Curiosity, hyper-growth, and AI-ready workplaces with Invested’s Noor van Boven

Robin Haak: Hey, Noor! It’s great to have you with us today. You’ve had a lot of different jobs at various stages of companies—high-growth and established companies and you’ve always said that curiosity is the key. Why is curiosity so important?

Noor van Boven: As long as you're curious, you can have a super exciting career in the corporate world or in start-ups or scale-ups. If you’re curious to do new things and solve new problems, you can figure things out as you go. My curiosity has taken me to a lot of places and allowed me to do a lot of different jobs.

Whether it’s when I just graduated and IBM sent me to New York for my internship— this was in the year 2000. Walking along Fifth Avenue in my suit – I’ll never forget it! I thought, “I’ve made it! What else is there to achieve?” And that was just my first job! Of course, there were other things to achieve, but back then, I thought it was the best thing ever.

For TomTom, the opportunity to live in India was amazing. For SoundCloud, living between Berlin and New York and managing the dynamics of a headquartered company, you get to understand the US-Europe dynamics a bit more. In large global corporate companies, the whole Western world often becomes one package versus non-Western countries. But when you work in a company that operates in both, you get to focus more on those differences within the Western world dynamic. That was also amazing. I could talk for hours about highlights!

What have you been up to over the last five years or so?

I’ve lived in different countries, but for the past 10 years, I was mainly in Berlin, and now I’m back in Amsterdam. After my time at N26, I wanted to start something new with my best friend, Anna Brandt, which is why we started Invested. We wanted to combine everything we love—working with founders and supporting them at both early and late stages—and we also wanted to learn something new.

So that’s when we decided to help startups scale and grow, both through strategic consulting, which is often with later-stage companies on people and work-related topics. The profits we make, we reinvest back into the startup scene, always focusing on early-stage startups and HR Tech. We’re now four years in, and it’s been a blast! It was a bit of a gamble to see if this setup would work, but it’s worked well.

Looking back at your time in corporate and your transition into startups, what were some of the key lessons you learned during the hyper-growth phases of companies like SoundCloud and N26?

Well, even before working at SoundCloud and N26, I worked in the corporate world. When I joined TomTom, I remember thinking, “Wow, how did they scale so much with so little process and structure?” It was a company just coming out of hyper-growth, and that was the first time I saw the effects of it. That triggered something in me, and in my next step at SoundCloud, I wanted to work with a company that was even further along in its growth journey. I wanted to guide those growth phases and see how I could contribute. That’s really where it all started for me.

And so, four years ago, you and Anna took the plunge and decided to work together. It sounds like you both have very complementary backgrounds. What’s it been like working with your friend?

I sometimes explain it to others like this: it’s almost a combination of working with a friend and a sister. I don’t know if you have sisters—I have two—and what I love about that relationship is there’s this unconditional love, which means you can be direct and even critical without breaking the bond. I think we have that foundation. And much like with siblings, there’s also a shared value system because you’ve grown up in similar environments and experienced the same core things - we’re completely aligned on values, and that’s crucial, especially in a world where money, failure, and pressure can cause things to unravel. This dynamic helps us maintain balance, and because we share those foundational values, we stay aligned on what’s important.

And you were both working at N26 in different capacities. At the time, Anna had her own talent business, and you were at N26 as Chief People Officer.

What was it like for you both working at N26 between 2017 and 2021 with the company growing so unbelievably fast?

Yeah, it’s no coincidence that Anna joined N26—she came in as a consultant because I got her in. You could say there’s some bias there, but I was very transparent with the N26 team. I honestly think she’s one of the best talent leaders in Europe, and yes, I’m biased because I started the business with her, but I also know how professionally skilled she is.

