault survives, and it labels the town Allagoena: the engraver had confused Las Palmas with La Laguna on Tenerife, so that the most durable image of the man's last campaign is a picture of the wrong place. The fleet went on to the Spanish holdings off West Africa. On October 24, 1599, at the island of São Tomé, the admiral died, of wounds taken at Las Palmas or of malaria. The sources disagree. He was thirty-seven.
Whether a direct line runs from that admiral to the Pieter van der Does who founded Adyen, the material available to me does not say, and I have not tried to make it say so. What can be stated is narrower and stranger. The modern Pieter's full name is Jonkheer Pieter Willem van der Does, born in 1969, and the genealogists at Adel in Nederland trace his family to the sixteenth century, to the small group of regent families who governed the Dutch cities. His ancestor Adriaan van der Does (1762 to 1840), a councillor and alderman of Rotterdam, was raised into the Dutch nobility in 1815 with the predicate jonkheer. The same surname appears down the centuries on an engraver, two painters, and Jan van der Does, called Janus Dousa, a statesman, historian, and poet. The name reads like a cross-section of the Dutch Republic: aldermen, admirals, dike-reeves, regents. These were the people who kept the water out and the money moving, and nobody thanked them unless something broke.
Hold the old job title against the new company for a moment. A dijkgraaf administers infrastructure whose entire success is measured by its invisibility. When the dike holds, the polder is a field of cows and nobody thinks about the sea. When it fails, everyone does. Payments work the same way. Adyen's whole commercial argument rests on the claim that the money arrives, the fraud is caught, the authorization goes through, and the shopper notices none of it. Forbes once described the company, in a line NRC later quoted, as an essential service without glamour, one of the hard workers of e-commerce. That is a fair description of a water board.
The modern van der Does does not talk about his ancestry in any interview I have found. The genealogy sites do it for him. He wears jeans, thin T-shirts, and sneakers, and he once told the Telegraph that the open, very direct feedback culture of his company was "maybe … quite a Dutch culture." He did not say patrician. The two traditions coexist in the country uneasily, the regent class and the flat, plain-speaking burgher ethic, and in him they appear to have settled into one man. He has the title and none of the manner.
In October 2021 he sat for a long podcast conversation on scaling Dutch companies, The Scale Lab, produced by the government-backed Techleap. One of the two hosts was Constantijn van Oranje, a man whose surname is the name of the royal house. The jonkheer was interviewed by the Orange about how to build something without anyone's permission. The conversation ran an hour and five minutes. Neither man seems to have mentioned the sixteenth century.
Apologizing for Other People's Pipes
The lesson of Bibit, stripped of the parable about reward dinners, was technical before it was cultural.
A card payment is a relay race run by people who do not trust one another. In the textbook version the shopper hands a card to a terminal or types its number into a website. The data goes to the acquirer, the institution that has signed the merchant and bears its risk. The acquirer checks for fraud, sometimes with outside help, and hands the transaction to a card network such as Visa or Mastercard. The network routes it to the issuer, the shopper's bank, which confirms who the shopper is and authorizes the charge. The authorization comes back through the network to the acquirer and then to the terminal. Then the whole sequence runs again, in a different form, for capture and for settlement. Each handoff is a seam, and data leaks at the seams. Bibit had lived at the seams. It was a layer over the banks, interfacing with card schemes it did not control and inheriting failures it could not fix.
— Pieter van der Does, to the Telegraph, October 2017At Bibit, we often had to apologise to consumers about issues that were no fault of our own.
That sentence explains the company. If you are forever apologizing for other people's pipes, you can buy better pipes, or you can become the plumbing. Adyen set out to become the plumbing. "We started from scratch and did it in the way it should have been done, building the full stack ourselves," van der Does told Institutional Investor. Gateway, risk management, processing, acquiring, settlement: one platform, one codebase, built in-house end to end, "so that no transactional data is lost," as he put it to the Telegraph. That last clause sounds bland and is in fact the whole thesis. A single system sees the entire life of a transaction, and so it can learn from all of it. It sees which authorizations fail and why, and which fraud patterns are emerging in Brazil this week that will show up in Spain next month. A patchwork sees only its own patch.
To own the stack, though, Adyen had to become the institutions it had once sat on top of, and that took licences, which took years. The milestones read like a slow siege. Adyen signed its first global enterprise merchant, Groupon, in 2009. It added risk-management tools in 2010. In 2012 it obtained a pan-European acquiring licence, added point-of-sale terminals, and opened offices in San Francisco, London, Paris, and Stockholm. In 2016 it got acquiring capability in Brazil through BIN sponsorship (the country where its founder had once tried to be bored) and launched Adyen for Platforms. In April 2017 it received a European banking licence, which made it an acquiring bank in its own right, and in the same year it obtained acquiring licences in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand. Malaysia and Puerto Rico followed in 2020, then Japan, the United Arab Emirates, and a US branch licence in 2021. Every one of them meant less dependence on a party Adyen did not control and fewer occasions to apologize.
By 2015, when the tech.eu writer Robin Wauters sat down with him in Amsterdam, the platform supported more than 250 payment methods in 187 transaction currencies for clients including Facebook, Airbnb, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Vodafone. Wauters asked whether Adyen was really a technology company or a financial-services firm. Technology, van der Does said, unequivocally. Asked whether big clients split their volume among providers, he gave an answer that doubles as a description of the strategy: "For many of our clients we are the sole provider, because it keeps it very simple for them, and they only have one financial administration, which we organise." In 2016 Adyen was processing $50 billion a year, according to Institutional Investor, and connected directly to Mastercard and Visa, so its transactions were faster and its service levels higher than if they had been routed through an intermediary bank.
It is worth remembering what the incumbents thought of this business. The consultancy SparkOptimus summed up the van der Does approach as offering clients "a subscription to innovation" in a sector that traditional banks had neglected as dull. They were right that it was dull. They were wrong to conclude that dull meant safe.
The Route and the Overhang
He climbs. That is one of the few personal facts he gives away, and he gives it away for a reason: it is how he explains the company.
"Never deviate from a well-planned route just because a shortcut suddenly appears," he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung, in the paper's German rendering, which means the English here is a translation of a translation of his English. The supposedly shorter way, he went on, often turns out to be a dangerous, exhausting route across an overhanging rock face you had underestimated. The reporters drew the business moral themselves: keep the large goal in view, and don't be distracted by gains that look easy but lie off the plan. They called the profile Der Kletterer, the climber, and they added a line he would not have written about himself: unknown summits attract him, not the well-trodden routes.
Both of those things are true of him, and they pull against each other a little. The climber who prizes the planned route and the climber who wants the summit nobody has mapped are the same climber only if the planning is very long. Adyen's planning was. In February 2022, while discussing the company's results for the second half of 2021, he gave the Financial Times a sentence that would read as a boast from most CEOs and from him reads as a measurement:
"We invested in point of sale technology in 2013, now in 2022 I'm talking about what a good move it was. This is the timeframe it takes."
It took nine years from the decision to the vindication. In between, Adyen built physical terminals at a time when the fashionable money in European technology was chasing apps, wallets, and anything that could be called a platform. Physical retail looked like the past. Van der Does treated it as unfinished business: the same shopper buying online on Tuesday and in a store on Saturday is one customer, and a payments company that sees only one of those transactions sees half a person. The industry later named this "unified commerce" and wrote white papers about it. Adyen had been laying the cable for years by then.
The shortcut most tempting to a payments company is the custom deal. A large merchant arrives wanting a bespoke integration in exchange for a great deal of volume. At Bibit he had said yes, and he has described the results: a custom integration for a single large client created months of technical debt and risk, and every exception made the system slower. At Adyen the lesson became the first line of the company's code of conduct: We build to benefit all customers (not just one). "If it only benefits one customer, it doesn't scale," he said in 2025. On a rock face, a shortcut that serves one climber leaves a loose hold for everyone who comes after.
In a 2025 conversation at Slush in Helsinki with the New York Times journalist Jason Karaian, he gave the metaverse as his example of an overhyped technology, the kind of shortcut that looks like a summit from the valley floor. Adyen's posture toward trends, as he described it there, was to build a foundation flexible enough to absorb whatever came rather than to predict it: to let merchants and markets drive adoption, and to hold off until the route was clear. At a Goldman Sachs event in February 2026 he said Adyen was offering loans to merchants but not supporting cryptocurrency, because clients were not asking for it. It is the posture of a man who would rather be second up a known face than first off an unknown one, and who is nonetheless climbing toward something nobody has stood on.
On the Techleap podcast in 2021 he was asked whom he admired. He named Robbie Naish. The heading under which that part of the conversation was later filed reads Reinventing and Staying Relevant. It is an odd choice for a payments executive, a man of the water rather than the rock face, but it fits the name of the company: start again, and then keep starting.
Why Look for an Exit?
The money arrived late and on his terms.
For its first eight years Adyen raised little attention and not much capital, by the standards of what came later. It was profitable from 2011. Profitability is the most useful thing a startup can have, because it lets the founder say no. In December 2014 Adyen announced a $250 million round led by the growth-equity firm General Atlantic, with existing investors Temasek Holdings, Index Ventures, and Felicis Ventures joining. The Wall Street Journal reported a valuation of $1.5 billion. tech.eu's Wauters wrote afterward that the company "flew under the radar for far too long until everyone looked up." By 2015 the valuation had reached $2.3 billion, making Adyen the sixth-largest of Europe's so-called unicorns. When it went public, Business Insider's headline identified it as backed by Mark Zuckerberg and used by Uber, which was a useful shorthand for an American audience still unsure how to pronounce the name.
