February 23, 2022

How Derek Roos shook up the enterprise application space with Mendix

Derek Roos co-founder & CEO of Mendix for the scale lab podcast by techleap

In this episode of The Scale Lab, we deconstruct the entrepreneurial journey of Derek Roos – the co-founder & CEO of Mendix. Our hosts – Joe & Constantijn – try to identify the various factors that made Mendix a pioneer in the app dev industry by discussing Capital, Talent, Market Expansion decisions Derek has made throughout his co-founder career.

Listen to this episode

The podcast episode is available on all major listening platforms: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts.

Derek Roos – co-founder & CEO @Mendix

Derek Roos is a non-tech person running disruptive tech company Mendix, which provides a cloud platform that enables developers and business users to rapidly build and deploy business applications. As Mendix’s co-founder and CEO, Derek leads a pioneering team of software industry experts with the mission to bridge the gap between business and IT, making application development dramatically easier, faster and more collaborative. As a result, the company is achieving tremendous global growth and empowering many of the world’s leading companies to innovate and compete with apps.

Source: MITCIO

Key highlights

00:07:45 – Derek – “We can’t just make the developers go faster because there’s simply not enough developers in the world unless we turn everybody into a developer. That was a vision.”

00:09:37 – Derek – “We like to say, you know, we have this big vision and we’re all breathing ‘aha’ moment. But the reality is you try everything until something works and then you go from there.”

00:17:54 – Derek – “You can sit there and think that everybody doesn’t get it or you can look in the mirror and say, maybe I’m doing something wrong.”

00:30:39 – Derek – “I was focused on creating a tribe, a family, a culture. That’s ultimately what you’re building”

00:34:48 – Derek – “So we said if we’re going to spend the next 10 years or 20 years, whatever our lives, building this company 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we better enjoy it”

00:39:32 – Derek – “That’s why you said egoless or no ego culture is so important, because egos can kill you. They prevent you from being honest with yourself sometimes”