Safety is the second layer from the bottom of the Maslow pyramid. In that sense, it is key to being able to live.
But for many people, particularly women and people of color, safety is not a given. Instead, they spend their time calculating: am I welcome here, is this route safe, can I safely do my job? These experiences go largely unnoticed. Because you can’t translate feelings of unsafety into data.
Or can you?
In episode 171, Anniek van Veldhuizen shares how her company, MyHives, enables people to log the moments and places where they feel unsafe. We talk about
- How cars, medicine and even whole cities are designed without taking women’s experiences into account.
- Why simply logging feelings of unsafety is crucial to help companies and policymakers make workplaces and cities safer for everyone.
- What MyHives’ AI-powered safety guardians, BEEKON and BEEKON+, can do to enhance personal safety at home and on the go.
Plus, you’ll discover how mindlessly tossing your cans and bottles in the trash may cost you a deposit, but also comes at the expense of someone else’s safety.
In the end, this episode is about what happens when women’s lived safety experiences go unmeasured and how registering feelings of unsafety can contribute to solving that safety gap.
You can listen to the episode by pressing play below.
Closing the Safety Gap by Turning Feelings of Unsafety into Data with Anniek van Veldhuizen – Women Disrupting Tech
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Anniek’s biggest lessons for founders have less to do with building safer technology and more to do with how you engage with the systems, institutions, and companies that already exist. Here are three ways that played out for her.
Follow-up beats outreach
Anniek found that, when it comes to finding customers and investors, perseverance and consistent follow-up are far more critical to closing deals than initial outreach. As a small startup working with major established organizations like large security companies and the police, initial contact rarely leads to an immediate deal. And consistent follow-up ensures the startup maintains momentum and demonstrates reliability.
Master the System’s Language to Change It
Anniek and her co-founder Nelson have the philosophy that systems can only be changed by deeply understanding them. Even when you don’t agree with it. Real change comes when founders from underrepresented groups establish a foothold within industry systems, and actively open doors for others who are not seen as the default.
Don’t try to beat incumbents; work alongside them
When we talk about how she sees MyHives develop over time, Anniek shares that she sees it as a security company that works with them. Rather than attempting to replace established companies or systems, startups can gain faster traction by positioning themselves alongside incumbents to leverage mutual strengths.
Ultimately, none of these are about building a superior product or outworking the competition. They’re about knowing exactly how a system operates, so you can change it from within.
🤗 Know a founder who is navigating a system they did not build? Use the share buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 04:00 | Anniek van Veldhuizen on building MyHives from lived experience |
| 05:49 | The daily calculations people make to stay safe |
| 08:08 | Why unsafe experiences go unreported |
| 10:04 | The gender data gap and how missing data shapes safety |
| 14:50 | Safety, participation, and learned helplessness |
| 17:15 | Building trust into a tool people can actually use |
| 19:52 | How MyHives works: app, Beekon, and Beekon+ |
| 24:00 | Triggering help discreetly when someone cannot act |
| 28:08 | How escalation works across languages and locations |
| 30:57 | Why privacy is central to the product |
| 34:58 | Preventing false positives and training the system |
| 40:32 | Trials, pilots, and the workplace safety use case |
| 48:09 | The business and societal case for better safety data |
| 53:16 | Pricing, monetization, and the impact model |
| 1:00:01 | Working with security partners without being absorbed |
| 1:04:20 | Fundraising as a woman founder and a Black co-founder |
| 1:07:36 | Designing Fundingcoach to feel safe and inclusive |
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
What makes the episode magical is that it’s about making the invisible visible and then using technology to give people more agency rather than asking them to adapt to systems that have failed to see them. Here are three moments where this comes to the surface.
Discovering that different people can have the same invisible mental load of unsafety
When she compares herself with her co-founder, the differences couldn’t be bigger. Anniek is a white Dutch female engineer. Nelson is a Nigerian entrepreneur and a tall man of color. But when they met through the impact investing scene, they discovered that they shared the exact same mental load of calculating their safety and place in a room. In all the differences between them, the mental load was the same.
