We raised €11M. Six months later, we were laying people off.

In September 2021, we closed a Series B round at €11M.

I remember the moment. The validation, the relief, the rush. Years of tight bootstrapping, pivots, nights spent staring at dashboards as if the numbers would change if you looked long enough. And then, suddenly, millions in the bank.

What happened next is the most instructive — and painful — thing I’ve experienced as a CEO.

A full bank account creates an illusion

When you raise money, something subtle shifts in your head. The constraint disappears. Not the real constraint — investor obligations, business plan targets, future repayment — but the perceived constraint. The one that forces you to choose, to prioritize, to say no.

With an empty account, every decision is brutally simple: can we afford it? No. Move on.

With a full account, the question changes: does it make sense? And everything can make sense if you want it to.

Before the raise, we’d built a team of about a hundred people across Europe — already a solid organization for a Belgian scale-up. After the raise, we accelerated hard. In 5 months, we hired 50 additional people. We thought we were building.

In reality, we were diluting.

What we didn’t understand in time

The problem with rapid headcount growth is that it looks like progress when it’s actually complexity.

Every new manager wants their team. Every team wants its tools, its process, its budget. And the energy that should go toward the core business scatters into coordination, meetings, role definitions.

We’d oversold our Series B. The business plan we gave investors projected a trajectory I should have known was hard to hit from the moment I signed. But when you’re raising, you sell the best case. And then you have to deliver it.

Board after board, the tension built. Growth was running at +1-2% per month instead of the 5-7% we’d projected. Expenses, meanwhile, had exploded. By summer 2022, investors had started warning management about spending outpacing revenue — that’s from the Belgian press, not me. We had 8 months of runway.

The hardest decision

In early 2023, I presented the entire team what I still call the hardest slide of my life.

Within months, we went from over 100 people to about 75. More than a quarter of the company, gone. We restructured the organization, cut everything not directly tied to marketplace growth, and put everyone into controlled survival mode.

I won’t sugarcoat it. It was brutal. People who had trusted the company, who may have turned down other offers to join us, received termination letters. Some had been hired just months earlier with promises of a future. That’s something I still carry.

What I should have done differently

A fundraise is not a reward. It’s debt — with interest, covenants, and an investor who has obligations to their own LPs.

If I could do it over:

1. Don’t confuse ambition with hiring speed. Ambition is proven by execution quality, not team size. We had a product that worked — Deloitte Fast 50 had measured +2000% revenue growth over four years. We should have optimized before scaling.

2. Set a non-negotiable hiring pace. Maximum 2-3 hires per month, regardless of cash on hand or manager pressure.

3. Keep the conservative business plan as the internal reference. Not the optimistic scenario pitched to investors.

4. Say no a lot more. That’s the muscle I’ve developed most since. The CEO who says yes to everything is popular in the first weeks and catastrophic in the long run.

What happened next

We survived. Better than that: by end of 2023, Sortlist was back to 40%+ annual growth — a figure publicly confirmed by my co-founders. By 2024, we’d reached operational profitability. The company that had been on the edge two years earlier was in the healthiest financial position of its existence.

What I tell founders who are raising today: enjoy the validation that a round represents. Then, the next morning, put the constraints back on. Hire slowly. Spend frugally. Stay focused on what creates value, not what looks impressive.

A fundraise buys you time. What you do with that time is all that matters.