Pieter van der Does

Overview

Jonkheer Pieter van der Does
Born	1969 (age 56–57) Amstelveen, Netherlands
Citizenship	Netherlands
Education	Economics
Alma mater	Clark University; Panthéon-Sorbonne University; University of Amsterdam
Occupation(s)	Entrepreneur, business executive
Employer	Adyen
Known for	Co-founding Adyen
Title	Co-chief executive officer
Term	2006–present
Board member of	Supervisory Board member, Écart
Spouse	Married
Children	2

💳 Pieter van der Does (born 1969) is a Dutch entrepreneur and business executive who co-founded Adyen, a global payments company headquartered in Amsterdam, and has served as its chief executive officer and later co-chief executive officer since 2006. He previously helped establish Bibit Global Payment Services, one of Europe's early internet payment processors, which was sold to the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2004. Known for favoring organic growth and unified technology over acquisitive expansion, he has overseen Adyen's development into a major provider of payment services to global technology and retail companies. His roughly 3% shareholding in Adyen has made him a billionaire, although he is often described in Dutch media as maintaining a comparatively modest lifestyle.

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Early life and education

🎓 Family background and studies. Pieter Willem van der Does was born in 1969 in Amstelveen, an affluent suburb of Amsterdam, into a family belonging to the Dutch nobility that holds the honorific title jonkheer. Although he came from an old patrician background, accounts of his upbringing emphasize a pragmatic and unpretentious household rather than aristocratic formality. Between 1988 and 1995 he studied economics and related subjects at Clark University in Massachusetts, at the Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris, and finally at the University of Amsterdam, where he completed a master's degree in economics.

🏔️ Mountaineering and early work. Van der Does has been described as adventurous and enterprising in his youth and frequently interrupted his studies to undertake mountaineering expeditions in the Alps, Scotland and Patagonia, experiences that he later said shaped his thinking about calculated risk in business. After graduating, he worked briefly at Dutch bank ING and at the publisher Elsevier, but later said that these early roles confirmed his suspicion that conventional corporate life would not suit him, remarking that his "fears that the working world was really dull came true". This dissatisfaction encouraged him to seek opportunities in the emerging field of online payments rather than pursue a traditional career in banking or publishing.

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Career

🧾 Bibit Global Payment Services. In 1999 van der Does co-founded Bibit Global Payment Services, one of Europe's early internet payment processors, and served as the firm's chief commercial officer. Bibit provided online payment services to technology companies, airlines and other merchants, and expanded rapidly as e-commerce grew in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2004 the Royal Bank of Scotland acquired Bibit for around €90 million, and van der Does joined the bank's board following the transaction. He later recalled that he found the bureaucracy of a large financial institution frustrating, saying that he often disagreed with decisions taken at headquarters and felt constrained in implementing changes.

🧪 Founding Adyen. After completing his lock-up period under Royal Bank of Scotland's ownership, van der Does left the bank in 2006 and, together with former Bibit colleague Arnout Schuijff, founded Adyen in Amsterdam. He chose the name "Adyen", meaning "start again" in Sranan Tongo (Surinamese), as a deliberate reference to getting a second chance to build a payments company according to his own preferences. Drawing on his experiences at Bibit, he sought to build Adyen's payments infrastructure from scratch rather than by connecting multiple legacy systems, later likening Bibit's sale to "building a race car and selling it before you could drive it on the track". He argued that much of the fintech sector merely added "a new layer on top of old technology" and that "no one was attacking the old rails", positioning Adyen as a firm that would replace rather than overlay legacy payment infrastructure.

🌐 Unified payments platform. Van der Does positioned Adyen as a technology-focused payments company that would maintain a single, internally developed platform rather than grow through acquisitions or layering systems, arguing that this gave the firm more freedom to innovate than incumbents running multiple fragmented infrastructures. Under his leadership Adyen reported double-digit annual growth from its inception, broadening its capabilities to process transactions in more than 250 payment methods and almost 200 currencies for merchants around the world. The company attracted large technology and platform companies such as Spotify, Facebook, Netflix and Uber as clients, which used Adyen to support their international payment flows through one integrated system.

🚀 Public listing and expansion. In June 2018 Adyen held an initial public offering on Euronext Amsterdam that valued the company at approximately €13.4 billion (US$15.8 billion), making it one of Europe's most valuable listed fintech firms. Van der Does emphasized that the listing would not change the company's focus on long-term product development, and Adyen, which had been profitable since 2011, continued to prioritize sustainable growth over short-term earnings targets. In 2020 his roughly 3% stake in Adyen led to his inclusion on the Forbes Billionaires list, and as of 2024 his net worth was estimated at about US$1.8 billion. During the 2020s he oversaw Adyen's expansion into unified commerce, integrating online and in-store payments, and into data-driven services, with the company processing in excess of US$900 billion in payment volume annually by 2024. To support the firm's continuing growth, he appointed long-serving chief financial officer Ingo Uytdehaage as co-chief executive officer in late 2022, establishing a dual-CEO structure.

