In 2006, Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten and his co-founders, Patrick de Laive and Arjen Schat, unintentionally set up The Next Web (TNW) as a way to promote their startup, Fleck.com. After realizing the high cost of pitching at a tech conference in San Francisco, Patrick suggested organizing their own event. With an impressive lineup of speakers and over 300 attendees, the conference's success led them to make it an annual gathering. Today, TNW conference is the largest tech conference in Europe, attracting over 15,000 attendees.
Alongside the conference, TNW has evolved into a multifaceted company with four main pillars: TNW News, TNW Conference and Events, TQ (a tech hub), and Index (a market intelligence platform). In this case we illustrate what it means to work at an entrepreneurial firm.
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By Martin Haring, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences
