My next guest, there would be a budget overrun by even a euro, we would have been bankrupt. Since then, I've come to the conclusion that I rather lose on my terms than win on somebody else's. Sixty years from now, you'll be dead. What would you like to be remembered for?
He grew up in a small Dutch town called Gouda with broken glasses held together by Scotch tape. I never thought of myself as failing in any way, and my goal was never to get rich. I've never worked for money. He started coding at 9 years old. He started investing in stocks 12 years old. His first business 16 years old. His name is Ali Niknam, and he's a three-time unicorn founder.
There's two types of people who want to get rich. A 22-year-old texts you, 'I wanna quit my job, but I don't have an idea.' What's your one piece of advice to him?
After doing some research and reading your book, I'm so pleased to have someone who has literally grown up on welfare in a Dutch town called Gouda. As I learn, you started coding at nine, stock market investing at 12, and your first company at sixteen. Tell me about your upbringing. How did you get this drive, this innate drive to learn? Was it something you were born with? Was it something that just came to you? Tell me a little bit about how you were raised.
Sure. I think I've always been a bit curious. I've always been excited to figure out how things work, and I've just had this natural curiosity that has brought me everywhere. And I think maybe what has also helped is that when I was about seven, we moved from Iran. So I was born in Canada, when I was two we moved to Iran, when I was seven we moved to the Netherlands, to Gouda. So I haven't had a traditional, I guess, youth where you, you know, get born somewhere, you go to school, you see the same people. And I think maybe from a young age, I've gone outside of the regular paths, and so it doesn't feel unnatural to me to just consider all my options and take a path that I feel like is most aligned with who I am.
Tell me more about your parents. So I read that your dad was an Olympic fencer, your mom a national basketball player.
How did you grow up like with this kind of super athlete mindset? Like how is that ingrained in you?
For me, and I think this is interesting, when you're a kid, your surroundings or your environment is just normal to you because there is no comparison. Until this day, I don't think my parents were abnormal or anything about my youth was abnormal. I appreciate maybe, you know, you're like, 'Oh, this guy started coding really young' or whatever, and you're like, 'Oh, what's the secret sauce or what's the magic?' But really, all I've been doing all my life is just following my curiosity.
Do you think that curiosity is a trait you're born with, or do you think that...?
I think in my case, that is true. I don't know if it's true for everyone, but in my case, it's true. Because from what I heard from my late grandmother, is I was already disassembling phones at the age of two, even the wired phones and stuff. And then I would change some wires, and then they would plug it in, and it would ring, and, you know, I would laugh apparently, and then that was it.
Do you still have that childlike curiosity today?
I think so, yeah. The curiosity is still there, definitely. I think I'm a little bit less energetic. I have lost, as I think all kids, a little bit of a sense of wonder of the world, which is such a shame. But I guess that's the price of growing up. But the curiosity is definitely the same.
Let's switch gears a little bit to your entrepreneurship journey.
I was CEO of TransIP, or team.blue as it's called now, which is the world's third-largest domain name and web hosting provider, like the European GoDaddy. And things were going really well, and I noticed that we had really, really good people, great talents, and I didn't want to be, you know, that guy sitting on his throne because I felt like we had so much talent and that they had opportunity, and they should get the opportunity to show what they were capable of. And so we changed the management team. It was still mine at the time, and, you know, they ran the company. And then I was suddenly left with a lot of time on my hands, which allowed me to think what my next steps in life would be. And during that time off, I decided to pursue one of my lifelong dreams, which is to write a book, which I did. Made a rookie mistake, wrote it in Dutch, so none of your viewers have, you know, any use for it. But anyway, I'm very proud of doing that. It was a fun process. And during the writing of the book, I figured out that what drives me is this urge to figure stuff out and create things, and that was then the start of bunq. Although I have partially exited from TransIP or team.blue, I still to this day remain a large shareholder.
So I guess one of the things I'm curious about, so this idea of luck, right? At least with my team, I have two education businesses, and I always tell my team like, luck doesn't just fall on your face. Luck is when preparation and opportunity fall in love or meet. The topic of luck, like what do you think about it? Is it something that's created? Is it made? Is it a combination?
