His father died when Pieper was 20, and on his 18th birthday he suffered a motoring accident which destroyed his sporting career as a player of the Juventus Schiedam basketball team.
After graduation, he worked for ten years for Software AG (both in Germany and in the United States), where he became chief technology officer for the US branch.
Pieper then decided to support the invention as a private investor and later also as board member, though Sloot's claimed huge compression is mathematically impossible.
The project received ninety Million Guilders of government subsidy, and as the Dot-com bubble burst, the ministry decided to sell Twinning to a group of private investors.
On 1 September 1999 Pieper was appointed as a professor of Electronic Commerce, a newly created chair at the faculty of informatics and technology management of the University of Twente.
At the end of 1999, Pieper founded Insight Capital Partners Europe, a private investment fund for IT-businesses, later operating under the name of Favonius Ventures, particularly in the field of e-commerce.
In cooperation with the Belgian authorities, Pieper helped to secure information that ultimately led to the formal charging of the founders Jo Lernout and Pol Hauspie.
In 2001, Pieper entered into the board of advisors of Nearshore IT services company, Levi9 Global Sourcing and conducted a study requested by minister Tineke Netelenbos for setting up a system for road pricing, called Mobimiles.
In 2001 with financial backing from private institutions, ING, CalPERS, and ABN AMRO, he established Favonius Ventures with offices in London and Amsterdam.
[1][3][4] In July 2006, Favonius Ventures received all of the technology investments of ABN AMRO Capital which is the private equity business unit of ABN AMRO Bank N.V.[4] In 2003, Pieper started a new venture involving Very Light Jets (VLJ), in cooperation with Albuquerque, New Mexico-based Eclipse Aviation Corporation.
After Semyon Bolotin (Russian: Семен Болотин; born 1985 or 1985) and a son of Roel Pieper, who had gone to school together and played on the same basketball team, introduced their fathers to each other, Roel Pieper and the Russian businessman Daniel Bolotin established in Luxembourg a joint venture investment business, which was headquartered in The Netherlands, called European Technology and Investment Research Center, or ETIRC BV.
Pieper attempted to secure the necessary funds for this acquisition, but was unsuccessful largely due to the economic downturn, which led to several potential investors bowing out at the last moment.
[20] At the same time he was fighting to save Eclipse, Pieper was investing tens of millions of dollars in a Russian technology to extract diesel fuel from coal.
Various successful companies include Veritas Software, Netwise, Quokka Sports, Google, TiVo, Netscape, General Instrument, Lost Boys, and various others.
[25] He subsequently left the firm on 15 December 2011 as a result of a conflict with some shareholders who forced a rights issue which was announced after the company failed to meet revenue targets.
The company subsequently was unable to return to its full potential as the rights issue created a period of high volatility and uncertainty.
New energy, engines, propulsion and a number of unique IT technologies such as the Antenna Company which was founded and funded together with Marcel Boekhoorn who is a long-term business partner and friend of the family.
Since the failure of Eclipse Aviation due to the financial crisis in 2009, most of Pieper's activities have been related to the RiRo Ventures main investments.
In May 2003, Pieper was target of an attack by a confused deranged man who broke into his house in Aerdenhout, and stabbed his wife who made a full recovery.
Pieper publicly blamed the Dutch police as the attacker was caught trespassing on the property, including with video proof, on previous occasions.
The man who stabbed Pieper's wife was convicted and sentenced to compulsory psychiatric treatment in a closed judicial institute (Terbeschikkingstelling in the Dutch language).
In addition, several high tech agricultural projects have been started to determine if a cooperation between the Netherlands and Ukraine could be established successfully.