amsterdam
(20)
Patrick van der Mijl and the message that missed the shop floor
A supermarket job gave Patrick van der Mijl a close look at how company news fails to reach the people doing the work. With Speakap, he has spent years trying to close that distance.
Oliviana Bailey and the Art of Being Let In
She spent years connecting people in artificial intelligence while wondering whether she belonged there herself. At AI4ALL, Oliviana Bailey is turning that experience into a practical invitation to others.
Alla Idrisova and the billboard that made leadership personal
A walk through Amsterdam gave Alla Idrisova a small, vivid measure of her work. Behind the campaign portrait is a career spent asking who gets to shape companies, communities and AI.
Nicola Ebmeyer’s first business school was her mother’s desk
Before co-founding Gain, Nicola Ebmeyer watched her mother run an agricultural machinery company. The lesson that stayed with her: understand the customer, then build something worth paying for.
Frister Haveman and the case of the missing hours
He knew the private equity research routine because he had done it. With Gain, Frister Haveman set out to shorten the homework - and kept a place for the people who check the answers.
Michiel Doornenbal and the business of almost goodbye
A master’s thesis on customer cancellations became Churned. For co-founder and CEO Michiel Doornenbal, the harder question is what happens between spotting a departure and giving someone a reason to stay.
Wesley ter Haar and the trouble with getting good at something
He helped build MediaMonks from a hotel basement into a global creative business. Now Wesley ter Haar is asking what an agency should become when the machines can make things, too.
Stefano Gulla and the second life of a founder
After co-founding Abcuro and serving as its CEO and CSO, Stefano Gulla took his company-building experience to Amsterdam. At Kling Biotherapeutics, his next chapter puts scientific leadership and the team behind it at the center of the story.
Pieter van der Does and the art of starting again
Before Adyen, Pieter van der Does had already helped build and sell a payments business. His second attempt became a lesson in patience, shared infrastructure, and knowing when to pick up the phone.
Patrick van der Pijl and the trouble with a good idea
An app for plumbers. A book built by 470 contributors. A consultancy forced to rethink itself. Patrick van der Pijl has spent his career putting business ideas where customers can argue with them.
Business Models Inc. and the factory that became a classroom
A pipe maker wanted a new factory. Business Models Inc. helped it see a different opportunity: teach the people fitting the pipes. Inside a consultancy that makes strategy answer to the customer.
The Portland Agency Named After a Fish That Swims Upstream on Purpose
For nearly three decades, Sockeye has sold its clients on a strange idea: that the safest thing a brand can do is refuse to be boring. Here is how a 57-person shop in Oregon turned a point of view into a business.
Philips Bet the Whole Company on Hospitals - Then a CPAP Recall Almost Broke It
It made light bulbs, then TVs, then the CT scanner in your local hospital. The story of how a Dutch electronics giant reinvented itself as a pure health-tech company - and nearly lost the bet.
Stellantis
Fourteen car brands, one Dutch holding company, and a bet that a constellation beats a single star. Inside the automaker stitched together from Jeep, Peugeot, Fiat and Maserati - and the reset now under way.
Churned
Predictive AI built to prevent churn for high-volume subscriptions. Churned tells you exactly which subscribers are about to leave, what to offer them, and triggers the action automatically.
Bird
The Dutch company that rebuilt telecom's plumbing now carries a claimed 40% of the world's commercial messages - and spent two years trying to delete Twilio's margins with a 90% price cut. Bird's next bet is that the software placing those calls will be an AI agent, not a marketer.
Derk Arts
Derk Arts is a Dutch physician-turned-entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Castor, a clinical-trial software company he started in 2012 after coding the first version of its Electronic Data Capture platform himself. Trained as a medical doctor and epidemiologist with a PhD, he built Castor to make clinical research more inclusive, patient-centric, and data-driven. The platform now supports thousands of trials across roughly 90 countries and was used by the World Health Organization for its Solidarity Trial. Castor has raised more than $60 million, including a $45 million Series B in 2021, and Arts is a recognized voice on decentralized trials, eConsent, and the responsible use of AI in research.
Adyen
Adyen is a Dutch financial technology company that provides a single, end-to-end platform for accepting payments online, in apps, and in stores. Founded in Amsterdam in 2006, it operates as a licensed acquiring bank and connects merchants directly to card networks and local payment methods across the globe. Adyen powers checkout and embedded financial products for enterprises such as Uber, Spotify, eBay, Booking.com, McDonald's, and Microsoft, and is publicly listed on Euronext Amsterdam.
Zlatan Menkovic
Zlatan Menkovic is the CEO and co-founder of Scaler, an ESG data platform helping real estate managers measure, report, and cut the carbon footprint of their buildings. A Dutch product designer turned repeat founder, he built Scaler after years shaping products at Uber and Uber Freight and an earlier startup, PeerReach. Scaler now serves roughly 30 clients overseeing more than $350 billion in assets and raised a $10M Series A in 2024 led by Plural. Menkovic's pitch is blunt: if you want global impact, start with the buildings we already live and work in.
Gergely Orosz
Gergely Orosz is the Hungarian-born, Amsterdam-based author behind The Pragmatic Engineer, the #1 technology newsletter on Substack with over 1 million readers. A former engineering manager at Uber who helped build payments infrastructure processing $65B+ annually, he left Big Tech in 2021 to write independently. He covers software engineering careers, Big Tech culture, and the AI-driven transformation of the industry - earning $1.5M+ per year from subscriptions alone, with zero ads or sponsors.