Pieter Zwart, Pieter van der Does and the New Generation of Dutch Founders

The new generation of Dutch founders has traded the dynastic model of total family control for a model built on speed, capital and partnership. Where the Brenninkmeyers never let an outsider own a share of C&A and the Van der Valks wrote a descendants-only rule into their franchise, Pieter Zwart sold a majority of Coolblue to an investment company, Pieter van der Does listed Adyen on Euronext Amsterdam twelve years after founding it, and Michiel Muller and Adriaan Mol have raised hundreds of millions of euros from international investors. The result is a set of companies, in e-commerce, payments, online groceries and small-business fintech, that are among the most valuable created in the Netherlands this century, and a set of founders whose personal wealth, though large, is less tied to permanent control. It is part of the Netherlands Company Stories hub.

Who are the founders of the new Dutch generation?

Four names define the group. Pieter Zwart founded Coolblue in Rotterdam in 1999 with fellow students Paul de Jong and Bart Kuijpers and is still its chief executive; Pieter van der Does and Arnout Schuijff founded Adyen in Amsterdam in 2006 after selling their first payments company, Bibit, and van der Does remains co-chief executive; Michiel Muller co-founded the online supermarket Picnic in 2015 with Joris Beckers, Frederik Nieuwenhuys and Bas Verheijen after earlier ventures including Route Mobiel and Tango petrol stations; and Adriaan Mol founded the payments company Mollie in 2004 and later co-founded the messaging platform MessageBird, now Bird, with Robert Vis.

They share a background. All built their companies in or near the Randstad conurbation, all began as technology-enabled service businesses rather than product manufacturers, and all reached scale in the 2010s, the decade in which Amsterdam established itself as a European technology hub with the arrival of Booking.com’s growth, Uber’s European headquarters and a wave of venture capital. The Amsterdam entry in the Kurums City Startup Atlas describes that ecosystem in detail.

They also differ from each other in important ways. Zwart and Muller run operationally heavy businesses with vans, warehouses and stores; van der Does and Mol run software platforms with high margins and global customers. Coolblue and Picnic sell to consumers; Adyen and Mollie sell to merchants. And their relationship with capital ranges from Adyen’s public listing to Coolblue’s single strategic shareholder to the venture-backed structures of Picnic and Mollie. What unites them is less a formula than a refusal of the old Dutch model in which growth waited on retained earnings.

How did Pieter Zwart build Coolblue and why did he sell control to HAL?

Coolblue began in 1999 as a collection of specialist web shops, each with its own domain, and grew into one of the largest electronics retailers in the Benelux by combining online sales with its own delivery fleet, physical stores and a service culture that Zwart has made the company’s public identity. In 2025 the company reported revenue of €2.56 billion and EBITDA of €86.5 million, with about 38 stores across the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, where it opened its first store in Düsseldorf in November 2021.

The ownership story is the unusual part. HAL Investments, the Rotterdam-based investment company descended from the Holland America Line, bought 20 per cent of Coolblue in March 2016, raised its stake to 30.1 per cent in 2017 and to 49 per cent in June 2019, and by 30 June 2026 held 56.4 per cent, with another shareholder, understood to be Zwart’s vehicle, holding 42.4 per cent. HAL’s own accounts describe Coolblue as a joint venture: under a governance agreement reached in January 2024, HAL has joint control but not sole control, which is why the retailer is not consolidated into HAL’s figures. Zwart, in other words, sold a majority of the equity while keeping half the power.

Coolblue’s attempt to go public, announced on 1 October 2021 and postponed on 13 October 2021 after a volatile market reception, illustrates the trade-offs. The listing would have given Zwart and HAL liquidity and the company a public currency; abandoning it left Coolblue dependent on HAL and on its own cash flow, which in 2025 funded expansion in Germany, an energy business selling solar panels, heat pumps and chargers, and continued store openings. The arrangement has worked for both sides so far: HAL’s net asset value reached €17.6 billion at mid-2026, and Coolblue has grown without the quarterly scrutiny of a listing. The broader Dutch e-commerce context, including Coolblue’s rivalry with bol, is covered in our bol and Coolblue story.

How did Adyen’s founders build a listed payments giant?

Pieter van der Does and Arnout Schuijff founded Adyen in 2006 with a single-platform approach to payments that let merchants accept cards, wallets and local methods in many countries through one integration, at a time when incumbents stitched together acquired systems. The company was profitable from 2011, won eBay as its main processing partner, listed on Euronext Amsterdam on 13 June 2018, and has grown into one of the most valuable companies on the Amsterdam exchange.

