Leaders of Growth

#30 Why Do You Need a Kickboxing Ring in Your Company, with Chris Zadeh

Arthur Nobel

"Life is too short to permit yourself the luxury of living it badly." That's Chris Zadeh's motto.

Chris is an entrepreneur turned Angel Investor. He joined the founders of BinckBank in 2000 as employee number six, and in 2003 he became managing director of the Netherlands.

After eight years at BickBank, he left the company and traveled the world. He got a vision of cloud-based administration factories for banks on his trip. That was how Ohpen, the world's first cloud-native core banking platform, was born. Ohpen raised over $80M.

Chris made his passions part of his routine as an entrepreneur. Being a founder didn't stop him from traveling and doing other activities such as yoga and martial arts. 

Today, Chris is an angel investor and non-executive board member. He walks his shepherd dogs Yucca and Myza before doing yoga and advises companies on how to scale via his company Whangai.nl. 

In this episode, Chris shares his story and learnings from scaling Ohpen, his approach to building company culture, and his passion for extreme activities.