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Wealth and compensation

💰 Executive compensation. Despite leading a large publicly traded fintech company, van der Does has maintained a comparatively restrained executive pay package. Analyses of Adyen's disclosures indicate that his annual compensation remains below €1 million, with his 2024 remuneration totaling about €807,000, of which a base salary of roughly €776,000 accounted for nearly all of the amount. Commentators have noted that Adyen's remuneration structure involves limited bonuses or stock-based incentives for the chief executive, aligning with the company's emphasis on long-term performance; instead, van der Does's economic interest is concentrated in his ownership of around 3% of Adyen's shares, estimated to be worth about €1.4 billion as of 2025.

🪙 Approach to wealth. Van der Does has described his personal approach to wealth as "totally passive", stating that he has not built a large portfolio of external business interests and has largely avoided the role of serial investor often associated with technology founders. Beyond Adyen he has reported holding only one external role, as a member of the supervisory board of the Dutch retail company Écart, and has said that his professional focus remains centered on running Adyen. Various rich lists have placed him among the wealthiest individuals in the Netherlands, estimating his fortune at roughly €1.1 billion in 2023, yet Dutch press accounts portray him as uneasy with conspicuous displays of wealth.

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Personal life and views

🏡 Family and lifestyle. Van der Does is married with a son and a daughter, and the family lives in central Amsterdam, a city he has described as "the nicest city to live in". Away from work he continues to pursue mountaineering and other outdoor activities, drawing parallels between the discipline required for high-altitude climbing and running a company. He has argued that "a good company is one that survives" and that, contrary to the popular image of the entrepreneur as a risk-taker, successful founders are "risk mitigators" who prepare carefully for setbacks, a philosophy that he has said influences Adyen's cautious approach to risk and growth.

🧠 Leadership style. Accounts from colleagues portray van der Does as an informal and collaborative leader who nevertheless maintains a strong operational focus. He has spoken publicly about being dyslexic and has said that the inevitability of spelling mistakes in his e-mails encouraged him to normalize open feedback, including inviting staff to correct the chief executive's messages, which he presents as part of a culture in which "everyone is allowed to see what is going on" inside the company. He has also emphasized giving engineers an equal voice alongside commercial and managerial staff, arguing that he became frustrated at previous employers where "non-technical people decided what the technical people should make", and has attempted to design Adyen's decision-making processes around technical input.

🚗 Attitudes to money and work. Van der Does has frequently stated that "money should put you at ease, not be an objective on its own", and has said he is "really not at all busy with money". He has given as an example his continued use of an older Volvo sport-utility vehicle that he has "never replaced", explaining that he values practicality and comfort for family and friends over status symbols. He has contrasted entrepreneurship, which he characterizes as implementing ideas in the real world, with "living off rents", which he has likened to "showering without getting wet"; instead of only talking about the quality of his ideas, he has said, he prefers to "prove it" by building companies.

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Controversies and challenges

📉 Market volatility and investor reactions. Van der Does has generally maintained a low profile and has not been associated with major personal scandals, but Adyen has faced periods of significant market volatility. In 2023 the company's shares, which had previously been highly rated by investors, fell by more than 40% in a single trading day after the firm reported results that reflected increased hiring and higher research and development expenses, disappointing some shareholders focused on short-term margins. Dutch business press reported that roughly €10 billion in Adyen's market capitalization was wiped out over the summer of 2023 and estimated that van der Does, as a large shareholder, saw around €500 million of his paper wealth decline in the downturn. He has frequently discussed the "single-stock risk" of having most of his net worth in Adyen shares and has presented the 2023 episode as an illustration of that exposure.

⚖️ Strategic debates and M&A stance. Van der Does has at times challenged prevailing themes in the technology and venture-capital sectors, criticizing what he views as an excessive focus on attaining "unicorn" valuations and arguing that such targets can encourage irresponsible behavior and an obsession with headline valuations rather than underlying performance. Adyen's historically organic growth and lack of acquisitions led some commentators to wonder whether the company was effectively "anti-M&A", a characterization that he rejected, stating that he was not opposed to acquisitions in principle but did not want to buy other payment companies merely to add scale while inheriting legacy systems. He has argued that, because Adyen is not "burdened by legacy infrastructure", it can maintain a simpler technology stack than rivals that grew through serial acquisitions and must integrate multiple platforms. Analysts have generally regarded this disciplined approach as supportive of Adyen's long-term positioning, noting that, despite the 2023 setback, the firm's three-year total shareholder return remained positive and that investors often cite its governance and risk management as strengths.

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Legacy and leadership philosophy

🧭 Legacy and outlook. Commentators have described van der Does's career as emblematic of a generation of European fintech founders who combined technical infrastructure development with a focus on large global merchants. Having steered businesses through the dot-com downturn, the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, he has emphasized resilience and steady execution over rapid shifts in strategy. His frequent analogies between mountaineering and entrepreneurship underscore a leadership style that blends caution about risks with a willingness to attempt difficult climbs, both literal and metaphorical. Reflecting on his decision to leave conventional banking and build Adyen from the ground up, he has said that "it's fun to prove that you are right", a remark that observers have taken as a summary of his preference for demonstrating ideas through long-term company building rather than through short-term market signals.

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