Designing for the response the system does not cover
Traditional safety tooling relies on people acting when they see or experience an unsafe situation. But those tools fail when people are unable to respond, or when they freeze in the face of danger. That discovery inspires BEEKON and BEEKON+, autonomous AI safety guardians that can escalate without requiring the human to act. With that, it turns what would otherwise be considered a user failure into a design brief.
The power of being underestimated
When we talk about her experiences as a female founder with fundraising, Anniek brings up the advice that the German writer and activist Kristina Lunz once gave her: “Let them underestimate you, because it actually gives you more space to blow them away”. It’s a motivational quote that can hardly be improved.
The thread that connects these moments is Anniek finding the actual design principle in the exact place most people would look away from.
🗣 What was your magic moment of the episode? Was it one of these or another moment entirely? Let me know by sharing your favorite moment in the comments.
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
Anniek gets part of her inspiration from the book ‘Invisible Women’ by Caroline Criado Perez. After sharing examples of how women’s experiences are left out, she shares this through-line of the book:
“When women’s experience isn’t measured, it disappears from the design. And safety is a clear example of that.”
— Anniek van Veldhuizen - co-founder and CCO of MyHives
This quote isn't a standalone observation. It's essentially her stating MyHives' founding premise in one sentence.
💡 Feeling inspired to make sure all experiences get counted, not just the reported ones? The blog is public, so feel free to share the quote with someone else who needs to hear about it.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
One of the anecdotes in the episode is about how home care workers tell Anniek that feeling unsafe is almost part of the job description. It shows how we’re taught to normalize experiences that we can’t change ourselves. It’s one of the things you may have heard before on previous episodes of this podcast. Here are three more trends you could spot by listening:
Prevention in a system that is built to deal with the crisis
Anniek mentions that the existing systems are built around fixing the problem when it happens, instead of preventing it in the first place. Data about feelings of unsafety can help us to start acting on the causes, provided the data gets measured. In episode 163, Robin Blackstone shared how Health 4.0 is designed around using data to support people in staying healthy, so fewer of them need treatment once they're sick. And in episode 170, Anke Kuik told us how eating less ultra-processed foods can help reduce the number of people with chronic diseases and how her app FLTRD is helping people to make healthy food choices. All are examples of prevention mechanisms that are built inside a system that is engineered to deal with crisis.
Privacy as a key component of safety
One of the things that Anniek is clear about is that the data of her customers stays on their own device and that it is up to them to make a choice about reporting experiences where they felt unsafe. We’ve seen this before in episode 153, where Sabrina Nowicki shares that the data collected by her fertility app sits on the phone of the users. And in episode 150, Femke Delissen shares how Pava uses wifi sensing to detect safety issues in elderly care homes. It’s a more privacy-friendly and less intrusive way of monitoring than cameras. These are all examples of how the ability to control your own data is built into a product.
Opening doors as key to changing the system
Changing a system from within only happens if those inside it open the doors “for those who are not yet." Anniek mentions this advice from Kristina Lunz, and it is something that I keep hearing from other founders on the podcast. In episode 126, Yasmina Khababi encourages others to share their ‘geographical luck’. Different words for the same mechanism. Paying it forward is an important aspect of being a founder, regardless of gender, and in episode 121, Dayana Marin Valencia mentions making introductions and giving visibility to talented people as a way to do that.
The through-line of these trends is that changing existing systems requires us to start changing how we approach a problem, what we optimize for in our products, and how we increase participation.
🗣️ What was the value you got from listening to this episode? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
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Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Painful periods, endometriosis, fertility treatment, pregnancy loss, perimenopause: next week’s guest explains why staying silent about any of these at work adds a layer of stress that drains energy, and still costs the company money.
Veroniek Vermeulen, founder of Shilata, joins Women Disrupting Tech to talk about what it takes to build psychological safety into a company, and why women’s health belongs on the agenda at work.
In the clip below, Veroniek explains how silence about these symptoms at work turns them into an extra source of stress that drains energy and costs companies money.
Curious what changes once women’s health is on the agenda of your company? Leave your email below to find episode 172 in your inbox on 8 October at 8:00 CEST.
