Every ecosystem talks about startup success.
We set out to understand why most founders never reach it..
Our Origins
Scaling Founders began with a frustration shared by thousands of founders worldwide:
it was almost impossible to find the right support, the right network, or the right education.
Anyone could register a company in a few clicks. But almost no one knew how to turn that company into something that created impact at scale.
And when founders looked for help, they found noise rather than answers.
We felt that pain personally. So instead of accepting the status quo, we chose to investigate it.
Over several years, we travelled, researched, and spoke with founders across Europe, Africa, and beyond. We studied why startup failure rates remained unchanged, why ecosystems were fragmented, why early support was inconsistent, and why only 1 in 400 founders ever reached meaningful scale.
The deeper we went, the clearer it became:
You can’t solve this problem from theory - Only from reality.
That led to the first experiments, the early prototypes in the Azores, and eventually the foundation of what is now the Scaling Founders Method. Each insight reinforced the same conclusion: when you train founders differently, outcomes change dramatically.
And that’s when this stopped being a project. It became a MOVEMENT.
WHY WE EXIST
Startup failure isn’t inevitable.
It’s a systems and support problem.
We don’t believe that founders lack ambition. They lack access to quality methods, practical education, and networks built on expertise instead of opinion.
We believe the world doesn’t just need more founders. It needs more Scaling Founders.
Entrepreneurs capable of building ventures that stand up, scale up, and create measurable impact.
Our mission is simple:
Make high-quality founder support accessible, affordable, and scalable — for any talented founder, anywhere in the world.
THE BIG SCALING FOUNDERS EXPERIMENT
To prove this is possible, we launched the Big Scaling Founders Experiment:
A multi-year initiative to train founders differently, build ventures differently, and show that scaling can become a repeatable, teachable, measurable craft.
We’re here to fix what’s broken. Not by preaching from the sidelines, but by building alongside the 100,000 founders who we hope will join us.
Meet Christiaan
Christiaan Oosterveen is a growth strategist and founder of Scaling Founders, driven by a five-year deep dive into why so many start-ups collapse and how to fix them.
With an original background in Hospitality, since 2020 he has immersed himself in founder stories, operational breakdowns and mindset shifts—seeing clear-cut patterns emerge. He built Scaling Founders as a purpose-driven framework to help entrepreneurs not merely grow faster, but build systems, habits and identities that withstand scaling risk.
The result: a blended focus on personal performance, organisational robustness and purposeful growth that helps founders avoid the common traps he uncovered in his research.
Meet Alex
Alex McNab-Lundbäck is a seasoned communications strategist and ghost-writer who co-founded Scaling Founders UK alongside Christiaan Oosterveen to bring together high-impact storytelling, founder mindset and operational scale.
Leveraging his extensive background guiding senior leaders and organisations through story architecture and authority-building, Alex now focuses on helping founders translate their insights, case studies and lived experience into compelling narratives that accelerate growth and leadership presence.
In Scaling Founders UK his mission is to fuse the traditional “leadership narrative” with the tangible frameworks of sustainable business scale — enabling founders not just to tell their story but to build the systems and identity that let their story scale.