2025 VIS: Somnium Capital’s Daniel Bols Like This Energy Company With A Large Moat

At the 2025 Value Investing Seminar, Daniel Bols, the founder of Senso International and the Somnium Capital Fund, shared a personal and insightful narrative that shaped his investment philosophy as well as a specific stock idea.

Bols’s journey from a hedge fund analyst to a company builder and ultimately a capital allocator for his own fund illustrates his guiding principle: value compounds best with good capital allocation – and time. His presentation at the Value Investing Seminar in Italy on July 4th, 2025, detailed the lessons learned from both entrepreneurial success and significant mistakes.

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2025 Value Investing Seminar – Somnium Capital Fund’s Daniel Bols

Bols began by recounting his early passions for books and numbers, which led him to a career in publishing before he transitioned to private equity in San Francisco. While analyzing numbers and building cash flow models, he observed his brother’s struggles in the industrial flooring business. His brother’s company, dealing in a commodity product, often competed solely on price, leading to projects sold “below cost” and ultimately bankruptcy. This observation sparked a fundamental question for Bols: how could a company be run successfully without falling into this trap?

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In 2005 his brother received inquiries for small-scale residential flooring projects – a market the industrial-focused company first dismissed as too troublesome. Inspired by Apple’s transformation of the computer from a commodity to a design-driven product with the iPod and G5, Bols envisioned elevating industrial flooring to a “premium lifestyle” product. This vision led him to quit his job, return to the Netherlands, and co-found Senso International in 2006.

His early entrepreneurial endeavors were marked by learning experiences. An initial $25,000 investment in advertisements in leading interior design magazines yielded no phone calls. This failure led him to pivot entirely to Google advertisements, an unknowingly prescient move that allowed Senso to “ride a wave of what would become the most powerful marketing platform in the world”.