The next economy
Door: Ivan Keja
Blijf op de hoogte en volg Ivan
12 November 2015 | Nederland, Delft
This morning, I took the train instead of the bike and arrived at 9 o'clock at YES!Delft. Firstly, I helped the startups, which had participated in the basecamp program, with rearranging the room and dividing tables and places among each of the startups. After that, I helped Samantha, receptionist at YES!Delft, with sorting out letters and preparing them for being put on the wall. Because at YES!Delft there are meeting rooms with certain quotes on the wall and some of the letters had fallen off. At around ten, we had a delicious brownie, because of the birthday of Cody, one of the employees at YES!Delft. Thereafter I had a look at the YES!Delft students department and got a certain task where I could help them with. Then we had lunch and after lunch I helped Lionel, one of the YES!Delft students, with distributing flyers for activities he and his team had organized for the following week, which helps students to find out more about entrepreneurship. After saying goodbye to the people I would not be able to see anymore this week, I headed towards the station of Delft to take the train towards The Hague, where I had the unique chance to join Pieter to one of his meetings. As agreed I met Pieter on the train and he explained me what we were going to do in The Hague. He gave me some relevant information about the regional and local levels of governance in the Netherlands and explained that we were going to a meeting of the Rotterdam The Hague Metropolitan Area. He explained that it was formed due to economic reasons and that the co-operating municipalities wanted the area to become more attractive to international companies and organizations. YES!Delft and the Rotterdam The Hague Metropolitan Area have introduced the Metropolitan Start-up Lab to achieve this goal and therefore letting more start-ups in this region grow. The meeting was with the aldermen of economics of almost every municipality that joined the Rotterdam The Hague Metropolitan Area. In this meeting, Pieter and Lija (working at YES!Delft as program manager MRDH) had to convince the aldermen that the Metropolitan Start-up Lab is the idea to achieve this goal, which worked out very well because of their very powerful presentation. At the end, one of the aldermen asked me how I got the idea of doing my international internship at YES!Delft and if I will become an entrepreneur myself. On advice of Pieter I answered the question with my pitch and it was again received with great enthusiasm. Unfortunately I already had to say goodbye to Pieter because I won’t see him tomorrow and thereafter I walked with Lija to the station and took the train back to Rijswijk. I had an amazing day, in which the ambition of building tomorrow’s leading firms has impressed me once again.