Following the adventures of Linda Vermaat and Erik Loots of Twentie Four
A couple of months ago during the 3rd edition of Start Your Business on a Boat I had the honour to spend a whole weekend with Linda Vermaat and Erik Loots of Twentie Four, two visionary social entrepreneurs on an extraordinary mission. Twentie Four is a project that follows 24 entrepreneur in 24 cities for 24 hours. In this blog I try to summarise their adventures so far.
What is Twentie Four all about?
Who is Linda Vermaat?
Who is Erik Loots?
Why have you started Twentie Four?
“Well, for instance climate change is one of the biggest challenges on our planet. At first politicians and organisations were trying to find solution. Today Elon Musk, with his company Tesla Motors, produces electric vehicles to slowly eliminate our dependancy on fossil fuels.
These next generation businessmen and women tackle the world’s issues with smart business solutions. Every transaction they generate is contributing to a thriving economy and a better future.
We’re inspired by these people and want to know everything about them. What’s in their refrigerator? What’s their routine? And what’s their vision for the future? We want to learn from their world view and mistakes. To find answers to these questions we came up with Twentie Four.”
Who have you followed so far?
Wilbert van de Kamp. Roeland Lelieveld. Sylvia ten Houten.
What does Wilbert do?
Wilbert is the founder of omapost.
Wilbert: “I was thinking about my grandma and the conversations we had over the last couple of months. It always went something like this: Are you still dating that girl? And how are your studies? But I wasn’t studying anymore or dating that girl.
Maybe it’s time to have real conversations again, but where can we find the ingredients for those connections?
So I thought let’s connect my online way of telling stories with her offline world. That’s omapost in the end. It’s just sending real postcards with a picture from Instagram and your phone numbers on the back. Giving your grandmother the opportunity to call you, to ask you what you’re up to.
It’s not about postcards, it’s about knowing the people around you. I see people disconnected from their grandma’s, families and friends. I’d be happy to change all of that. People in the Netherlands are afraid to come up with megalomanic ideas. We are just a small country. The US is a lot bigger. To me there’s no real boundary to the number of people I could influence.”
What does Roeland do?
Roeland is the founder of the Forest Market Foundation, a reforestation project in Kenya to stop desertification, erosion and land degradation.
Roeland: “People always assume I have a degree but I’m only educated as a gardener. When they find out they’re often disappointed. If you find something interesting enough you’ll want to read everything about it. In the end the knowledge will come to you.
In 2005 I did an internship in Kenya. That’s where I met Daniel my business partner. We talked about trees and plants constantly. We wanted torehabilate as much land as possible, but we were still studying. A few years later we bought 20 acres of land and started planting those trees.”
What does Sylvia do?
Silvia ten Houten is the founder of GoodHout. Sylvia: “GoodHout has a technology to make the most amazing engineered wood out of coconuts. We mill the husk into very fine bits. Then we press it at very high temperatures so the natural glues in the coconut activates and permeates the whole. Nothing else. I think this is the coolest thing in the world, that you can make an awesome product out of a waste stream. A mediocre product out of a waste stream would have been cool enough but making an exceptionally awesome product out of a waste stream, is kind of mind boggling. The project sells itself and has so much potential.”
“Three years ago I went to Indonesia to discover my roots. I started looking for a product that had little value in Indonesia, but a lot of value overseas. You quickly come up with coconuts, and I started researching the potential of coconut water, but in fact saw that nothing was being done with the coconut husks.
Wageningen University was already exploring the possibilities of utilizing coconut husk waste. Engineering wood was one of the obvious options. Wageningen didn’t seem convinced it could be a commercial product but we continued looking at market viability and this is where we are today.
Wouldn’t it be cool to be a game changer, the first one to get a whole movement going? With GoodHout I might turn into the queen of waste.”
Interested in following the adventures of Linda and Erik?