Offers to buy the company came too. He did not hide them. "I always have the feeling that this is only the beginning," he told Institutional Investor in 2016, when the magazine placed him fiftieth on its list of the people reshaping financial technology. He went on:
— Pieter van der Does, to Institutional Investor, July 2016The market size is almost endless, the opportunity is so big, and the company is doing well, so why look for an exit?
"Why look for an exit?" is a rhetorical question only if you have already sold a company once and watched what happened to it. He had. A founder who sells his first company usually sells his second more easily, because the first sale taught him the price of things and the second sale is only arithmetic. Van der Does drew the opposite lesson from the same experience. Bibit's sale had taught him what selling cost in culture, in speed, and in control over the quality of a transaction, and the second time he declined to pay it.
In the 2021 Techleap conversation, according to a published outline of the episode, he described the funding philosophy that made the refusals possible: simplicity, independence, common shares. He held out for the right investor and turned down acquisition offers. Common shares are the dull detail in that list, and they matter. A company financed with layered preferences, in which later money gets paid out ahead of earlier money in a sale, builds pressure toward a particular kind of exit at a particular moment. A company financed with plain common stock keeps everyone in the same boat, and keeps the boat in the founder's hands.
San Francisco was the hinge, and he spent a great deal of time there in those years. By 2016 more than 40 percent of Adyen's merchants were American, and Institutional Investor reported that he spent much of his time in the city, though his home stayed in Amsterdam. (The magazine dates the San Francisco office to 2008. Adyen's own milestone list says 2012. Even the company's history cannot agree about when it went west.) The shape of the American business was peculiar. Many American companies, he explained in 2015, started with Adyen in Latin America, and then "the São Paulo office will grow quickly in terms of revenues. We could attribute that growth to Brazil or to the US, depending on where the client's headquarters are." It was a Dutch company winning American clients through Brazilian volume. Where the business was located depended on which way you held the map.
The decisive signature came on January 31, 2018. eBay announced that Adyen would become its primary payments processor, replacing, over a long transition, the arrangement under which PayPal (once eBay's own subsidiary) had handled its marketplace payments. Bloomberg's headline was blunt: eBay rose to a record high on the shift to Adyen, and PayPal tumbled. eBay began moving volume in North America in the second half of 2018, expanded in 2019, and in 2021 shifted the majority of its marketplace customers to the Dutch platform. Four and a half months after eBay's announcement, someone at Adyen pressed the green button.
He spoke to NRC in the spring of 2020. By then Adyen's value had roughly tripled since the listing, to some €25 billion, and the paper noted that he had sold 15 percent of his shares the year before. He said several times during the interview that money did not interest him. The headline the paper ran was a line he had said in a different mood, rendered here from the Dutch: Yes, but guys, how great is this, what I'm doing now? The slug in the paper's web address preserved the other line: I'm really not concerned with money at all.
Instructions, Not Inspiration
About five years into Adyen, by van der Does's own account, he and Schuijff noticed they were repeating themselves. Every new conversation with every new hire covered the same ground: how to decide, whom to call, what to build, what to refuse. So they wrote it down.
The result was the Adyen Formula, eight sentences long. Most corporate values statements are written to be framed. This one was written to be followed, and you can see the difference in the grammar. The sentences are almost all declaratives with a verb doing work:
We build to benefit all customers (not just one).
We make good decisions and consider the long-term benefits for our customers, Adyen and the world at large.
We launch fast and iterate.
Winning is more important than ego; we work as a team — across cultures and time zones.
We don't hide behind email, instead we pick up the phone.
We talk straight without being rude.
We seek out different perspectives to sharpen our ideas.
We create our own path to grow toward our full potential.
The fifth line is the one outsiders remember, because it sounds like a quirk and turns out to be a theory. "We avoid emailing, where possible; everyone is encouraged to pick up the phone," he told the Telegraph in October 2017. Then he gave an example from outside the office, so domestic it is almost comic: "It's how I conduct my personal life. If an upstairs neighbour had a leak in their house and emailed me about it, I would drop by and talk to them, rather than escalate the issue with another email." A billionaire climbs the stairs about a leak in the ceiling. It is the dike-reeve's instinct in miniature: when water is coming through, you go and look.
Email is asynchronous, and asynchrony lets people perform. They can copy a superior and build a paper trail. Disagreement turns into a document. A phone call is less flattering and faster: two people, one problem, no audience. A company that processes hundreds of billions of euros a year has strong reasons to fear the slow accumulation of written defensiveness that turns a startup into a bank. Van der Does had watched that happen once already, in six months, at a company with 120,000 people.