It was important for me to have her there because we have that sister-like relationship. She was the most senior person on my team, and in such a fast-paced environment, where everyone’s under pressure, you need people around you who can give honest feedback. It brings out both the best and the worst in people, and you need strong voices around you. I saw that during the scaling journey—everyone around me was in survival mode, and I needed someone to lead by example and show that we had a culture of safe feedback, where you could say anything and challenge each other. I think that worked well and set a strong foundation. There were a lot of learnings from that time at N26.

It sounds like having that trust and strong feedback culture was key. What would you say were the biggest challenges you faced during that hyper-growth period, and how did you manage to keep the team aligned?

In the beginning, we had designed a plan for how things would work, but then COVID came, and it didn’t play out the way we planned. We said from the start that we had to scale fast because the client growth was massive, and we just couldn’t keep up. But we also knew that hyper-growth wasn’t sustainable, and we needed to move toward stabilization.

The problem was that just when we were getting into that stabilization phase, COVID hit. So that was a pity; I would have wished for a more stable year so we could test our plan, but I think it gave us a chance to understand that hyper-growth wasn’t a healthy stage from a long-term business perspective. Having those discussions around hyper-growth and understanding that it’s not healthy long-term was crucial.

When COVID hit, what did you do? How did your strategy change?

Well, managing the whole working-from-home situation was… interesting. There’s a bit of a bias that startups and scale-ups are super modern and flexible about remote work, but even in my corporate days, there was already a lot of flexibility around it. I’ve always worked in tech, and at big companies like Dell, we already had a lot of flexibility with working from home.

But I think for startups and scale-ups, - where there’s so much change, and the foundation isn’t always there yet – it’s a little different, so you end up wanting people in the office more. A lot of problem-solving happens informally – something as simple as having a chat next to the coffee machine, where people overhear each other and figure things out. So, making the shift to fully remote work was a big challenge.

It sounds like creating those informal connections remotely would have been tough. What strategies did you have for maintaining that sense of connection and problem-solving culture?

We had to find ways to organize those informal, day-in/day-out problem-solving systems, so we eventually realized we needed to organize informal circles. A lot of people were already doing virtual coffee chats and such, but we went a step further. We asked ourselves, “How can we create informal networks that keep people connected, especially as this drags on longer?”

Before COVID, we had been opening more offices to build that connected dynamic, but with everyone working from home, we had to formalize informal circles. Another challenge was the rapid growth—we were hiring 50 people a month for a company that was under 1,000 people.

Everyone was stretched to their limit. We had designed things so that we’d have a calming year to stabilize, but COVID threw that plan off track. And then there was the issue of resilience. We were already pushing people hard, and then COVID hit, eating into whatever resilience was left. It was tough on the organization and the people in it.

What do you see as the biggest challenges within HR in the tech world right now?

There are different things at play here. So, if you look at HR across different layers, I always break it down into three client groups: employees, managers and leaders, and the organization as a whole. I think the role is shifting more and more, and that also comes with AI moving into the customer base. Traditionally, employees were the core client group of the HR team. But over time, it started shifting—first to managers, since we all know the phrase, “People don’t leave companies, they leave managers,” right? That thinking was about enabling managers to support employees.

In that sense, it’s shifting again. HR is becoming more strategic and focusing on the organization as a client. That means HR is playing the role of architect, building effective, successful, and healthy organizations.

For example, cultivating an AI-ready workplace is very much a topic, as well as also designing what the composition of the organization looks like. If you look at the talent challenges that are currently in the market - a market with less available talent - it’s about aligning the current workforce with new technologies like AI and reskilling employees to fill those gaps. It’s like a question of, ‘How can we reschedule the current workforce to play the role that we want them to play?’ It’s almost a technical, architectural challenge, not just IT-related but across the whole organization. Does that make sense?

Yes, it does. So, traditionally, the focus has been on putting the employee at the center, making sure they have everything they need and want from their employer. But now, with employee churn becoming a huge issue, do you see this trend continuing over the next few years?

