Frits Goldschmeding, the founder of staffing agency Randstad, has died at the age of 90, the company he founded nearly 65 years ago said on Monday.

Goldschmeding set up Randstad, then known as Uitzendbureau Amstelveen while a student, with him and a fellow student each investing 500 guilders. It was a golden idea, focusing first on students and later on married women who wanted a part-time job.

In 1963 new locations opened in Leiden and Rotterdam and the company name was changed to Randstad. The first foreign branch opened in 1965 in Brussels and by the end of the 1970s, the company had over 100 branches.

In 1990, Randstad was floated on the Amsterdam stock exchange. This was not for money but to get the name better known because of the shortage of good managers, Goldschmeding said at the time.

For years Goldschmeding was the richest man in the Netherlands and he put much of his money to good use, sponsoring a research centre at Nyenrode and funding the construction of Golden Age clipper Stad Amsterdam as an employment project.

He retired from the company he founded in 2011 and in 2015 he established the Goldschmeding Foundation, a philanthropic foundation dedicated to improving the way people work and cooperate.

In 2016, he told the Financieele Dagblad that he had no problem letting his money go. “If you worked for it, you did not do it alone,” he said. “So I give it away, because in a way it is not mine.”

Last year Goldschmeding was in third place in the Quote rich list, with estimated worth of €5.8 billion. Randstad itself is the world’s largest staffing agency, with approximately 40,000 employees in 39 countries and annual revenue of € 25.4 billion in 2023.