The hiring rule is stranger and costlier. "Every person whom we bring into the team is seen by a board member first," he told the Telegraph. That includes, by his later accounts, an office manager on another continent. When Adyen had 260 people in 2015, the rule was eccentric. At more than 4,000 people in 28 offices, drawn from over 115 nationalities, it is a deliberate tax on executive time, and he defends it on the grounds that the tax is the point. Managers under pressure to fill seats settle for good enough, and senior leaders, he argues, do not. The SaaSiest write-up of his 2025 talk compressed the philosophy into a phrase about hiring nines rather than polishing sixes: most organizations spend their energy turning average performers into slightly better ones, and Adyen spends it at the door.
According to the executive-intelligence firm Paragon, which interviewed several former senior colleagues, Adyen kept startup habits well past the startup stage, among them the absence of standard performance evaluations. Feedback was meant to happen continuously and directly, in the talk-straight-without-being-rude register the Formula prescribes. The design principle, as SaaSiest relayed it, was to delegate authority but not accountability: "If you act according to the Formula, you can make decisions yourself." Teams were expected to "debug" ideas with peers before escalating, the language borrowed from engineering, where it belongs. Product managers consulted support teams before launch. The Formula did the approving so that people did not have to.
It worked, or at least it held, for a long time. "We have expert software developers whom, in a Silicon Valley environment, might leave after about 18 months," he told the Telegraph. "At Adyen, we still have developers who were with us from day one." The headquarters he described to NRC in 2020 housed 660 people on Simon Carmiggeltstraat, near Amsterdam's Centraal Station, most of them programmers. He conducted the interview there, in a corner of the canteen, folded into a bench a little too small for him.
The people around him follow a pattern. Ingo Uytdehaage joined as chief financial officer in 2011, the year Adyen turned profitable; he holds degrees in accounting and finance from Maastricht University and passed through the CPA programme at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, a career of large enterprises and spreadsheets that met the startup at the moment it stopped losing money. Roelant Prins, the chief commercial officer, began as a consultant and moved into online payments in early 2000. He studied economics at Erasmus in Rotterdam and spent his career selling payment solutions to the same international e-commerce businesses Bibit had courted. Mariëtte Swart came from an international law firm's financial-services practice, built Adyen's legal team from nothing as general counsel, and became chief risk and compliance officer, the person in charge of the licences that turned the company into its own bank. Each of them, in a different discipline, had seen the old payments world up close and decided to help replace it. Like him, they had started over.
A Negative Return on Being Seen
"The worst is yet to come," he said. The NRC reporter had just asked whether the interview had been less painful than he had feared. "When this piece is in the paper."
He talks to journalists about once a year, he told her, because it comes with the job. "We show that there's nothing secret about what we do here. But for me personally this has a negative return. It leads to a lot of noise." He used the English phrase in the middle of the Dutch, the way bankers do, and it is one of the more revealing things he has said on the record. He has priced publicity the way he prices everything else. It costs attention, distraction, and noise. Whatever it yields goes to the company, not to him, and on his own books the account runs in deficit.
His contemporaries in the industry give long podcasts, keep up public personas, and post a running commentary on their own genius. A Dutch tech-news site profiling him in 2026 opened by contrasting him with CEOs who run their companies like reality shows: daily posts, interviews, podcasts, what they ate for breakfast, which books you ought to read. Then there is van der Does, the site went on, who prefers not to use email and avoids interviews like the plague. The plague line is the site's, not his. The avoidance is his.
The Dutch financial magazine Quote, which tracks the country's rich with the attention of an ornithologist, has catalogued what he does not own. No boat. No collection of sports cars. No expensive designer clothes. He drives, by his own earlier admission, a Volvo XC90 nearly two decades old. Quote approved, with a little edge: "For someone who spends day in and day out pumping money around." In 2022 the magazine spotted a filing with the AFM, the Dutch market regulator: he had sold 8,330 Adyen shares at exactly €1,650.20 apiece, about €13.7 million, keeping a little over 989,000. The stock had approached €3,000 at its peak late the previous year. At the 2018 listing, according to Adel in Nederland, he had held 1.61 million shares. The selling has been steady and modest, the way an engineer might drain a reservoir, and nobody calls it a celebration.
The Jobs comparison returns here, because it rests on a resemblance and a contradiction. There is the gaunt frame, the nearly bare head, the determined look the Süddeutsche noted, and the founder's habit of saying no. The contradiction is in what each man did with the stage. Jobs made the launch event an art form. Van der Does made a button out of spare parts. He insisted to the German reporters that Adyen did not revolve around him as a person, and then he walked into the Berlin office and took an empty seat at the end of a long table.
