Pieter van der Does has a joke about his line of work. “How hard can it be to send a card number to Visa?” It sounds like a reasonable question until you remember everything that can happen between wanting something and successfully paying for it. A customer is abroad. A delivery address belongs to somebody else. The order is returned. The easy bit has acquired a committee.
Van der Does co-founded Adyen in 2006 to work on that committee’s plumbing. He had already spent years in payments, including a spell as chief commercial officer at Bibit. Royal Bank of Scotland bought that business in 2004. Two years later, he was starting another one with a group that included Arnout Schuijff. Experience had supplied both an opportunity and a fairly detailed list of things to reconsider.
The attraction of his story lies in that second attempt. Startup histories often arrive with a discovery scene and a young founder who knows little enough to be fearless. Van der Does arrived with professional memory. He knew the customer’s problem. He had seen a payments company from the inside. Beginning again gave him a chance to choose the foundations before anyone built another floor.
An apprenticeship before the second start
Born in Amstelveen in 1969, van der Does studied economics, eventually earning a master’s degree at the University of Amsterdam. His student years also included Clark University and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, with breaks for mountaineering. There is something pleasingly literal about an economics student interrupting his education to consider the cost of taking the wrong route.
His working life began at ING Netherlands in 1995, followed by Elsevier. In 1999 he joined Bibit as chief commercial officer. That sequence matters because it places him in the commercial side of the business before Adyen: a place where a system’s limitations eventually become a conversation with a customer.
At Adyen, Schuijff supplied the technical leadership as co-founder and CTO. Van der Does brought the commercial experience. Their new company faced an industry whose systems had accumulated over time, with different pieces doing different jobs. They chose to develop an integrated platform themselves. The decision committed them to a considerable amount of work before a merchant could enjoy a conveniently uneventful checkout.
Commercial leadership
A second start
Public listing
Still building
That experience also complicates the usual division between financial services and technology. By 2015, when asked which kind of company Adyen was, van der Does firmly placed it in technology. Money was what passed through the product. Engineering was how the company expected to make its contribution.
The customer who needs you now
Early Adyen work included payments for German casual games. The audience was specific, and so was the need. A young company could offer useful expertise to merchants with an immediate reason to try it. The grand plan had to survive contact with people who wanted a payment to work that afternoon.
In 2009, Adyen signed Groupon as its first global enterprise merchant. Expansion brought a different test: could the platform follow a customer across markets? Each country could introduce different payment habits and requirements. A company selling online might appear borderless to a shopper while its finance team encountered borders everywhere.
Van der Does’s concern with the underlying problem, rather than simply obeying a customer’s requested specification, became part of Adyen’s approach. A feature for one merchant has to make sense in a system used by many. Otherwise, every new account risks leaving behind its own little annex, with its own wiring and its own demand for maintenance.
There is a human consequence to this architecture. A merchant needs fewer pieces to coordinate, and the provider carries more responsibility for making the pieces work together. The platform’s appeal depends on handling details well enough that the customer can spend less time thinking about them. Reliability rarely gets a standing ovation. It does, however, get invited back.
By 2012, Adyen had added point-of-sale payments and obtained a European acquiring license. It also opened offices in San Francisco, London, Paris, and Stockholm. The company was moving into physical shops while extending its geographic reach. An online business was learning to follow a sale to the counter.
In a 2015 conversation, van der Does described a surprise: some retail brands were adopting Adyen in stores before moving their online traffic across. Changing equipment seemed like the more demanding step, yet those customers began there. Listening can be inconvenient for a neat strategy. It is useful for finding out what customers actually do.
The telephone is part of the architecture
Van der Does’s interest in systems extends to the people operating them. Adyen’s Formula consists of eight working principles. They cover shared customer benefits, long-term decisions, speed, teamwork, communication, different perspectives, and the room to pursue the company’s own path. The subject matter is familiar. Some of the wording is wonderfully unceremonious.
“We don’t hide behind email, instead we pick up the phone.”
