Why the startup world needs more femininity to balance male power
Hybridize CEO Eline van Beest at Level Up 2025: “We need both sides of the system that cut the fabric”
Published on October 6, 2025
Eline van Beest © Bram Saeys
Bart, co-founder of Media52 and Professor of Journalism oversees IO+, events, and Laio. A journalist at heart, he keeps writing as many stories as possible.
When Eline van Beest, CEO of Hybridize Therapeutics, took the stage at the Level Up 2025 event in Eindhoven, she didn’t want to talk just about her own success story. Instead, she used her journey to highlight a deeper point: the startup ecosystem is still dominated by masculine traits, while innovation flourishes only when both the masculine and the feminine are present.
Her keynote was a blend of personal history and cultural critique. “My story started at Christmas,” she recalled, “when my dad came up to me with an idea for his patients. I went to my professor to ask if I could work on it as my graduation assignment. And he literally said, ‘girl, why don’t you go play outside a little?’ That really fueled me to prove him wrong.”
Eline van Beest
Prove him wrong she did. Van Beest developed a medical device for the treatment of sleep apnea, graduated top of her faculty, co-founded a company at YES!Delft, secured venture capital, ran extensive clinical trials, and eventually sold her startup NightBalance to Philips. The journey, as she described it, was “ten years of excitement, fear, and loneliness all at once.”
Masculine drive, feminine perspective
While many founders encounter obstacles, Van Beest gradually realized hers were different. “Piece by piece, I started to realize it was this thing called being feminine, being a woman,” she said. Her approach - seeking advice, carefully weighing options, and building consensus - was often dismissed. “My board first said I was leading a democracy, and then they called me stubborn. It took me a long time to understand that what they were really reacting to was femininity.”
She drew on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to explain the distinction: “Masculinity leans towards force, ambition, drive. Femininity is characterized by care, equality, collaboration, stillness, and listening. This is not about men and women, though women tend to have more feminine qualities. But the best leaders and the best teams combine both.”
Van Beest challenged the audience with playful questions: Who assembles an IKEA cupboard without reading the manual? Who dares to ask “stupid” questions in meetings? In each case, she showed how feminine approaches - careful preparation, openness to others’ perspectives, truth-seeking - are often misunderstood, but in fact critical for innovation.
Learning from failure
Her own company’s story offered a vivid example. During its first clinical trial, NightBalance’s device failed in 60% of patients. “Panic. Big panic,” Van Beest said. “Everybody jumped into solutions. But I felt, what’s happening here? I’ve been spending so much time engineering this device. I dove deeper into the problem, and everyone thought I was too slow. But that led to new patents and algorithms that solved the issue.”
For her, failure was not defeat but information. “The masculine leads towards solutions, the will to succeed at any cost. The feminine is more likely to embrace the failure. And that’s exactly where innovation lies; if you dare to look into it.”
The misunderstood servant mind
Van Beest also spoke about her “servant mind” approach. In meetings, she doesn’t always speak up. “That might sound passive, but I’m observing and asking: how can I best contribute? Sometimes that means naming the elephant in the room, like when Philips was afraid of cannibalization. Once I said it, the whole collaboration opened up.”
The misunderstanding, she noted, is that quietness equals weakness. “My only purpose is for the meeting to shine, not to become the star myself. That doesn’t mean I have nothing to say - I just want to say what really matters.”
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Her company’s acquisition by Philips also underlined the value of feminine rigor. “Every contract was tracked, every test cross-validated, every file in place. Not because I didn’t trust my team, but because rigor from day one is essential. The number one deal killer in mergers and acquisitions is that stuff is not fixed behind the scenes.”
Too often, she said, such attention to detail is dismissed as micromanagement or a sign of perfectionism. In reality, it can be the difference between success and collapse.
Eline van Beest at LEVEL UP 2025 © Bram Saeys
Overriding instinctive bias
Van Beest concluded by pointing to research on cognitive bias. Drawing on Daniel Kahneman’s work, she reminded the audience that most people operate in “system one” (fast, instinctive thinking), especially in new situations like innovation. “If I ask you to picture a leader or an inventor, what image comes to mind? When I asked AI to generate inventors, I got a room full of men. That’s system one: repetition, instinct, bias.”
The solution, she argued, is to consciously engage “system two” (slow, deliberate thinking), when evaluating female leaders or founders. “Research shows that ideas developed by men are valued more, patented more, even when identical to women’s. So, whenever you feel your gut reaction, stop and think. Because in this masculine world, it’s quite an asset to add a bit of femininity.”
Her closing remarks underlined that one can't do without the other: “By all means, these are two sides of the system that cut the fabric. We need both.”