I'll give a class in one of the Amsterdam universities, and then obviously, especially younger adults, you know, younger students, they ask me, 'How do I get rich?' And then I always tell them, well, there's two parts to that answer. First of all, in my personal situation, my goal was never to get rich. I've never worked for money. I've always done stuff that fascinated me, assuming that this somehow would pay the bills. There's nothing wrong with working for money, by the way. In Dutch society, sometimes people think that is wrong if you wanna work for money, but I think, you know, everybody's free to have their own considerations. But it's just that in my case, my motivation has always been something else, you know, fulfilling that, I guess, that curiosity that I always have, or just finding something interesting. That was the start of TransIP. I'm quite a bit older than 32. It was the early days of the internet, and I was just fascinated by this concept of everything being connected to everything, and I wanted to be part of it, and I wanted to figure out how that stuff worked. You know, I figured out and I taught myself routing and BGP4 and autonomous system numbers and firewalls and server management and all those things just because I was curious as to how these things work. Like when you just see a website, there's a ton of magic happening behind a very simple thing for that to be made possible. And then the second thing is, there's two types of people who want to get rich. Type A is the person who goes and buys lottery tickets, you know, and then of course once a year, one of these people will become lucky and they will indeed become rich. And the second type of person is a person who says, 'Okay, you know, I wanna get rich. What do rich people do? Oh, this is the habits they have, this is the things they do, this is what I should do. I'll wake up first person of the day, I'll work harder, I'll be smarter, and I'll go home last.' And then I always ask the class, like, which of these two people do you think has a better chance of becoming wealthy? And of course, it's the second. Yeah. So, of course, I mean, as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day. So luck plays a role sometimes. You're just on the right place in the right time. But I don't know anyone who is really successful who wouldn't have been successful if some coincidence or luck would not have happened.
That's really interesting. Like I find, you know, one of our board members always says like, if Covid hadn't happened, our edtech business wouldn't have boomed from 2019 to 2022. And I'd like to think that that wouldn't be the case. Like, I'd like to think that that growth would have happened inevitably, you know. But who knows, like, who knows.
Yeah, I think, you know, I think maybe it wouldn't have happened, but then maybe something else would have happened, right? Right. So that's, it's to me, it's always a bit nonsensical. I sometimes, people are stuck like, 'If only I had done this right' or 'What if I had done that?' It's just, you don't know because, yeah, life is so complicated. And I don't want to get into chaos theory, and it's like that, you just don't know what would have happened. So it's a waste of energy.
It's funny 'cause like in high school, right, there's always that kid who is like, who doesn't study for tests, who gets concepts super easily, and like, who were you? I hated people like that. No offense, like, I was no, I was the opposite of that. I would come home and meticulously write my notes. Like in 8th grade, I was asked to repeat the year 'cause I was so uninterested in school. And then in 12th grade, I graduated valedictorian, not because I was smart, because I was a nerd. Like I would come home at 4:00 PM, timetable, like checklist, everything, right? And you know, it's funny 'cause the year before, like, valedictorian was announced, there was this really smart girl from the US, and she got like, concepts like, super quickly. She ended up leaving to America in 11th grade, and that's the only reason why I graduated top of my school. But like, I guess I share that because some people don't have that knack, right? Nobody have something else.
So for me, school was very boring, and I did spend late nights, but I just spent it on other things, like figuring out how the stock market works, or figuring out, you know, how the internet works. Personally, I don't think you'll get anywhere in this world without the discipline and drive to do what it takes. So if anything, you just proved my point that you can become a lot of different things as long as you put your mind to it, have the right motivation, whatever 'right' means in your case, yeah, and then just go for it.
Do you think that's lacking in the youth today?
What do you think is the reason?
Easy life, easy upbringing. And the other day I read something that was very interesting to me. That's when I was growing up, computer games were quite simple. They were challenging and simple, and you couldn't like have save points and stuff. When you were playing like Super Mario, you would, you know, go on this adventure and do stuff, and then at the end, you know, get struck by whatever mushroom or whatever it was, it's been years, but... and then because you had to restart, yeah, start from the beginning, go through the whole thing again. And this article wrote that was fascinating to me, that this taught kids from a young age to become resilient, that you need to work hard, you need to do the same thing over and over again, and that often you will fail and you restart, but if you keep persevering, you will succeed, and that this would be ingrained in kids' brains. Contrary to today's games, we have loot boxes, so you can throw money at a problem, and that money comes from your parents. You get dopamine hits all the time, right? 'Oh, good job, good job, good job.' And so the first time you get any sort of adversity, which is for many people often after their school, like the first time they get out in the real world where it's not a fabricated environment but an environment that just tells you more or less the truth because they need you to do the things that need to be done, people, they just don't understand what's going on. And that's so sad because I don't think you can fix that after a certain age, and you become scared of it. And then you become scared, either scared of it, or you start creating these fantasies because there's this psychological process going on, cognitive dissonance, that protects your ego and your identity against something that is so painful that you cannot tolerate it. And so therefore, the answer must be that the other person doesn't like you, or that the other person is unfair, or... And this is unfortunately what you have seen happen in certain areas of the internet where, you know, whole streams of people live in this fabricated virtual world where, in theory, they know everything better and they pass judgment on others, but in reality, the sadness is that they are lacking elements that you simply need to have to be successful in the real world, and that they would be better off trying to overcome those missing pieces.
