Jelmer de Jong.
Partner to tech founders.

Amsterdam London New York

Early-stage tech investor by day -- OSINT hobbyist and copy-paste programmer by night.

I am a Partner and Chief Technology Officer at RTP Global, a global early-stage venture capital firm. I invest at pre-seed and seed, and sometimes in an A round, in enterprise software, cyber security, developer and cloud tooling, critical infrastructure and fintech infrastructure: anything that is or can be big on GitHub, and any startup going after a line item on the price list of IBM, Oracle or SAP. As CTO I build the data, AI and intelligence capability the firm runs on.

I've spent over two decades building companies and products, using technology and data to gain an edge -- as a founder, marketer, product manager, tech & data lead, running AI initiatives, and now as VC. I am not bound by a formal job description: I do what needs to be done.

I work with founders and VCs to build and bring product ideas to life -- to help you win. I enjoy firefighting and special projects.

Based in Amsterdam, London, and New York. More on what I invest in and my background.

Building an AI-native firm in 30 days. Except we didn’t.

“Building an AI-native firm in 30 days” is a great LinkedIn AI slop bait title. We are not AI-native. We are roughly 10x more AI-enabled than we were on April 1st. Those are different sentences. The gap between them, between AI-enabled and AI-native, is most of what I want to share, because it is the thing every VC, CTO, and partnership-led firm I now talk to is getting wrong. For 30 days in April, I ran a sprint that pulled our entire firm (partners, investors, finance, legal, EAs, ops, all 30 of us) out of business-as-usual. The one thing we did not drop was answering our founders. We are a venture firm, and that line is sacred. Everything else moved aside, so that between 50 and 80% of every person’s time, every day, went into building with AI. By Demo Day 5 on April 30th, we had shipped 52 internal apps, deployed multiple production AI agents, redesigned core processes, and turned a partnership of investors and operators into a partnership of builders. ...

On Speed

Execution speed is the most powerful tool a startup has against competitors, against the market, and against incumbents. Execution speed shows quickly. Not in delivery, but already in the earlier planning phase. Execution speed shows when asking “when” or creating plans: where large companies create yearly plans or roadmaps with quarterly deliverables, others plan not for “next month” but for “tomorrow” or “give me an hour.” The test is simple. If you plan, do you plan in years, quarters, months, weeks, days, or hours? The smaller the planning unit, the higher the execution speed. ...

Why We Believe in Data Driven Venture Capital

Venture capital (VC) is traditionally a people-based, non-scalable business. Do you want to do more deals? Hire more people. Want to do deals in a new region? Open a new office. Want to provide better support to your founders? Hire an ops team. For an industry that invested billions of dollars in technology companies, the venture capital industry lacks proper technology adoption. It is one of the last industries to embark on the digital transformation journey. ...

Hello World

2025 will be the year of the revival of the blog. …or at least it will be for mine. Not for a particular reason; I’ve been blogging on and off since 2003, back when Blogger was still a thing, Twitter did not exist, and personal blogs didn’t receive spam but 10+ comments on every post, and that with only 20 visits. I stopped and restarted on different platforms to play with the tech or because I felt I had something to share. And that something always felt cringe a year later, which resulted in clicking ‘destroy’ (and no guarantee that will not happen this time). ...