The 2025 figures show why. Net revenue was €2,364.2 million, up 18 per cent (21 per cent at constant currency), EBITDA rose 26 per cent to €1,245.7 million for a 53 per cent margin, up from 50 per cent in 2024, and processed volume reached €1.39 trillion, up 21 per cent excluding one large-volume customer. Point-of-sale volume, the in-store business, grew 34 per cent to €311 billion. The first half of 2026 continued the pattern: net revenue of €1,302.9 million, up 19 per cent, processed volume of €803.8 billion, up 24 per cent, and EBITDA of €641.5 million at a 49 per cent margin, held back only by one-off costs from acquisitions completed on 1 July 2026.

Those acquisitions, of the loyalty-software company Talon.One and the billing platform Orb, mark a strategic shift that van der Does described in August 2026 as expanding well beyond payments to address the structural complexity merchants face. Guidance for 2026 was raised to net revenue growth of 21 to 23 per cent at constant currency including the acquired businesses, with an EBITDA margin about one point below 2025 on a reported basis and above 55 per cent by 2028. Capital expenditure was lifted to about 7 per cent of net revenue for 2026 to pull forward data-centre investment. Adyen’s governance is also distinctive: van der Does shares the chief executive role with Ingo Uytdehaage, the former chief financial officer, under a co-CEO structure adopted in 2023, with Ethan Tandowsky as CFO. Our Banking & Finance pillar has a full profile in Adyen, Amsterdam’s payments unicorn.

What is Michiel Muller building at Picnic?

Picnic is an online-only supermarket, founded in Amersfoort in 2015, that delivers groceries in small electric vans along fixed “milk-run” routes at scheduled times, a model designed to make home delivery cheaper than the store-based delivery of incumbents such as Albert Heijn. Michiel Muller, the most visible of its four co-founders, had previously built and sold Route Mobiel, a breakdown-assistance challenger, and Tango, a chain of unmanned petrol stations, which gave him both capital and a reputation for attacking comfortable incumbents.

Picnic has expanded from the Netherlands into Germany and France, and has raised large sums from international investors, including a reported €600 million round in 2021 in which the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust participated and a further round reported at about €355 million in 2024. The company has not published audited group profitability figures, and reporting on its finances describes a business that has prioritised growth in new regions over near-term profit, with the Dutch operation reported to be the first to reach break-even. Readers should treat any valuation figure as an estimate; Picnic is private and does not disclose one.

What is verifiable is the operating model and its ambition. Picnic owns its hubs and fleet, employs its drivers, and has invested in automated fulfilment centres, which makes it a capital-intensive business more like Coolblue than like Adyen. Muller’s bet is that a purpose-built delivery system will eventually have a structural cost advantage over supermarkets adding delivery to stores, and that the advantage will compound as density rises. The Dutch scale-ups story in our Tech pillar sets Picnic alongside the other venture-backed Dutch companies of its cohort.

What has Adriaan Mol built with Mollie?

Mollie, founded by Adriaan Mol in 2004, is a payments service provider for small and medium-sized online merchants across Europe, offering a simple integration for cards, iDEAL, bank transfers, buy-now-pay-later and other local methods; it is, in effect, the small-business counterpart to Adyen’s enterprise platform. Mol started it in his early twenties in Amsterdam, bootstrapped it for years, and only took significant venture capital in the late 2010s.

In 2021 Mollie raised a large round that was widely reported to value the company at about US$6.5 billion, making it one of the most valuable private fintechs in Europe at the time, with Mol remaining the largest individual shareholder while handing day-to-day management to professional chief executives. The company has since expanded into business lending, point-of-sale terminals and financial services beyond payments, and operates across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and other European markets. As with Picnic, Mollie is private and its current valuation and profitability are not publicly audited; figures circulating in the press should be treated as estimates.

Mol’s other venture gives him a second claim on the cohort. MessageBird, co-founded with Robert Vis in 2011 and renamed Bird, became a cloud-communications platform that raised heavily during the 2020–2021 boom and then restructured. Mol’s path, from bootstrapping to venture scale to a portfolio of founder stakes managed through his own holding, is the clearest example in the group of a founder who treats company-building as a repeatable craft rather than a single lifetime project, which is a sharp break from the one-company-forever model of the Goldschmeding and Randstad generation.

What do the new founders do differently from the old dynasties?

The sharpest difference is their attitude to control. The dynasties profiled elsewhere in this pillar built structures to keep outsiders out: the Brenninkmeyers’ Cofra, the Heinekens’ L’Arche Green and Heineken Holding, the Van der Valks’ descendants-only franchise. The new generation has done the opposite. Zwart accepted a majority shareholder in exchange for capital and patience; van der Does and Schuijff took venture money from Index Ventures and others, then listed; Muller and Mol built cap tables with a dozen international funds. None has created a family holding designed to last a century.

