A different vantage point.
Ithaka Ventures participates in transformation — with perspective, experience, connections and, where it fits, capital.
Ithaka Ventures works with entrepreneurs, leaders, boards and organisations at moments when something fundamental needs to change.
It is deliberately not an industry specialist. The experience behind it spans fashion, consumer goods, entertainment, mobility, energy, hospitality, technology, software and logistics — worlds that rarely talk to each other, and learn the most when they do.
The real magic happens when diverse perspectives meet in trusted connection, and collective intelligence emerges from it.
Laurens van de Vijver
Founder — seer and connector
Formally, the career reads as entrepreneur, executive, CEO, advisor and investor. In practice, the contribution sits somewhere else: moving between the levels of a system, zooming out to see the larger pattern and zooming in to sense what is really happening between people.
That ability has been built from systems and complexity thinking, analytical rigour, pattern recognition, leadership experience, entrepreneurship, human understanding, intuition, and years spent in very different industries.
It has also been shaped internationally: working across markets and cultures has reinforced the value of looking beyond familiar assumptions, and of finding insight in the spaces where different worlds meet.
[PLACEHOLDER] A fuller biography will appear here once confirmed by the founder.
What are we not seeing yet? What does this tell us? And what are we going to do about it? Almost everything I do begins with those three questions.