The ceo’s of Alibaba, Apple and Uber will be in the Netherlands on May 24 for the grand opening of Startup Fest Europe.
Pieter van der Does (Adyen), Dutch president Mark Rutte and Andrus Ansip (European Commission) have also confirmed to be part of one of Holland’s biggest startup events this year.
Startup Fest 2016 is a four day marathon of matchmaking between startups, investors, developers, creatives and corporates. At the helm of the Presidency of the European Union, the Netherlands aims to boost entrepreneurship in Europe.
Therefore Neelie Kroes of StartupDelta as well as prince Constantijn van Oranje (chairman of Startup Fest) have put in great effort to draw some very interesting guests to Holland.
Startup Fest is organized by Jim Stolze and is initiated in association with StartupDelta. Fourteen regional innovation hubs will host several events in order to show the world that the West Coast of Europe is a hot bed for startups and innovation.
The following international speakers have committed to attend Startup Fest Europe 24-28th of May:
- Jack Ma is the lead founder of Alibaba Group. Jack is a pioneer in the Chinese Internet industry and has recently stated he wanted to focus more on the United States and Europe;
- Tim Cook is Apple’s CEO since 2011. In 2015 Apple was the first company to reach the market value of 700 billion;
- Travis Kalanick is co-founder and CEO of Uber. Uber brings disruptive technology and business innovation to urban transportation challenges;
- Mark Rutte is Prime Minister of the Netherlands; currently the Netherlands holds the presidency of the council of the European Union.
- Andrus Ansip is vice-president of the European Commission and responsible for the Digital Single Market;
- Kevin Hale is building one of the most successful accelerators in the world. Y Combinator has invested in more than 750 companies, with a total sum of 700 million dollars;
- Pieter van der Does is co-founder of Adyen, an online payment company that is famous for being the Dutch “unicorn”;
- Camille François researches the intersection of new technology and politics, with a focus on robotics and cybersecurity. Camille has led initiatives in organizations such as the French Prime Minister’s task force on Open Data & Open Government, Mozilla, DARPA as well as Google, the French-American Foundation & the Software Freedom Law Centre.
- Professor Daniël Shechtman is an Israeli Nobel Prize winner, known for his expertise on tech entrepreneurship;