Please introduce yourself, and tell us a little bit about your start-up.

Povilas Zinys. – “I have always been an entrepreneurial mind since I launched my career in Luxembourg – from SES to Luxtrust and now at Haslle I strive for new product, new technology and new market combinations that unlock untapped value for customers in Luxembourg and abroad.

Haslle seeks to unlock company spending data to help SMEs analyse, control and better manage employee expenses, online subscriptions and later other types of company spending. Using Haslle, small companies can have better insights on B2B services, get saving suggestions, join forces to negotiate better deals from providers and incentivize company spending on green services and products. Since Haslle enables all the company with a payment card and an efficient process handled on a modern interface it saves a lot of employees, managers and accountants time from manually collecting, getting approved and otherwise processing expenses on paper.

What are the qualities needed to launch a start-up?

“Getting started is tough. I believe you furthermost need resilience, you need to be brave and bold and you need to be able to adjust fast. For example, you can meet a business angel who says the idea is not worth anything, meet an advisor who says your pitch deck is bad and on the same day get admitted to an acceleration program like fit4start because they say they loved your pitch deck. It’s confusing to be refused and praised, believed in and rejected often on the same day. Nevertheless, I think you get used to not getting super excited nor super sad – always calling it another day when your life is so tumultuous. That also gets me thinking that being able to connect with all kinds of people helps a lot to go through it all – to celebrate, to get through disappointment and in the middle of it all get stuff executed.

We often hear that it is essential to make mistakes. What do you think of that?

“It is indeed essential. I think mistakes are unavoidable – you can only do your best – you need to fail and recover fast. In a way when you’re starting a company you are doing something that wasn’t done before so, of course, you won’t be right all the time. I think mistakes help us learn and in general building a start-up is one of the greatest life schools I’ve ever faced. Trust me, I’ve graduated from 4 universities already, but I have a feeling this is a lecture on a whole different scale. I can only recommend it for those who have an opportunity to pursue this journey.”

You can register for the Start-up Stories: Round 3 on the website of the .

Discover innovation at Bil

Discover the innovators of the Lhoft