The second difference is leadership. The old firms were run by family members or by professionals chosen by the family; the new ones are run by founders who share power with each other and with hired executives. Adyen’s co-chief-executive structure, Mollie’s decision to bring in outside CEOs while Mol stayed as a shareholder, and Picnic’s four-founder team are all forms of distributed leadership that the older generation would have found alien. Coolblue is the partial exception, with Zwart still firmly in charge, but even there HAL’s joint control means the founder cannot act alone.

The third is geography. The dynasties expanded abroad slowly, over decades, from a Dutch base; the new founders built for Europe or the world from the start, in Adyen’s case because payments only make sense at global scale and in Picnic’s and Coolblue’s because the Dutch market is too small to justify their fixed costs. That has made them more valuable and more exposed: Adyen’s results move with global e-commerce, Coolblue’s with German consumer confidence, Picnic’s with French grocery regulation. The Booking.com story shows the extreme case, a Dutch-founded business that became an American-owned global one.

How wealthy are the new founders, and does it matter?

The new generation is wealthy by any ordinary measure but, with the exception of the Adyen founders, their fortunes are illiquid and hard to value. Van der Does’s and Schuijff’s Adyen holdings are publicly priced and have placed both among the richest Dutch citizens on Quote 500 and Forbes lists in recent years, though Schuijff stepped back from executive roles some time ago. Zwart’s 42.4 per cent of Coolblue is worth what a buyer would pay for a joint-controlled, unlisted retailer with €86.5 million of EBITDA, which is a matter of estimate. Muller’s and Mol’s stakes depend on private valuations last set in funding rounds.

The difference from the dynasties is instructive. Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken’s roughly US$14 billion is one liquid, listed stake; the Brenninkmeyers’ tens of billions are spread across hundreds of people and a dozen asset classes; the Van der Valks’ wealth is in land and buildings that are rarely sold. The new founders sit between: concentrated in one company each, like the Heinekens, but with a cap table of outsiders who have their own views about when and how value should be realised.

Whether it matters depends on what one thinks founders are for. The dynastic model produced durable institutions that anchored employment and headquarters in the Netherlands for a century. The new model has produced faster growth and more companies, but also more exits: Dutch-founded technology businesses have frequently ended up owned abroad, and Adyen’s own share register is dominated by international institutions. The Dutch debate about whether the country can keep the companies it creates, discussed in our story on the headquarters exodus and tax climate, is in part a debate about which of these two models the next generation will follow.

Where does the next generation of Dutch founders come from?

The cohort behind Zwart, van der Does, Muller and Mol is already visible, and it is being produced by the companies they built. Adyen alumni have founded payments, lending and software businesses across Amsterdam; Coolblue’s logistics and retail-technology staff have spun out their own ventures; and the venture funds that backed Picnic and Mollie now invest from Amsterdam offices that did not exist in 2010. Dutch universities, particularly Delft, Eindhoven and Amsterdam, supply deep-technology founders in semiconductors, quantum computing and energy, areas where the ASML ecosystem is the dominant influence.

The policy environment is less clearly supportive than it was. The Netherlands has tightened its tax treatment of expatriate employees and has debated the treatment of founder share options, while competing hubs in Berlin, Paris and Lisbon have become more generous. The founders of this article have, for the most part, kept their companies’ headquarters in the Netherlands, but they have done so by choice, not because the structures compel it, which is the fundamental difference from the dynasties.

For the Netherlands the question is whether a country of 18 million can keep producing companies of Adyen’s scale under a model in which control is sold early and the founders’ loyalty is personal rather than structural. The evidence of the past decade is that it can, provided the ecosystem keeps supplying capital, talent and customers at home; the evidence of the headquarters exodus is that it cannot take that for granted.

What can founders and investors learn from the new Dutch generation?

The first lesson is that the trade between control and capital is negotiable, not binary. Zwart kept half the power at Coolblue while selling more than half the equity; van der Does kept operational leadership of Adyen through a listing by making the company profitable first, so that the market had no reason to demand a different chief executive. Founders who think the choice is between total control and total exit are usually negotiating badly.

The second is that profitability is the strongest form of independence. Adyen was profitable from 2011 and has never needed to raise money on unfavourable terms; Coolblue’s positive EBITDA let it walk away from a public listing in 2021 without a crisis. Picnic and Mollie, which have prioritised growth, are correspondingly more dependent on the goodwill of their investors. Van der Valk and the Brenninkmeyers, for all their differences from the new founders, would recognise the principle.

The third lesson is about the Netherlands itself. Every founder in this article built from a Dutch base and exported, which is the only strategy that works in a small, open economy, and each has stayed Dutch by choice. The dynasties prove that structures can keep a company at home for a century; the new generation proves that it can also be done by building something good enough that the founders do not want to leave. Which model lasts longer is a question for the 2050s. For a contrasting case of a Dutch family firm that chose structure over speed, see our story on the Van der Valk hotel dynasty.

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