Some of this is temperament and some of it is strategy, and he would probably not separate the two. A payments company sells trust, and trust in plumbing is the absence of drama. A founder who generates noise draws attention to the place where things could go wrong. When the Telegraph asked him how the company kept data secure, he declined the comforting version. "The nice answer would be that everything is bombproof and that you never need to worry about it. But that's not the case; you have to invest a lot and make sure that you can tackle any attacks or breaches quickly." He chose to sound like a dike-reeve, not a salesman. You do not promise there will be no storm. You promise that someone will be on the dike when it comes.
Iterate on My Approach
On November 22, 2022, Adyen published an internal message from its chief executive. It ran to five short paragraphs and was signed with his first name.
He preferred, he wrote, always to be together in the office, and Adyen was such a special place that after a recent medical procedure he had returned to work at the first opportunity. "After some months pushing myself, I now realize that this approach will not lead to the fastest recovery." Then came a sentence that only someone who had spent sixteen years inside a company that ships software could have written:
— Pieter van der Does, internal message to Adyen staff, November 22, 2022As much as I enjoy being back in the office with all of you, I need to iterate on my approach and prioritize taking as much time as needed to recuperate.
Iterate. It is the third line of the Formula, We launch fast and iterate, turned on his own body. He had shipped himself back to work too early, observed the defect, and was rolling out a patch. He expected to be out of the office for six to eight weeks while still taking part in strategic decisions. He trusted the leadership team "entirely to manage in my absence with zero disruption to the business." The message does not name the procedure, and nothing I have read since does. The man who regards interviews as a negative return gave his own health a single paragraph.
The market had already been unkind that year. Adyen's shares had fallen from near €3,000 to roughly €1,600 by the time Quote noted his share sale. Within the next year the company reorganized at the top. In 2023 Ingo Uytdehaage, the CFO who had arrived in 2011, was appointed co-CEO. Paragon, summarizing interviews with former colleagues, described the change in plain succession terms: van der Does stepping back for health reasons, and a co-CEO "in his own image" set to preserve the culture while bringing more financial expertise. The two men now share the title. Adyen's own team page lists them side by side, and the founder's entry is a short paragraph about economics at the University of Amsterdam and the supervisory board of a company called Écart.
He did not disappear. In November 2025 he was back on stage at Slush with Karaian, advising founders to attract talented people, to concentrate on whatever would raise their odds of survival, and to accept that the odds were poor. He said Europe's advantages were long-term commitment and engineering depth. In February 2026 he spoke at Goldman Sachs about AI-driven authorization and about matching a shopper's physical and digital identities. But the co-CEO arrangement settled a question most founder-led companies postpone until it is answered for them. The Formula was written down so the company would not have to ask him. Now it did not have to ask him about the chief executive's job either.
A culture designed to survive its founder gets tested only when the founder is away, and the test came in a form nobody would have chosen. It came, characteristically, without noise: an internal memo, a timeline of six to eight weeks, zero disruption. Someone else held the dike.
In April 2026 Adyen did something it had never done in twenty years of business. It announced it would buy another company.
The first was Talon.One, a maker of software for loyalty programmes and promotions. In June it announced a second, Orb, an enterprise billing platform. Both deals closed in July 2026 after regulators approved them, and the company began folding Talon.One's promotions engine and Orb's billing technology into the platform. On the same day it announced changes at the top. Gayathri Rajan, global head of product, became chief product officer. The chief financial officer, Ethan Tandowsky, would leave on August 31, and Hwa Tsao, senior vice president of group finance, would serve as interim CFO from September 1.
Five months earlier, at Goldman Sachs, van der Does had described Adyen as a company that rejected acquisition-heavy growth in favour of a single technology stack. The two statements do not quite contradict each other. Buying two companies in twenty years is not acquisition-heavy by any standard, and the stated plan was integration into the one stack, not federation alongside it. But the moment marks something. For two decades the answer to should we buy it? had been we'll build it, because building it was the only way to know every line, and knowing every line was the only way never to apologize for someone else's pipes again. Now the answer had changed, at least twice. The climber who never left the planned route had found two holds he judged were already sound. Or the route itself had changed, and the company had rebuilt its stack so many times that it could take in a foreign piece without the seam showing.
I cannot tell you which, and I am not sure he could either, yet.
Here is what the record does show. A company named for starting over has now outlasted the first company by fifteen years. It processed nearly a trillion euros in 2023 and $43 billion in a single holiday weekend in 2025. It counts Temu, DICK'S Sporting Goods, Vietnam Airlines, and the small-business software company BILL among the clients on its single stack, and it lends money to merchants in Canada through a product it calls Capital. Its founder still drives an old Volvo, still answers questions after a long silence, and still prefers the phone. He has been compared to Steve Jobs and to nobody else. His surname belongs to a water board, an admiral who died off an island in the Gulf of Guinea, and an engraving of the wrong town.