I think one of the things that I see a lot with our students is like the foundational skills, right? Communication, you know, persistence, resilience, but even having this positive relationship with failure, right? Some people actually love failing.
Very few people. I've never thought of myself as failing in any way. And that's not because you're looking at me, you're like, 'Yeah, this dude, I won't say what,' but I'm not gonna say anything on camera. But, you know, no, I don't think this, but like, this guy with his, with his, you know, with his ideas and his things, and, you know, of course, he has the success and the whatever. But I've always been this way, right? So for me, the flip side of curiosity is that you don't know something, right? And therefore, that you are trying to figure out something. And so, when something doesn't go the way I wished it would or thought it would, I don't see that as a failure. I see that as a learning process. And only a few years ago, when journalists started asking me these kinds of questions, I came to understand that it is more common for people to see, 'Oh, you thought A plus B is C, but it turned out to be D, you're a failure.' But that's just not how my brain is wired. I think, 'Oh, A plus B, I thought it would be C, but it's D. What did I miss? Why is A plus B D?' So...
Let's say I gave you $150 million to open your own school, yeah, the Ali Niknam school, yeah, and you had to create environments like you just described in that school. What would you include in the curriculum? What would you just completely kick out?
Um, I think up until the age of, and I don't know, I need to do some research, but like, this is off the cuff, I would probably until the age of 16 forbid any type of electronic device.
Um, I would forbid any meddling by parents. I would have kids in the same room in larger groups trying to figure stuff out, whatever this stuff is. It doesn't really matter whether it's someone likes, you know, history, someone likes math, someone likes language, all good. Try to find where your natural, your natural curiosity or your natural character brings you. Understand that it's not the same for everyone. Understand the power of that. Figure out how to work together towards a common goal. Figure out the beauty in people being different. Figure out what it is to have to deal with bullies. I was bullied as a nerd in school.
You were, of course. How did you react to that?
It was just a fact of life. So figure out how to deal with it. Figure out, you know, figure out what it means to be a guy, figure out what it means to be a girl, figure out what it means to be anything in between. Yeah. Figure stuff out instead of doing this the whole day.
Yeah, well, you should meet some of my clientele. You will meet a lot of parents who can't stop meddling. And you, you know, I mean, a lot of parents now, they want to control their child on every single thing, not just the courses they're taking, but what extracurriculars, how does that feed into application, how do they get into the top university. One of the reasons I'm doing this podcast is because I have so many students who have literally followed the right path and are now at university, have no idea who they are, have no clue how to follow up to an email, and are simply stuck. And so I feel for this generation because I feel, is it their fault? Is it, you know, the parents' fault? Is it the environment? Like, how can we make it easier for the 20 to 30, you know, age group to figure out who they are?
Look, there's a lot of things in there, right? So it's natural for parents to want the best things for their kids, especially older, like even older generations who were brought up after, in Europe after the Second World War, where they had hunger, where they had nothing, where they had to work hard to get the very basics in. Of course, they want a better life for their kids. It's a normal thing. But I believe that maybe in that good intention, it's been overdone, leading to kids not being resilient at all. Right? If you have been brought up too protectively, you don't know how to handle yourself. So that's one. Secondly, in your sentence, in one of your sentences, you said something like, 'They've done everything, they've been on the right path, they've done everything they should.' But that's very funny to me because that sentence, to my ears, is contradictory. Because if they were on the right path and did everything they should, they would be somewhere where they would be happy and enjoying what they were doing and being challenged and being successful in the context of who they are. What you're actually saying is, there is this theoretical path that should be followed that on paper looks like everything that you should do, and all those people who did that and probably forewent a lot of their character and skill and other things that they were good at to do the stuff they were supposed to do, the outcome of that is that they're somewhere they didn't want to be. That's what I'm hearing. So I don't think at all, and I don't want to speak to your junior mentees, but I don't think at all that the outcome of someone, 'Oh, now you know how to, you know, you learned how to play the other game, sideline who you really are, now you're in a new environment which is a new game, and I'm going to teach you how to play this game and how you can continue to be miserable for the next 40 years of your life doing something well because you know which buttons to push, but you're not going to be you.' So for me, figuring out who you are, what drives you, what makes you you, what makes you happy, what makes you sad, what things are important to you, what things are not important to you, that's the real journey of life, right? And work and all friends and all the other things fall out of that.
