I am an entrepreneur by heart. Even though I am only 18 years old, I founded numerous companies during the past 8 years. Some of them succeeded, with Young Creators, we're connecting 7,000 talented youngsters, with Woodify, we made almost half a million €s in turnover. However, besides entrepreneurship, I believe I am maybe even more passionate about transportation. I spent much of my childhood playing train-, ship and flight-simulators, watching trains and planes at stations & airports, and designing my own vehicles during boring classes while setting up required specifications.
We have seen a tremendous amount of innovation in the field of computers over the past 40 years. CPUs got 1,000,000 times faster, we can transfer billions of bits per second through the air with just a small phone, and social media led entire revolutions in for example Egypt. However, when we look to transportation, not much has happened. In The Netherlands, trains don't run any faster than in 1950, 5 years after our country was destroyed in WW2. Planes didn't get much faster or cleaner since the launch of the Boeing 747 in 1969. And at the same time, we're running this crazy experiment in which we change the entire molecular composition of our atmosphere, without a backup-plan or without knowing for sure what the effects of this may be.
Young Creators is a community for ambitious & talented young entrepreneurs. In 2012, we founded Young Creators for the sole reason that we were young entrepreneurs ourselves, and that we found it very helpful to be in touch with likeminded people with who we could share our ideas & knowledge. Right now, we're growing at a steady pace and are connecting over 7,000 youngsters and we're being sponsored by companies like Booking.com and Adyen
Woodify is a webshop that sells Wooden Sunglasses. I founded this webshop - together with Robert van Hoesel - because I wanted to learn how to place a brand in a market, and how it is possible to start a webshop/brand with € 0 budget. Right now, we sold over 10,000 sunglasses and are very close to €500.000 in total turnover. Take a look at http://woodify.nl/
I was 10 years old at the time, and my dad used to work at a company that produced sauces like ketchup. He gave these sauces away to friends & family, for free. I found that quite strange -- after all, it costed his company money to produce them. He allowed me to start a store and sell these sauces. I learned how to make websites a bit earlier, and I founded my first e-commerce store.
I'm pursuing a Bsc in Aerospace Engineering at Delft University of Technology, since I believe I am truly passionate about engineering, and most importantly, it's applications on transportation. Peter Thiel is famous for saying: "We were promised flying cars, and all we got is 140 characters", and I couldn't agree more. Since 1970, our computers got a million times faster, while our planes are flying more or less the same speed and didn't become much less polluting. Trains in the Netherlands don't run any faster than 5 years after WW2, 1950!
High School
I participated in a 2-week summer course organised by Oxford University at Balliol College, focussed on business & entrepreneurship. I was awarded the attainment award, out of 100 talented international students.
I successfully participated in the CAE exam hosted by Cambridge University. I scored 78%, and according to Cambridge, my level of English can be described as: "Effective operational proficiency – able to express oneself fluently and use the language flexibly and efficiently for social, academic and professional purposes."