When the NRC reporter came to Simon Carmiggeltstraat in March 2020, she passed it on her way in. It sits in a display case at the headquarters, near the station: the green push-button, homemade, pressed once on June 13, 2018, and then put behind glass. It is not connected to anything now. Nobody presses it.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to extract the operating logic from a career its subject has been reluctant to narrate. Van der Does does not publish essays or keep up a public feed. Most of what he believes has to be inferred from what Adyen did, what it refused, and the handful of interviews he grants each year as the price of running a listed company. The principles below are grounded in that record. None of them is "work hard," and several of them run directly against the conventions of venture-backed technology.
The principles
- 1.Treat the first company as research for the second.
- 2.Become the plumbing rather than a layer over it.
- 3.Build for all customers, never for one.
- 4.Refuse the shortcut that serves this quarter.
- 5.Measure strategic bets in decades, not years.
- 6.Profitability is how you buy the right to say no.
- 7.Write the culture as instructions, not inspiration.
- 8.Tax senior leadership with every hire.
- 9.Prefer the phone: make friction synchronous.
- 10.Book publicity as a cost, not an asset.
- 11.Design succession while you still have a choice.
A
Twenty Years on One Route
The decisions that compounded, in order.
1999
Bibit Global Payment Services begins; van der Does is chief commercial officer, Arnout Schuijff a co-founder.
2004
Royal Bank of Scotland acquires Bibit, reportedly for about €100 million. Van der Does stays two years.
2006
After a sabbatical in Brazil meant to be boring, Adyen is founded in Amsterdam. The name means "start again."
2009
First global enterprise merchant: Groupon.
2011
Profitable from this year on. Ingo Uytdehaage joins as CFO.
2012
Pan-European acquiring licence; point of sale added; offices in San Francisco, London, Paris, Stockholm.
2014
$250 million round led by General Atlantic at a reported $1.5 billion valuation.
2017
European banking licence; Adyen becomes an acquiring bank.
2018
eBay deal announced January 31; IPO on June 13 marked with a homemade green button.
2021
US branch licence; eBay migrates the majority of its marketplace customers.
2022
Internal memo on November 22: "I need to iterate on my approach."
2023
Ingo Uytdehaage appointed co-CEO.
2026
First acquisitions in company history: Talon.One and Orb.
Principle 1
Treat the first company as research for the second
The usual story of a serial founder is momentum: the first exit funds the second venture, the network carries over, and the second time is easier. Van der Does's story is closer to an autopsy. Bibit gave him a precise list of failure modes. A layer over the banks loses data at the seams. A custom integration for one client produces months of technical debt. An acquirer's bureaucracy can kill a culture within six months. Adyen was designed as a negative image of that list, and the name says as much.
The important discipline is specificity. "We should have moved faster" is a lament, not a lesson. "At Bibit, we often had to apologise to consumers about issues that were no fault of our own" is a lesson, because it points straight to an architecture: own enough of the stack that nothing is anyone else's fault. The sabbatical in Brazil, nominally devoted to boredom, seems to have functioned as the period in which the autopsy became a blueprint.
Tactic: Before starting anything new, write down the three most expensive structural mistakes of your last venture, and make each one a constraint the new company is designed around.
Principle 2
Become the plumbing rather than a layer over it
The obvious move in 2006 was to rebuild Bibit with better software: another gateway, another aggregator, another polished layer. It would have been faster to market and cheaper to fund. Van der Does chose to build "the full stack ourselves," and then spent eleven years collecting the licences (European acquiring in 2012, the banking licence in 2017, then market after market) that let Adyen stand in the positions it had once sat on top of.
The payoff is not only margin, though owning the acquiring relationship captures economics an intermediary cannot. The deeper return is information. A single platform that sees the whole life of a transaction learns from every authorization, decline, and fraud attempt across every client and region. A layer sees only its own slice. That is why the company answered tech.eu so readily that it was a technology company: in payments, the technology advantage comes from owning the whole data trail.
Tactic: Identify the handoff in your value chain where you most often absorb blame for failures you do not control, and treat owning that step as a strategic priority even if it takes years.
Principle 3
Build for all customers, never for one
The first line of the Adyen Formula is the most commercially painful one: We build to benefit all customers (not just one). It means telling an enormous prospect that it cannot have a bespoke feature, even when the volume on offer would fund a quarter. Van der Does's reasoning came from experience: at Bibit, one custom integration for one large client created months of technical debt, and "every exception made the system slower."
The principle is what keeps a single stack single. Every exception you build for a client is a fork in the code, and every fork multiplies the cost of every future change. Refusing to fork keeps the platform compounding: an improvement made for one merchant reaches all of them, which is the "subscription to innovation" that SparkOptimus identified as Adyen's offer. The refusal itself becomes part of the product.
Tactic: For any feature request from a single large customer, require the team to name at least three other customers who would use it before it enters the roadmap.
