StellarUp Founder's Bio
Estelle is Co-Founder & CEO of StellarUp, a Dutch tech scale-up whose mission it is to help companies turn isolation into collaboration in a disconnected world. With over 20 years experience in people and talent development, Estelle believes in the power of knowledge sharing and the positive impact being part of a community has on people and companies. Her career has been dedicated to creating diverse, people-first culture turning every member into a valued member of a vibrant professional community. A builder and creative at heart, Estelle has over the last 5 years worked with a number of start-ups and scale-ups to help them grow their businesses, establishing strong female workforces and building thriving diverse communities. Fully aware of the demands that come with balancing a career and family, Estelle enjoys teaching and mentoring women on how to promote themselves in business and in technology.
Julian is Co-Founder and CTPO of StellarUp, a Dutch Saas platform that is solving the challenges of the Great Resignation – a $406Bn per annum problem for US companies. Degree qualified in AI and Biochemistry, Julian has 30 years of technical and product development experience and is the driving force behind the StellarUp product. He shares a common vision for inclusion and knowledge sharing with his co-founders at StellarUp. Boasting a combination of corporate technical leadership and co-founding numerous tech startups, Julian is set on improving work life for employees wherever possible. Outside of work, Julian is an active mentor and coach for young CTOs and product professionals in the Netherlands. He is always looking for new ways to enable personal and professional growth through the use of technology. Both his children are also young coders and share a love of lego on rainy days.
Our Story
In 2017 both Estelle and Julian were heavily involved in mentoring – Estelle was running a very large mentoring program for a big international IT Consultancy and Julian was participating as a mentor at StartupBootCamp in Amsterdam. Both programmes faced the same challenge – they were being run via slow and complicated spreadsheets and sometimes in a ‘they can go with them’ matching methodology. We both believed in the power of mentoring and wanted to see it scale and help companies see the impact and ROI
Our mission was to find a way to get more relevant data from mentoring relationships so that companies can use that as impact drivers when implementing learning and development strategies.
Frustrated by this, Estelle asked Julian to quote to build a matching tool. The project didn’t go ahead but we decided to push forward with the development anyway and Mentorjam was born – both of us recognising the value of mentoring and the inefficiency of the current solutions.
The startup ecosystem version of the product was a relatively simple product as an MVP with a great potential return. Our launching customer had 3 month cohorts (3 a year) and it was a great testing ground for a new product. After 2 years of bootstrapping, a trip to WebSummit with our MVP, some further refinement and we had our first paying customer – StartupBootCamp Amsterdam. 6 months later we incorporated and we quickly landed the Dutch Government, followed by the United Nations Foundation and a number of other organisations who shared the same values we have.
Fast forward 5 years, a pandemic and a huge shift in how companies and people work we are now faced with the Great Resignation. Workers are facing more issues staying connected in the workplace than ever before, with 65% saying they feel less connected to their coworkers. Hybrid working has created an unforeseen divide in workplace communities causing employees to feel disconnected and isolated resulting in the Great Resignation that costs US companies $406 billion dollars per year.
We support companies to transform isolation into collaboration that brings a sense of belonging back to the workplace. Our platform hosts a suite of connection-enhancing features focused on mentoring, learning, and growth. This leads to a 50% increase in productivity, a 70% improvement in retention, and an overall 80% boost in engagement.