Forget The Playbook: Why Founders Would Benefit From Improv

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Most leaders build their sales pipeline around processes. Thijn Lamers, a member of payment provider Adyen's founding team (Listed for €7.1bn in 2018) and now Co-Founder of Noah (which is modernizing how money moves across borders), is different.

I recently spoke with Lamers in the hope of understanding his playbook. Instead, he answered with his obsessions, the need for improvisation and the importance of creating luck.

Obsession And Selling Downwards

Lamers keeps his priorities narrow. “I hold myself and everything I build to a standard of excellence with no exceptions. This is my obsession,” he said in our conversation.

For Lamers, this obsession pays dividends: “Your customer is your best salesforce. It’s better to have 100 clients who love you than 1,000 who like you. The clients who love you will tell everyone about you. Never underestimate the power of these relationships.”

In practice that means starting at the top. When he advises founders today, he says: "You can always work your way down once you have that first contact but going up becomes increasingly complicated." Go in low, he argues, and the climb only gets harder from there. "These are long-term relationships," he wrote in a follow-up email, "so by the time they are ready and open to working with you or looking for the solution you offer, you will be top of mind for them."

The Power Of Improv

In order to build these relationships, Lamers thinks that “improv is probably one of the most important skills for being successful. Improv is basically hustling," The same hustle, in his view, is needed for anyone starting a successful company. So many deals fail, he added, not for lack of a good offer but for bad timing or the wrong comment at the wrong moment. To overcome this he is adamant that most founders would benefit from improv training.

Timing and humor are also key in Lamers’ view. Whilst visiting the World Economic Forum in Davos, what struck Lamers “was the endless stream of shuttle buses moving people between venues all day long. When I returned the following year, instead of rushing from event to event, I spent most of my time on the shuttle buses. People laughed when I told them I was staying on the bus. In a place where everyone was trying to get into the room, the real conversations were often happening on the way there.”

Serendipity mindset and Smart Luck

Lamers believes that with a serendipity mindset, things will find their way to you, and he is careful to draw a line between luck and the work behind it. "Serendipity is not just something that happens to lucky people," he wrote. "It's a mindset and a set of practices that allow you to create your own luck. It's about being well prepared to recognise opportunities when they appear and being proactive to turn that into value."

Where AI Can’t Beat Human Interaction

In areas such as compliance, Lamers notes that AI can already handle large volumes of screening and monitoring tasks with a level of speed and consistency that would be difficult to achieve manually. “This frees up teams to spend more time on judgment, problem-solving, and client relationships.”

But Lamers believes that as AI becomes more common, human interaction will become even more valuable. “I expect AI will basically create situations where people will want to go back to conversing with people,” he said. “At Noah, every process is assessed to determine whether it is best handled by AI or by a person, with the goal of creating the best outcome for clients and the business.”

What AI cannot automate is trust. "People connect on a personal level," Lamers said. “When people really feel that something is not right, you want to have the ability to make a phone call to someone that you really trust and respect and actually want to talk to. And if you provide that, then this gives peace of mind.”

As we increasingly rely on the predictability of AI, it is worth remembering that the best opportunities rarely follow the script. They belong to the people willing to improvise.

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