I don't like that word anymore because it's been abused so much. But if you want to use that word, hahaha.
I definitely felt stuck at 23. I was at Goldman Sachs investment banking, and I had the, like, a side desk where you could see the river, and I'd always look at the river, and I'd like write poetry like sometimes during the day, and just my mind would drift, and then I would think about education, and like, I literally felt so unhappy going to work every single day until I was 24 and started to sign out my first company. And as you say, but like, that's where you learn the skills, like that's where the... Devi before entrepreneurship, I don't recognize her. Yeah. I don't even remember how she thought, right? And so it's very interesting. Okay, so then likewise, for some people, banking is their perfect... totally, right?
So I've had a, this is maybe a funky example, but we like that. Like just last week, I saw a small Instagram video about this guy. I don't know, in festivals, in Dutch festivals, you have these urinal wars, but clearly somebody needs to clean that stuff up, right? And I've always wondered who does that. And there was this video about this guy who really liked doing this work. He said, 'I feel so much joy to get a disgusting thing and clean it and then have it cleaned afterwards, and I'm proud of my work.' And he smiled and said, 'Yeah, you think he's that weird guy, but this is what I do.' And so for me, there was so much beauty in that because this is, of course, in today's society where we are quite snobby about many things, is the absolute opposite of what any parent wants for their kids, any maybe partner wants for their partner, and like, it's being looked down upon. But this guy was so in tune with who he was, and he was so strong, he didn't give a shit about anything, and he knew that for whatever reason, this is what he liked to do, and he enjoyed doing it. So my point is, for you, it was entrepreneurship. And I'm flagging this because the last couple of years, a lot of younger people think, 'Oh, if only I become an entrepreneur, then I'll be happy.' But that's not true. What you need to become is something that is in tune and aligned with who you are.
Okay, I'm gonna switch gears a little bit. This is a funky question I have. And you started three companies. Any like differences in Ali company 1, Ali company 2, Ali company 3? Who's your favorite?
What qualities do you respect in each one?
The qualities by and large are the same. It's just, you know, Porsches. If you look at the Porsche in 1950 or something, 60, whenever they were created, and you look at the Porsche in 2026, you can still see it's the same Porsche, but over time it has slightly changed. And I think I'm like that. So my drive has always been the same: curiosity on one hand and trying to do good on the other, while being, you know, while creating something that can be durable and independent. And I think that's the same. I think like my first big successful company, which is TransIP, that was more techy because I was just fascinated by this feeling of interconnectedness, and maybe because I have family all over the world, I don't know, reason doesn't matter, I was just mesmerized by it. My second company, I co-founded, I wasn't single founder there, because after TransIP, I just really wanted to build something physical, something I could see, something I could touch, and it was a data center company. And I remember a certain day, it was an early morning, I drove up to the construction site, and I saw like 50 of these vans on the parking lot, and I just felt so happy. I was like, 'Wow, we are really making something. We're really making something.' And, you know, in hindsight, it was far more risk than any sane person would take, but I don't know, this was just what we wanted to do, and it was all or nothing. And if the construction would have been delayed by even two weeks, or if there would be a budget overrun by even a euro, we would have been bankrupt.
So the build was done on time, 5% below budget, which is something that I've never heard of or never achieved again after that. But so that was the second thing. And then, you know, my third company with bunq, I felt like society was very negative. I felt like after the financial crisis, people were very focused on finding who was at fault rather than how to move forward and learn from whatever happened. And so I felt like with bunq, we could, you know, make serious impact on a societal level. But all of my companies have always been about curiosity, figuring problems out, you know, coming up with the solution.
I wanna talk about the data center because I read that you sold that company to keep bunq alive.
I wanna learn more about the process in your head, the conversation in your head. You built this amazing company, your second company, and you sell it to keep the third one growing and float.
How did that feel?
Many say about me that I'm a logical guy, so I guess my answer is it was very logical for me. Because all the companies I built, similar maybe to the book I wrote, I like the building, but I also like it to ultimately become independent. For me, something that can survive me. I compare it to a kid. I've never had a kid, but you know, in my mind, I compare it to a kid. You get a kid, it grows up, but there also comes a day where it needs to go out and get into the world and you know, figure it out by itself. And I think for me, it's very comparable to companies. So for example, team.blue, I'm still a major shareholder, but I don't meddle with the day-to-day because the company should be on its own and it shouldn't need me.
I spent last night reading Breaking Through Banking, which is I suppose the origin story of bunq, in a way.
