Brothers in Tax | Episode 6 | Building an internal culture: going all in, hiring on instinct, and the mistakes we'd undo

"If you stab each other to death every day, you're not gonna make nice babies." Ruben and Ramon van Aarle went all in on SaaS in 2017 with a team of three. Last month they welcomed number 35. In this episode they tell the story of building that team, and the culture they are proud of. They get candid about the early calls. Hiring their first developer before salary ever came up. Why that developer is still here ten years later. Why two tax guys who cannot code decided to build the software anyway. And they name their biggest miss without flinching: going to market too early, and raising too little to back it. Then they dig into what actually builds a culture. Not the rules, not the bonuses, but the running club, the yoga, the pancakes and the ski trip nobody was told to join. Two brothers, no script, no slides. CHAPTERS 00:00 Cold open 00:13 Welcome 01:05 How Keeyns actually started 02:16 Two tax guys, and nothing on the market 03:45 "Hired" before a word about salary 05:00 Ten years in: why the first developer stayed 06:08 We can't code, so we trust the team 08:11 When we started hiring more people 08:37 Private equity and scaling the team 09:12 Has the strategy changed since 2017? 09:52 From VAT engine to tax management platform 11:11 Wins and f-ups: too early, too fast 12:24 Should we have raised more money? 14:57 When the strategy started to work 15:57 Building the company top down 17:47 Stewardship: letting people own their work 19:39 The atmosphere we try to create 20:48 40 resumes for a single job 22:32 The unplanned things that build culture 23:31 Does culture actually help the business? 24:43 What we would do differently 27:00 Wrap up ABOUT BROTHERS IN TAX Ruben and Ramon van Aarle are brothers, co-founders and lifelong tax professionals. Every month they sit down to talk about their years in tax, what's happening with tax technology, and the businesses they've built along the way. No script, no slides. ABOUT KEEYNS Keeyns is a tax management platform for multinational, multi-entity companies, built for lean in-house tax teams owning dozens to hundreds of filings across many jurisdictions. Tax Directors and CFOs get total confidence in every tax process: they can prove exactly what was done, when and by whom. Got a subject you'd like us to cover, or want to join us on the podcast? Let us know at https://keeyns.com #Tax #TaxTechnology #StartupCulture #CFO #TaxDirector