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The 2016 Tech 50: Pieter van der Does

The Adyen president and CEO debuts on the Tech 50 ranking at No. 50.

50
Pieter van der Does
President and Chief Executive Officer
Adyen
PNR

After selling Bibit Global Payment Services to Royal Bank of Scotland Group in 2004, Pieter van der Does took a sabbatical in Brazil. “The total objective was to be bored,” says the 47-year-old Dutch entrepreneur. But he couldn’t resist planning another payments start-up, Adyen, which was launched in the Netherlands in 2006 and has grown rapidly as a service provider to Airbnb, Facebook, Netflix, Uber and other big names in e-commerce. “The first time around, we were doing payments with large companies,” says van der Does, who as Adyen’s president and CEO works closely with chief technology officer — and Bibit and Adyen co-founder — Arnout Schuijff. “We were an interface between the merchant and bank systems to make reconciliation smoother.” With Adyen “we started from scratch and did it in the way it should have been done, building the full stack ourselves,” van der Does explains. An e-payment processor with a global reach, Adyen invites comparisons with PayPal Holdings (see Dan Schulman, No. 29). But Adyen doesn’t work directly with consumers. Its mission is to help merchants efficiently and safely accept all forms of payment, ranging from credit cards to PayPal to government-issued vouchers. The company, which processed $50 billion in payments last year, is directly connected to MasterCard and Visa, so those transactions are faster, and their service levels higher, than if they were routed through an intermediary bank’s network, van der Does says. Adyen employs 400 and has 4,500-plus customers worldwide. With more than 40 percent of its merchants in the U.S., Adyen has had a San Francisco office since 2008; van der Does spends much of his time there, though his home base remains Amsterdam. The company, which in 2014 raised $250 million (valuing it at $1 billion-plus) from the likes of General Atlantic and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, has received buyout interest, van der Does says, adding: “I always have the feeling that this is only the beginning. The market size is almost endless, the opportunity is so big, and the company is doing well, so why look for an exit?”

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The 2016 Tech 50

1. Catherine
Bessant
Bank of America Corp.
2. Jeffrey Sprecher
Intercontinental Exchange
3. Lance Uggla
Markit
4. Phupinder Gill
CME Group
5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko
Bloomberg
6. R. Martin Chavez
Goldman Sachs Group
7. Robert Goldstein
BlackRock
8. Adena Friedman
Nasdaq
9. Deborah Hopkins
Citi Ventures
10. Daniel Coleman
KCG Holdings
11. Stephen Neff
Fidelity Investments
12. David Craig
Thomson Reuters
13. Michael Spencer
ICAP
14. Michael Bodson
Depository Trust & Clearing Corp.
15. Charles Li
Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing
16. Chris Concannon
BATS Global Markets
17. Blythe Masters
Digital Asset Holdings
18. David Rutter
R3CEV
19. Neil Katz
D.E. Shaw & Co.
20. Lee Olesky
Tradeweb Markets
21. Richard McVey
MarketAxess Holdings
22. Seth Merrin
Liquidnet Holdings
23. Robert Alexander
Capital One Financial Corp.
24. Brad Katsuyama
IEX Group
25. Antoine Shagoury
State Street Corp.
26. David Gledhill
DBS Bank
27. Lou Eccleston
TMX Group
28. Andreas Preuss
Deutsche BÖrse
29. Dan Schulman
PayPal Holdings
30. Scott Dillon
Wells Fargo & Co.
31. Mike Chinn
S&P Global Market Intelligence
32. Craig Donohue
Options Clearing Corp.
33. Gary Norcross
Fidelity National Information Services
34. Steven O'Hanlon
Numerix
35. Sebastián Ceria
Axioma
36. Michael Cooper
BT Radianz
37. Tyler Kim
MaplesFS
38. Neal Pawar
AQR Capital Management
39. David Harding
Winton Capital Management
40. Chris Corrado
London Stock Exchange Group
41. Brian Conlon
First Derivatives
42. Jim Minnick
eVestment
43. Stephane Dubois
Xignite
44. Mazy Dar
OpenFin
45. Yasuki Okai
NRI Holdings America
46. Kim Fournais
Saxo Bank
47. Jock Percy
Perseus
48. Robert Schifellite
Broadridge Financial Solutions
49. Brian Sentance
Xenomorph Software
50. Pieter van der Does
Adyen

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