Start to scale. Startup and Scale-up Founder Stories. · Start to Scale

Riding the Storm: Philip Hess (Senz Umbrellas) on Innovation and Resilience in Entrepreneurship

·48 min·1 clip

Key insight from segment 5

This special edition marks the 20th anniversary of the Phillips Innovation Award. Lars Kramer opens by asking listeners to picture the ordinary problem of opening an umbrella in a rainstorm. That leads into Philip Hess, co-founder of Sense and the award’s first ever winner. Philip looks back to 2005, when he and two fellow students founded the company. Their original storm umbrella became the idea that brought Sense wider attention. The episode treats that invention as a direct answer to a problem people know well. From there, the discussion moves from product design to growth. Philip describes the Rockefeller Habits as a growth methodology. He puts the framework in plain terms. It is, in his view, an operating system for fast-growing companies. The aim is more focus, more structure, and more discipline. That structure is supposed to help a company keep growing while staying in control. The conversation then follows Philip’s work after Sense. He later joined a sleep startup, Somnox. He also coached scale-up founders on how to use the Rockefeller Habits in practice. A useful thread runs through that part of the interview. How do you know when to step in, and when to let other people run with the company? Philip talks through how hard that choice can be and does not pretend there is a neat answer. The latest chapter is Rotterdam Factoring. There he wants to build the largest factoring company in the Netherlands with no more than 10 people on staff. The episode closes as a careful look at invention, scale, and the limits founders place on their own companies.

As heard by us

A founder story that moves from a storm umbrella to the discipline of staying small while scaling.

Philip Hess's path from Sense to Rotterdam Factoring gives the episode a clear throughline: a strong product can become a scaling problem. Lars Kramer keeps things practical, starting with the umbrella built with two fellow students, moving through Rockefeller Habits as a growth…

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Why you'd press play

If you want a founder story about an original storm umbrella, a lean scale-up, and a growth operating system.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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