Born in the Cloud: a new breed of tech entrepreneur with Joris van der Gucht & Tim Vandecasteele of Silverfin
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What is Silverfin and how did the founders first conceive the cloud‑native accounting platform?
Mm. I pitched an early idea, simple, easy and news reporting solution. And we just kicked off almost by accident and building a business.
So I think we're super aligned on really the people part that like that's the most challenging part and for me also the one that's most surprising.
Hello everyone and welcome to Orbit, the A G podcast series where we speak to leaders and innovators from across the software and technology ecosystem to discuss the key trends changing how we all do business. Today I'm joined by Tim van der Castelen and Joris van der Gusta Tukhon, co-founders of Silverfin. My name is Joris van Gogh. I'm an investment partner at AG and have been working with Tim and Joris for a couple of years now. We at AG are proud backers of Silvafin. And Silvafin is a leading cloud platform for accounting. The platform improves the efficiency, competitiveness, and profitability of compliance services and empowers the development and delivery of advisory services. So let me start off and and and just ask Tim Yoris.
Silverfin was born out of true tech entrepreneurship, really. How did the journey start for you? How how did it get started?
Well, first of all, great pitch, uh Yoris, great intro of actually what we do as a technology. Uh and if we go back to the to the early days, um The fundament of this company is uh built on a frustration and it's always a good start, it's never a solution. Uh before starting uh the company, I was an accountant myself. So an experienced firsthand that it's rather challenging to build reports, management reports, TET reports. It doesn't matter over and over again. and go over all recurring tasks. And then I had the look of meeting my co-founder, Tim, an engineer. I pitched an early idea, simple, easy and use reporting solution. And we just kicked off almost by accident and building a business.
Exactly. So what Yoris did was he he basically sold me on that ID, like he still does, but now towards prospects and clients. And I wanted to build a product. I I wanted to make something that people like to use, that I was always focused on user experience and having the luck that I am an engineer. I can create something from nothing.
How did Joris’s frustration as an accountant lead to the creation of Silverfin?
And then yeah, we quickly got started with it, iterated quite a few times because I had little background on the financials and Yoris had indeed this very healthy frustration. And yeah, the rest is history. But the fun part is that we can look around in industries and take the things that really work well in an industry that might be maybe a bit more ahead technologically. And we take that and we apply that to accounting, compliance, and stuff like that. And that's really a fun part. It's like putting a puzzle together and getting getting the best of all all worlds and applying this to our sector.
Right. Y y you've been going for eight plus years now. So what what have been the m the most let's say challenging part of that journey and and and and if you think back, what what have been the biggest hurdles you've had to overcome?
Well, it's it's a fun journey. It's an intense journey, I think. But you need to keep in mind that we really have to build everything basically from scratch, from two persons to now almost 200 persons in the team. So really everything we're building ourselves from small processes to team. Teams who's fitting at a certain time in our teams who do we look for internationalization skill sets and so on and so on. And if I need to lead that back to one most challenging topic for me, it's always finding the right people. Finding the right people that fit in at a certain stage. Hypergrowth. I sometimes say that a quarter for us is sometimes a calendar year for another company. So like really that hypergrowth.
And finding the right people with the right DNA that want to build in this journey has been, at least in my personal opinion, the most uh challenging part. Challenging.
So yeah, actually I wanted to say um I couldn't agree more with what you're saying. I'm me being an engineer, I would have thought like probably it's the technical challenge and all that kind of stuff.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Silverfin and how did the founders first conceive the cloud‑native accounting platform?
0:01–2:15
2
How did Joris’s frustration as an accountant lead to the creation of Silverfin?
2:15–4:18
3
What were the biggest challenges in scaling from two founders to a 200‑person team?
4:18–6:35
4
Why is being built “born in the cloud” a competitive advantage for Silverfin?
6:35–9:28
5
How does Silverfin use SaaS automation to transform compliance work into advisory services?
9:28–11:54
6
What role do data, machine‑learning and AI play in the next evolution of Silverfin’s product?
11:54–14:14
7
If you started Silverfin today, would the market still be open for a cloud‑first accounting platform?
14:14–16:31
8
What are the founders’ key takeaways and future vision for the accounting industry?
16:31–17:05
Speakers
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