Principle 4
Refuse the shortcut that serves this quarter
"Never deviate from a well-planned route just because a shortcut suddenly appears." The climbing metaphor he gave the Süddeutsche is more precise than most business metaphors, because it names what a shortcut costs: you underestimate the overhang. In a company, the overhang is the hidden expense that arrives later, such as the technical debt from a custom deal, the cultural damage from a hasty hire, or the strategic drift from chasing a trend.
His examples are mostly refusals. He declined the metaverse, which he named at Slush in 2025 as overhyped. He declined crypto support, because merchants were not asking for it. He declined acquisitions for twenty years in favour of building. The 2026 purchases of Talon.One and Orb test the principle, and they may also show its mature form. A planned route is not a fixed one. It is a route you chose deliberately, and leaving it should also be deliberate rather than opportunistic.
Tactic: When an attractive shortcut appears, write down the specific risk it hides (your overhang) before evaluating its upside.
Principle 5
Measure strategic bets in decades, not years
"We invested in point of sale technology in 2013, now in 2022 I'm talking about what a good move it was. This is the timeframe it takes." Few public-company CEOs would say that sentence on an earnings call, because it implies that their best current decisions will not be vindicated until long after the analysts covering them have moved on.
The structural point is that the bets with the biggest payoffs are usually the ones whose payoff is invisible for longest, which is why competitors leave them alone. Physical terminals looked like a step backward for a company built on e-commerce. Nine years later, unified online-and-in-store payments was the industry's favourite phrase. Patience paid off here because few competitors were willing to match it.
⏳
Time to Vindication
Adyen's long bets, from commitment to payoff.
| Bet | Committed | Payoff visible | Stage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full in-house stack | 2006 | Profitable 2011; IPO 2018 | Scaled |
| Own acquiring licences | 2012 (Europe) | Banking licence 2017; US branch 2021 | Scaled |
| Point of sale | 2013 (by his account) | Called "a good move" in 2022 | Scaled |
| Platforms and embedded finance | 2016 | Capital, Accounts, Issuing products by 2025 | Expanding |
| First acquisitions | 2026 | Unknown | Early |
Tactic: Keep a deliberate portion of investment in bets you do not expect to pay off within five years, and track them separately so quarterly pressure cannot quietly cancel them.
Principle 6
Profitability is how you buy the right to say no
Adyen turned profitable in 2011 and stayed that way. The $250 million round in 2014 came three years after that, which meant van der Does was negotiating from a position where he did not need the money. The 2021 Techleap conversation, as later outlined, describes the consequences: simplicity, independence, common shares, holding out for the right investor, rejecting acquisition offers.
"Why look for an exit?" can only be asked freely by a founder who does not need one. Profitability turns an acquisition offer into a compliment you can decline. Plain common shares, without layered preferences that favour a sale at a particular price, keep investor and founder incentives aligned with staying. Each refusal was cheaper than the last because the company kept getting more valuable while it waited.
Tactic: Treat early profitability as a negotiating asset, and raise outside capital only when declining the term sheet would leave you no worse off.
Principle 7
Write the culture as instructions, not inspiration
The Adyen Formula has eight lines and nearly every one contains a verb a person can act on before lunch: launch fast and iterate, pick up the phone, talk straight without being rude. It was written about five years in, when van der Does and Schuijff noticed they were repeating the same lessons in every conversation. It codified habits that already existed. It was not an aspiration drafted in a workshop.
The test of a values statement is whether it can replace an approval. "If you act according to the Formula, you can make decisions yourself," he said in 2025. That sentence is a delegation mechanism. A culture written as instructions can be audited: you can ask whether someone picked up the phone, and you cannot ask whether they were "passionate." That makes it scalable in a way inspirational language never is.
F
Conventional Wisdom vs. the Van der Does Approach
Where Adyen's operating choices diverge from startup convention.
| Conventional wisdom | Van der Does's approach |
|---|---|
| Values should inspire. | Values should instruct: eight actionable sentences. |
| Delegate hiring to managers as you scale. | A board member sees every hire, at any level. |
| Async written communication scales best. | "We don't hide behind email." Pick up the phone. |
| Formal performance reviews at scale. | Continuous direct feedback; reportedly no standard evaluations. |
| The founder is the brand. | Interviews have a "negative return"; once a year. |
| Grow through acquisition. | Build in-house for twenty years; first acquisitions in 2026. |
Tactic: Rewrite each of your company values as a sentence beginning "We [verb]" that describes an observable behaviour, and delete any that cannot be rewritten that way.
Principle 8
Tax senior leadership with every hire
"Every person whom we bring into the team is seen by a board member first." At 260 employees that is a policy. At more than 4,000, across 28 offices and over 115 nationalities, it is a large, deliberate drain on the time of the people whose time is scarcest, and that is the reason to do it. The rationale, as relayed from his 2025 talk, is that managers under pressure to fill a seat will accept good enough, and senior leaders will not.