I think the employee will always remain at the core. The question now is how we interact with them. In the past, HR focused more directly on the employee experience—how quickly they get contracts, how well we handle life events, etc. All of that will stay. But moving forward, it’s about asking, “How do we touch the employee?” I think employees will still be central but in a more complex way.

For example, I can give you two examples, both linked to AI. One is about HR’s responsibility for creating an AI-ready workplace.

Could you expand on what you mean by an AI-ready workplace?

Not every employee needs to get into AI, it's about how you, as an organization make sure that different roles, with all the different levels of digital interest of people in the organization, are aware of how AI will come into play for their work. It could be that they are in the product team and need to work on the opportunities that AI offers in that setting. It could also be someone very far away from the product, but AI could help them do their work more efficiently.

It's also about bringing into the culture that AI brings a lot of opportunities, but it also brings threats. We can leverage AI, but it needs to be within boundaries. As I told you before, what I like about working with Anna is that we have shared values, and we work in a money-driven world where money can push values at times. And we have boundaries for that. Similarly, when organizing large organizations, we want to maximize opportunities, but we also want to make sure that, from the beginning, we give room and voice to all the elements.

So you also start creating an active dialogue in the organization about where AI is ethical. And that's not because companies are coming from bad intentions, but sometimes they may overlook certain long-term risks for customers or employees. So, building an AI-ready workplace is also about making sure that the education and maturity level of your organization increases over time. And you need to encourage a culture where all employees can step up.

I think the individual contribution to that discussion is fundamental for the organization's success. So, when I'm talking about the organization as a client, the role of the individual is only getting more important.

How do you think companies can leverage qualitative data more effectively when it comes to understanding their employees' needs and concerns?

Good question. The second thing is that we’ve been listening to employees through engagement surveys for years because you want to be data-driven. So we make everything quantitative, but the actual power of the employee voice, so to speak, is much more in the qualitative data.

One of the things that I think is very cool, for example, is a product like Net AI. They can say, around a certain topic—whether that's AI, management capabilities in the organization, or whatever it is—they have the ability for a company with 100,000 employees to host multiple Zoom sessions where people are just going to talk about the topics. And then the AI platform brings it back to the board with insights. So all of a sudden, you can be informed by the power of the collective brain of all the individuals in your organization, but based on qualitative data instead of quantitative data. That wasn’t acknowledged or possible before, right?

Let’s pivot back to investing and what you’re up to at the moment with Invested. How do you look for teams that you feel are going to do what it takes but also stay ethical in the same way?

Yeah, absolutely. I think everyone will say founders need to have a well-functioning brain and a strong “why,” but let’s put those in the obvious category. What’s important for us is that, if you look at founding teams, they have a good balance of boldness or drive, or sometimes even naivety about the hurdles that might be there. But there also needs to be a big level of self-awareness, because one of the things that's very difficult for founders, in general, and which

I highly respect, is that you need to be open to the voices of others. But if you’re too sensitive to the voices of others, you’ll never make it, right?

But if you become tone-deaf to the input from others, that can also be your breaking point in the midterm. So that’s always an interesting one. One of the things we always want to know is, without getting too theoretical, how flexible they are. What if they need to pivot? How flexible can they be in their thinking and acting when things happen?

And the topics that people tackle, there are very obvious solutions out there with a clear market, and you can make loads of money from that—you’ll find investors for that. But for me and Anna, that’s a little less interesting. We want to invest in people who are tackling a problem that we’re super passionate about, or we feel like they’re differentiating something. This could be something that will elevate or change the role of work in the workplace.

So, there always needs to be this edgy thing where we believe they’re onto something that will move things forward. But that also makes it a bit riskier, because then timing becomes a big topic. Maybe you’re right, but it’s too early—that also happens. But we like those kinds of solutions.

Yeah, you’ve talked a lot about investing in female founders. Are there a lot of female founders in HR Tech?

I’m not sure if there are more women in HR Tech than in other fields—there might be a bias. What we do see, if I were to generalize, is that the female founders we meet who are working in HR Tech often have a background in HR. And we see more male founders in HR Tech who have been managers and have been the recipients of HR services but haven’t necessarily worked in HR itself.

