Dan Lievens

Dan Lievens grew up without a fixed address. His mother is Taiwanese, his father Dutch, and his father's work as a diplomat for the Belgian government meant the family moved often across Southeast Asia. Along the way, Lievens passed through British, French, Dutch and Chinese schools - four national systems, each with its own language, rules and idea of how a story should be told.

That upbringing left a mark that shows up decades later in the company he runs today. When you have to read a new room every year, you learn quickly what makes people believe each other and what makes them tune out. It is the kind of instinct that does not appear on a resume but tends to shape everything a person builds.

His formal education started at a university in Singapore and finished in the United States, where he earned an MBA from Penn State. Then came the building. Lievens describes himself plainly as a serial entrepreneur, with 11 companies started across information technology, finance, and health and wellness. He has a reputation for fast, nimble execution and for moving between industries without losing the thread.

Before coworking had a name

One of his earlier bets looks obvious now and did not at the time. Lievens built the first coworking facility in Philadelphia, years before shared workspaces became a fixture of city life. Hundreds of early and mid-stage companies came through, and he worked alongside them, helping founders analyze what their businesses actually needed and where the real market demand sat.

That period is the connective tissue between his ventures. Across all of them, he kept running into the same gap: the distance between what a company says about itself and what its customers actually believe. Marketing copy sits on one side of that gap. Trust sits on the other. Closing it became the problem he wanted to solve for good.

The one-story idea

Share One, his Austin-based venture, is built on a deceptively simple premise. As Lievens puts it, if each and every one of us could share one singular, transformational story of ourselves, we would live in a different world. The company name is the thesis.

In practice, Share One is a full-service video testimonial platform. It handles customer outreach and scheduling, then puts a real customer in front of an expert interviewer for a human-led conversation - not scripted soundbites. The result is produced and edited into what the company calls Share Packs: long-form edits, short clips, social content, transcripts and written posts, all tracked in real time through a client portal and stamped with a “Real Stories by Real People” seal of authenticity.

The distinction Lievens draws is between recording and capturing. Anyone can record a video. What Share One is after is harder: a story the next customer can see themselves in. In three years the company says it has helped hundreds of businesses, from startups to established enterprises, swap generic marketing claims for the voices of their actual customers.

A raise about lowering the cost of honesty

In September 2025, Share One announced it had closed a Series A round. The framing was telling. Rather than talking about aggressive scale, the company said the money would go toward expanding engineering, refining editing workflows, and building features that reduce the cost and complexity of collecting testimonials in the first place. The bet is that authenticity can be made cheaper and easier without being made fake.

It fits a pattern Lievens has followed for years: back purpose-driven businesses, execute quickly, and stay focused on the human element that technology tends to flatten. He splits his founder identity between Share One and a related venture, The Proof, and keeps his public footprint modest - a LinkedIn presence, an Instagram handle, a YouTube channel where the company shares founder videos and customer stories.

For someone who has started 11 companies, the ambition is unusually consistent. The industries change. The underlying question does not: how do you get people to believe something is true? Lievens keeps answering it the same way. Let a real person say it, and get out of the way.