Daniel Ruff

His father taught; his mother worked a range of different jobs. Daniel is the first entrepreneur in the family, and he does not pretend that was neutral.

“There was no business at the dinner table, no company waiting for me, and nobody to ask how a balance sheet works. That matters more than it sounds. I had to go and find the thing I wanted, because nobody handed it to me or even described it to me.”

The decision arrived at twelve, and the distinction inside it has followed him since: not to start a company, but to run one. He worked hard through school and university and made a deliberate point of having a life alongside it. He was rarely the best in the room, by his own reckoning, and never tried to be. Being consistently good over a long stretch, he reasoned, compounds better than intensity in short bursts.

Then he started moving. Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands for extended periods, with roughly six months each in the United States, Spain, France and Hong Kong. Some of it was circumstance: German parents, a Danish childhood, a job that took him to Amsterdam. The rest was engineered. During his studies he set out to live in as many countries as possible, taking every opportunity that appeared “and manufactured a few that did not.”

Away from the work, he renovates. His home, and a summer cottage.

The lesson from all those countries was, in his phrase, uncomfortable and useful.

“A great deal of what we treat as obviously right or wrong is simply the consensus of wherever we happen to be standing. Cross a line drawn on a map and the same behaviour is read in the opposite way.”

The examples tend to be small ones. Whether it is healthy, say, to let a child sleep outside during winter.

For the work he does now, that observation turns out to be most of the job.

“Founders arrive with a list of things they believe are constraints, and most of them turn out to be conventions. Telling one from the other is what I bring.”

He was CEO of Logic4, an ERP company serving e-commerce, and the problem was one he now hears constantly. The strategy existed. Daily operations kept getting in the way of delivering it, and the attempts to close that gap were more improvised than deliberate.

So he went looking for a method, and found Scaling Up.

“After reading it, I thought there was a lot of good stuff in there, but I also realised that I needed help implementing it.”

ScaleUp Company was the only official partner at the time. He got in touch with Bart, and that became nearly five years of history.

Logic4 was the start of the Katapull Group, which he built around it, adding EffectConnect, Highbiza, Vendit, DeliveryMatch and Transus. Between 2020 and 2025 the group grew from twenty employees to a hundred and twenty.

As it grew, his own role shifted. Increasingly he was defining strategy and, more to the point, making sure it was actually being realised across the different business units. He found that was the part he enjoyed most. When he stepped down as Group CEO, he wanted other scale-ups to reach the focus and clarity he had found on the other side of the table.

“The difference was not in the strategy. It was that everyone finally knew what they were working on and why.”

He has also done the thing founders rarely volunteer. When one of his companies made a heavy loss, he had to let go of a large percentage of one of his teams. What he drew from it has no sentiment in it at all: growth is not an ambition, it is the thing that keeps a team together, and it has to be realised so that people can stay.

Beyond that he is careful not to claim one defining lesson. What he has instead is a collection of smaller ones, all still shaping how he works.

Setting seven priorities for a single quarter, and watching how quickly focus dilutes and results suffer. Taking on a priority too large to finish, a full redesign of a major part of the product, which taught him to be honest and humble about what can actually be achieved without giving up on ambition. Learning that open discussion is essential, but that badly managed it becomes a five-hour management meeting.

And one that runs the other way: a good storyline around a strategy, with a little gamification, can engage an entire company and genuinely lift performance.

He takes time to know a founder before anything else happens, on the reasoning that a personal connection makes the honest conversations much easier to have later.

Then the questions start.

“I ask all the annoying questions I can think of until we get to what's actually holding them back.”

Certainty is what draws his attention. A founder who is absolutely convinced about a decision is a founder about to be challenged, while Daniel goes looking for the assumption or the blind spot sitting underneath the conviction.

Emotion produces the opposite response. He gives the founder room, works to bring the temperature down, and stays in the conversation rather than steering out of it.

Founders open to challenging their own thinking, and willing to let the business evolve even where that means evolving past themselves.

The mismatch is easy to name. Someone who already believes they have all the answers will get little from him.