Yes, because when we started, and this is quite a while ago, in 2012, there hadn't been a greenfield banking license in 35 years. And 35 years before it, all the rules and regulations were approximately, let's say, this much. And now it's like, this much. Wow, right? So nobody really knew how to start a bank from scratch anymore. Regulators didn't know, law firms didn't know. It was quite a big thing. And so we figured when we started, hey, let's have someone as a part of the team who sees what we're doing, what we're attempting to do, how things go. Because even if we don't get the banking license, aka we fail, at least we'll have a good story. So this author, Siba, who became a great friend over time, he was just silent in the corner, like Elaine is now, making notes. Maybe she's writing, I don't know. Observation, who knows, maybe someday, I don't know. And so when we launched, that was the last chapter of his book. Yeah. So that was the outcome of his, I think, two or three year journey with us. And nobody really knew how it would end, but I'm happy it ended.
You created it from scratch, right? Not on top of any infrastructure, like on your own. So my question is, how did that idea come up to you?
After I was done writing my book, I knew that I wanted to start another company. I wanted a new challenge, a challenge that was bigger, that just excited me. And I looked into many things. I looked into freshwater supplies because there's a huge water shortage, drinking water shortage. I looked at clean energy. And while I was looking around, this financial crisis came about. The two things came together that I observed. One was that it touched and it hurt a lot of ordinary people in their day-to-day. Entrepreneurial friends of mine who, you know, had to stop their business or stop growing because some spreadsheet somewhere a number changed. People had to sell their house or couldn't buy a house. On the one hand. And on the other hand, nobody, in our minds, nobody was busy with working on a proper solution. You know, it was very nasty. Like certain things we have unfortunately these days, they become political, and then it's about who did what and why and whatever, and who's at fault rather than, okay, we are where we are, are we gonna solve it or not? And those two things coming together, I thought, okay, let's do this. I wasn't intending on doing it for 14 years now, but I guess the challenge was quite big.
By the way, we're switching from Revolut to bunq. Great. Okay, so I wanna switch to hiring because I'm really interested in the process of hiring. Everyone seems to have some pain point with hiring. At least for me personally, both as an owner, it's one of the hardest things I have had to nail. And I have hired the HBS person, I have hired, you know, the one that has the right resume, and I have been burnt quite a few times. And I still managed to like mess it up somehow. And there's been a few hires that I literally thought would be interns and now are like the second biggest shareholder in my business. So my first question is, tell me more about your hiring process. How did you develop it?
Okay, so everything has an origin, right? So if we look back, then during my youth, I was a non-blonde in the eyes of the Dutch, a non-white person in a very white environment. And there was, and unfortunately still is, a lot of racism in this country. And so I noticed that although on paper the rules are the same, not everybody gets the same opportunities. But I also saw the opportunity in that, because I noticed that a lot of really good people were just not being offered the same chance. And so they worked harder, sometimes smarter, faster, whatever, right? So that was one. The second thing is, now being a techie is kind of cool, or maybe not so much anymore, but for some years it has been cool. But when I was growing up, you know, during the Bill Gates era, tech guys were nerds, and nerds were idiots to be laughed at, right? And so I saw that again, very competent people basically being sidelined due to a bias in the system. And so I figured, okay, in my companies, I want to eliminate as much bias as possible. I want a meritocracy where people are hired, fired, salary raised, or whatever, based on what they perform, rather than how people feel around them or think about them. I want performance. I don't want a popularity contest, which is basically what most companies are. And so even in my first company, we already had simple tests. It wasn't as expensive as bunq.
You developed those tests?
Yeah, even at the first company we would still, because I mean, I had never hired anyone, so it was also like figuring out how to support. But even in the first company we would do tests. And that has brought me here today at bunq, where I think we get 20,000 applications a month. And all these people are from all over the planet. I don't know if they're male, female, young, old, black, white, purple, I don't know. I don't care. All I know is how well they score in the test. And the top 1%, half percent, even below 1%, gets to have a conversation. Then we try to figure out the soft skills. So yes, there's still a human element in it. And then we do more tests to see if somebody would fit. One of the most famous and also best parts of the test is what we call a 'Get Shit Done Day', where we get to invite a potential colleague to join us for them to experience what bunq is like, for them to experience if it's an environment that they can thrive in, that they can excel in, and for us to see if that person literally can get shit done. So you come in, you get the correct access depending on your future role, you get an assignment. At the end of the day, you're either happy and smiling, so that's one half of the equation. And the other half of the equation, your assignment is either correct or it isn't. That's it. And if it's yes and yes, you're in. And if not, then you know, thank you for trying, and maybe another time.
I'd like to get shit done day concept a lot. Let's say I was applying for head of sales of bunq, what would you ask me?