Until then, as always, keep being awesome,
Dirkjan
What I Want to Leave You With
At the start of the episode, Anniek says something that appears to be very obvious: “when you design a solution on incomplete data, your solution will be incomplete as well.”
However, as we learn in this episode, the safety experience of women is notably missing in how we design buildings, healthcare, and society. This is a consequence of the fact that men have different lived experiences.
What I think happens as a result is that systems, regulations and technologies, while meant to provide equal opportunities, do exactly the opposite: increase inequality.
It’s one of the reasons that I think that companies, such as MyHives, are solving for a critical need: ensuring that the voices of underrepresented groups are captured so that systems, technologies and our society become more inclusive by design.
One of the analogies that come with this episode is ‘making the invisible visible’. It’s essentially what MyHives tries to do when it comes to safety. And I think that is key to making our world a safer place.
Listen to the full conversation with Anniek van Veldhuizen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Anniek van Veldhuizen
Anniek van Veldhuizen is co-founder and CCO of MyHives, the company she built with co-founder Nelson to close what she calls the safety data gap. Trained as an engineer, she started from an uncomfortable observation: the safety calculations she made every day, which route to take, where to sit, whether she'd be taken seriously in a room, never showed up in any dataset. Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women gave her the framework for why, when women's experience isn't measured, it disappears from design, and safety is one of the clearest examples of that.
She met Nelson Ajulo in the impact investing scene in The Hague, and together they built MyHives around a single engineering premise: a solution built on incomplete data will always be incomplete itself.
Beyond MyHives, Anniek speaks on the gender data gap in safety infrastructure and on why a system that only works for the people it was designed for is the most dangerous kind, including a TEDx talk at TEDxTilburgUniversity in May 2026.
If her work on closing the safety gap resonates with you, connect with her on LinkedIn. And if you’d like to learn more about Anniek’s why, check out this episode from the Journeys of Empowerment podcast.
About MyHives
MyHives is an everyday-safety company based in The Hague, founded by Anniek van Veldhuizen and Nelson Ajulo on a single question: why does anyone have to shrink? Nelson, now CEO and CTO, architected the platform end-to-end, the escalation engine, the evidence vault, and BEEKON itself, with the core architecture patent-pending in the Netherlands. Anniek, co-founder and CCO, turned that architecture into contracts, building the partnerships and closing the pilots that made it operational.
Besides a free app, MyHives has two products:
- BEEKON, the AI safety guardian, listens privately on a user's own device, warns their trusted circle in more than 170 countries with live translation, and never streams anything until help is actually needed.
- BEEKON+, the hardware layer, goes further: a credit-card-thin device that can call local emergency services on its own connection, even when a phone is unreachable, detecting danger through multi-sensor fusion, radar, ultra-wideband, and inertial sensing, rather than a camera.
BEEKON+ is now open for pre-order, with first shipments expected in December 2026. What started as a question about why anyone has to shrink is now infrastructure: built, patent-pending, and hosted in the EU.
If you’d like to learn more about MyHives, check out the MyHives website and follow them on LinkedIn and Instagram. You can download their free app in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Listen to Episode 171 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Featured Event: TEDx Coolhaven Women
The TEDx Coolhaven Women event takes place on 9 October from 6:30 to 11:30 in the evening at HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam. This year’s theme is The New Builders, a theme that seamlessly aligns with the content on this podcast.
Throughout the evening, you’ll hear powerful TEDx talks from women who are redesigning the systems that shape our lives—from leadership and parenting to women’s health, mental healthcare, and access to investment capital. Together, they’ll explore what it really takes to build a better future.
As a proud media sponsor, I am happy to offer you a chance to be there in person, to listen to groundbreaking talks and meet and network with like-minded people. As a listener to the podcast, you’ll get a 25% discount when you use the code WDT25 at checkout. And even though this is a TEDx Women event, men are very welcome to join.
- 🗓️ 9 October 2026, from 18:30 - 23:30
- 📍 HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam
- 🎟️ You can buy your ticket here.
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