The policy also sends a message to candidates. Someone joining as an office manager on another continent who is interviewed by a member of the board learns before the first day that the company takes their seat seriously. The retention he cited to the Telegraph, developers from day one still at Adyen where Silicon Valley might expect 18 months, depends on that first conversation as much as on anything that follows.
Tactic: Require at least one senior leader to interview every final-round candidate, and treat the hours this costs as a fixed investment rather than an inefficiency.
Principle 9
Prefer the phone: make friction synchronous
The neighbour with the leak is the whole argument. "If an upstairs neighbour had a leak in their house and emailed me about it, I would drop by and talk to them, rather than escalate the issue with another email." Email allows people to avoid each other. They copy a superior, build a record, and let a disagreement harden into documents. A phone call forces a resolution between the two people who have the problem.
This is less nostalgic than it sounds. Bureaucracy, the thing van der Does watched kill Bibit, grows out of asynchronous defensiveness: written justification, policy drafted to prevent the last argument, approval chains. Requiring synchronous conversation for problems makes defensiveness expensive and resolution cheap. The Formula's adjacent line, We talk straight without being rude, describes the kind of conversation the call is supposed to be.
Tactic: Set a rule that any email thread exceeding three replies on a disagreement must move to a call, and that the call's outcome is summarized in one line afterward.
Principle 10
Book publicity as a cost, not an asset
"For me personally this has a negative return. It leads to a lot of noise." He gives one interview a year because a listed company owes the public transparency, and he treats the rest of the circuit as a distraction from Adyen. The green button instead of the Damrak gong, the little champagne instead of a party, and the old Volvo are not a performance of modesty so much as the absence of a performance.
For a company that sells trust in invisible infrastructure, this is also strategy. A dike-reeve who stages press conferences invites questions about the dike. A founder who becomes a celebrity becomes a single point of failure for the brand, and a target whenever the stock falls, as Adyen's did by nearly half between late 2021 and 2022. The quieter the founder, the more the company's reputation rests on the product's performance, which is where a payments company wants it.
Tactic: Before any public appearance, write down what specifically the company gains from it; if the answer concerns only your own profile, decline.
Principle 11
Design succession while you still have a choice
The November 2022 memo was candid in a disciplined way: one paragraph on health, one on trust in the team, a timeline, and a promise of "zero disruption." The co-CEO appointment of Ingo Uytdehaage in 2023 made that promise structural. Uytdehaage had joined in 2011, the year Adyen turned profitable, and had spent twelve years absorbing the Formula from inside the finance function. Paragon's sources described him as a successor "in his own image," with added financial expertise.
Most founder-CEOs postpone succession until a crisis forces it, and then the choice is made in a hurry, often from outside. Van der Does used a health scare to put the transition on a timetable while he was still present to model the culture beside his successor. Sharing the title is an unusual arrangement and a deliberate one. It lets the company learn to work without him while he is still there to correct it.
Tactic: Name a credible internal co-leader for every role you personally hold, and give them real decision authority before you need to step away.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Pieter van der Does, to Institutional Investor, July 2016We started from scratch and did it in the way it should have been done, building the full stack ourselves.
— Pieter van der Does, to the Financial Times, February 2022We invested in point of sale technology in 2013, now in 2022 I'm talking about what a good move it was. This is the timeframe it takes.
— Pieter van der Does, SaaSiest Amsterdam, 2025It's surprising how quickly you can kill a culture.
— Pieter van der Does, SaaSiest Amsterdam, 2025If it only benefits one customer, it doesn't scale.
— Pieter van der Does, to the Telegraph, October 2017The nice answer would be that everything is bombproof and that you never need to worry about it. But that's not the case; you have to invest a lot and make sure that you can tackle any attacks or breaches quickly.
Maxims
- Name the company for the lesson. Adyen means "start again," a reminder of what the first attempt got wrong and of the habit of renewal.
- Own the seams. If you keep apologizing for failures in someone else's pipes, become the pipes.
- One stack, all customers. Every exception you build for one client slows the system for everyone else.
- Stay on the planned route. A shortcut that appears suddenly usually hides an overhang you have underestimated.
- Count in decades. The best bets look wrong for years, which is why few competitors make them.
- Earn the right to refuse. Profitability turns acquisition offers into compliments you can decline.
- Write values as verbs. A culture that can be followed can be delegated; a culture that only inspires cannot.
- Climb the stairs. When something is leaking, go and talk instead of sending another email.
- Silence is a balance sheet decision. Publicity is a cost borne by the company; spend it only when the return is real.
- Press the button quietly. Make the moment of success, like the moment of payment, feel almost like nothing.