HR is still predominantly women-led, although more men are entering the field, but maybe it’s not seen as an entrepreneurial space. I also think, to be honest—and this applies to both genders—that people sometimes misunderstand the complexity of HR, the "sausage factory," right? So we see this a lot in recruitment solutions, where many decks start with, “I’ve been hiring people for a long time, and it was really difficult, so my solution will solve that.” But there’s often little curiosity about why it’s so complex. That’s why we’ve made very few investments in recruitment, even though we get most of our decks in that space. I think that dynamic plays out very strongly.

You’ve talked before about putting your money into things that push the right values forward. What do you think is important for the future?

So, in my mind, our investments should bring HR forward as a profession, but we believe the HR department or function has a critical role to play in the future that will shift very quickly for multiple reasons—whether that’s talent wars, migration, or technical innovations. Everything is now at a pivotal point in the market. And for companies of the future, they should take responsibility and start leading that change.

I think driving that message forward from a business understanding is important, and also see HR professionals as organizational architects. Technology can help the HR team bridge the gap because there’s a big gap to bridge. We want to contribute to that.

When we look at founders, we prefer those who may have less access to the system—those who aren’t in touch with the financial system, investors, or angel investors. We prefer those founders because we can connect them to the system. But there’s also another piece, we look for founders who are pushing the boundaries from the start. So, there’s a different style and worthiness to it that we like.

And what are your current plans and goals for Invested?

We like the consulting side of things. I think we’re scaling the same mission on both sides—helping organizations with people and work topics. We do a lot of co-design with HR teams. Whether it’s about the architecture of your future operating model, we invest in companies that help you do that at scale. But we also consult with companies pre-IPO to get them there, and we do that in co-design with the HR team, so they can continue leveraging that work. I think we’re super passionate about that, and there’s a lot to do in the coming years to continue on that journey.

What were your plans for the Invested rebrand and website?

We’ve launched a new website because we wanted to have one place and one brand to elevate the message of what we do. We also wanted to give a stage to the awesome companies we’ve had the opportunity to invest in. We wanted to continue doing that and also provide online resources for people teams who want to make that jump.

How do you manage to maintain a good work-life balance?

Yeah, I think with my character, that’s a very difficult one. I don’t know if I’ve mastered it yet. But I have to say, with Invested, it’s way more in balance because I work with someone who’s also a good friend, so we keep each other in check. In my previous jobs, it was a problem, and I think we need to be more transparent about that. Especially in growth-stage startups and scale-ups, it’s not for everyone, and it’s not for every phase of your life. It can be enriching, but it also costs a lot of your personal life.

For me, that was the trade-off I made back then, and it was worth it for the experiences I got through work. Those experiences were life-enhancing, but not sustainable in the long term. Now that I have more control over my own business, it’s very different. I do see the conversation around work-life balance changing a bit.

That’s interesting. How do you see that balance shifting towards your relationships with clients, especially in startups and scale-ups?

We see the dynamic in startups and scale-ups changing as well, and the focus on balance is there. It’s also about tracking how people can continue doing their best work and whether they’re set up for success. A big part of that is cutting out unnecessary stress, which isn’t always linked to the number of hours worked.

For me, when my personal life was affected, it wasn’t because I was always away for work—it was because my mind was full of problems and complexities I was trying to solve. So, even when I was home, I wasn’t there.

Outside of Invested, what would you say are the most impactful contributions you’ve made throughout your career?

I hope that in my career I’ve helped build great people teams. I stay in touch with many people from my previous teams, and they’ve all gone on to have cool careers themselves. I think I contributed by selecting the right leaders in the People team, but they built teams that allowed for innovation, autonomy, and self-drive in their careers. I think that’s also something very cool and something I’m proud of.

Thank you, Noor.

Thanks so much, Robin.