The Adyen Formula
Imagine a colleague finishing the day in one office while another starts in a different time zone. An ambiguous answer can leave the second person waiting through an entire working day. Van der Does has explained the communication rule in precisely those practical terms. A phone call can remove a delay that a carefully forwarded message merely preserves.
The Formula took written form in 2011. In his account of its origins, the founding team had found themselves repeating stories about how they worked. Writing down the lessons made them available to people who had never been present for the original conversations. Institutional memory needed a way to travel with new hires.
Hiring brought its own test of scale. Adyen traditionally had board members conduct final interviews. In 2022, van der Does discussed expanding the group responsible for those conversations, potentially from six people to twelve. The point was to remove a bottleneck while retaining a selected group of interviewers. Even a well-intended safeguard can develop a waiting room.
This is a revealing detail about him as an operator. He could explain why a practice mattered and still consider changing how it worked. There is no useful prize for keeping a founder’s calendar permanently full. A growing company needs more people who can exercise judgment and take responsibility without putting every question through the same small set of desks.
A patient company gets a public clock
In 2015, van der Does acknowledged a quieter organizational weakness. “We haven’t been very good at celebrating our successes.” Adyen had attracted customers including Facebook, Airbnb, and Spotify, but the experienced team remained occupied with expansion and improving the product. Its commercial success was becoming easier for outsiders to notice.
That year, he also explained the purpose of the company’s $250 million funding round. Adyen needed financial stability as it pursued permissions and operated in territory associated with banks. Capital could provide reassurance even when it remained on the balance sheet. The money’s usefulness included what it enabled others to believe about the business.
In June 2018, Adyen listed on Euronext Amsterdam. The company’s announced rationale included maintaining its independence and giving shareholders liquidity. Going public introduced a second audience for the founder’s decisions. Merchants could judge the service through their daily operations; investors could judge the company through reported results and a continuously available price.
In 2019, van der Does and Schuijff together sold approximately 15% of their holdings. The stated purpose was portfolio diversification and reducing their exposure to one stock. They remained committed to their roles. A founder can spend years making a company central to his working life while deciding that it should occupy a smaller share of his financial life.
The sharper test arrived in August 2023. Adyen’s first-half results disappointed investors as growth slowed and hiring weighed on margins. Van der Does acknowledged pressure from competitors lowering prices in the United States. The share price fell almost 40% over the trading day. Long-term investment had acquired a very short-term verdict.
Adyen’s one-day share-price decline after its first-half results.
That episode belongs beside the listing because it exposes the pressure within a patient business. Hiring has a current cost. Its eventual contribution takes time to establish. Competitive pricing arrives on a customer’s desk immediately. A founder’s confidence cannot make those pressures disappear, and a falling share price cannot settle every question about the company’s future.
Adyen’s 2024 shareholder letter continued to emphasize its in-house technology, enterprise customers, licenses, and investment in people. Existing customers expanding their use of the platform remained a central growth driver. The business still depended on earning more responsibility from merchants who already knew it.
Twenty years in, another set of problems
Since 2023, van der Does has shared the CEO role with Ingo Uytdehaage, who joined Adyen as CFO in 2011. In May 2026, shareholders reappointed van der Does to the Management Board for a term ending in 2030. The second start had become a twenty-year undertaking, with the founder still participating in its next decisions.
Those decisions now reach beyond checkout. Adyen’s first-half 2026 communication described acquisitions of Talon.One and Orb, alongside Adyen Agentic and Intelligent Money Movement. Van der Does presented the direction as addressing more of merchants’ financial operations. A company long associated with building its own technology was also choosing to acquire capabilities.
In September 2026, he welcomed the nomination of Niclas Neglen as the next CFO, due to join in February 2027 subject to approvals. Leadership, product scope, and the demands of customers continue to change around the founder. Starting again does not leave a business permanently young. It gives it an origin to revisit when its circumstances change.
Van der Does’s recurring preference is for an organization able to listen and respond quickly. That is an aspiration with fairly ordinary daily requirements: understand the merchant, make a decision, call the colleague, revisit the bottleneck. The shopper sees a payment go through. Behind it sits a career spent deciding how much work an apparently simple act deserves.