view on the bay area from the stanford dish

The right place

The start of a start-up from a different perspective

I’m just a normal teenager from Amsterdam with thoughts and a passion for working on ideas. Occasionally I come together with like-minded people nearby. Everybody has these ‘creative’ periods in which we have a huge amount of thoughts. For me, I usually have those moments every now and then. These moments are valuable; they bring ideas forward that can make it far and deliver lots of fun.

For most entrepreneurial people, these creative moments are the beginning of a so called ‘start-up’ journey. They would draw and write a bit, convince like minded people and eventually move somewhere to upscale even more. I’d call this the settled start-up plan:

1. You have an idea.
2. You convince people to join.
3. You move to a ‘better’ place.

I’ll get back to this in a minute.

Since I was a 7 year old skateboarder, I have always wanted to move to California. ‘Everything’ happened to be there. The surfers, the palm trees and the sunny weather instead of the soccer players, the flat lands and the rain overseas here in Amsterdam made me want to move there.

When I started developing apps I noticed this place called ‘Silicon Valley’, the place where everything around technology and entrepreneurship is happening. I also heard so many people talking about this enlightening place called ‘Stanford’. Steve Jobs was there for his commencement speech, I learned programming by their online lectures and the campus looks stunning.

Again, a reason for me to move to California. I realized this, obviously, looking backwards.

Applying for a summer course in business and entrepreneurship at Stanford was one of the best decisions in my life so far because I found out that there are places in the world where a lot of people with similar interests can do beautiful things.

After I got admitted, I spent 4 weeks at the campus with so many like-minded people. Something I noticed soon was that the ‘entrepreneurial moves’ showed up fast. The way people worked on projects, how they interacted with each other and of course the enthusiasm in which they do everything.

Back to the settled start-up plan. Because it seems that so many people are starting in this way, I thought there should be another way of getting to great ideas that will lead to pleasant start-ups.

So the idea is; thoughts show up in moments of creative periods, at least that’s the case for me. Something I noticed at Stanford this summer is that because of so many like-minded people, instead of having these creative periods every now and then, it was something that was there constantly.

So…

Let’s turn around the settled start-up plan, that makes you start with moving to a place where you heart says you would live for the rest of your life. You will meet like-minded people. Thoughts will start sparkling around. I’d call this the initiate start-up plan:

1. Follow your heart and move to the place where you would live for the rest of your life.
2. Be social; connect with people around you and make friends.
3. Solve problems you and your friends would like to be solved.

The fact so many similar people in one place, with the same interests started to work with so much enthusiasm and passion on certain topics. Out of this activity every single person felt the a kind of “pressure” of doing something with their ideas and share it with the world. People who never wrote a single line of code, built their own website in 2 days! A dear friend of mine, Grant Calderone published his very first essay online!

People started pursuing their passion because they were in a environment where it just happened to happen.

Do not think I’m saying people should focus on just what they are, the opposite is true, having a broad vision, doing things you would never expect to do is one of the best things a human being can do. Looking for people who think like you do is something which almost certainly leads to delightful journeys in life.