The Next Web took place last week in Amsterdam, Netherlands. With more than 3,500 participants, it’s one of the biggest technology conferences in Europe. This year marked the 10th anniversary for the conference, a conference that now has more than half of its attendants coming from outside the Netherlands.
Neelie Kroes, ex-VP of European Union’s Commission on Digital Agenda and “special envoy” for Netherlands start-ups was given the technology lifetime achievement award together with Wernel Vogels, CTO of Amazon. Neelie Kroes as the startup ambassador for Netherlands is the voice of Amsterdam on its way to take on Silicon Valley.
Samir Patel, CEO of Growth Machines and Growth Mentor at 500Startups, explained his 5P’s framework. The five P’s are people, platforms, process, plan and purpose. Samir’s growth talk was based around the quote ‘Grow fast, or die slow’. He walked through a high level overview of his recommendation for growth team structure with Chief Growth Officer, Quant, Designer, Hacker and Channel gurus. His talk was followed by the “Growth MBA in a day“, invite only speech later the same day.
David Allen, of Getting Things Done, the famous book about productivity came up next on stage. “Empty your head in order to stay in the present. Your head is a terrible place to keep track of things” is the quote to be remembered from his speech.
Food ordering service, Takeaway.com founder Jitse Groen was interviewed on stage after raising 73 million Euros. Almost two thirds of its users are ordering via mobile, a number that the founder predicts may go up to 90 percent in the next two years. Next step for takeaway.com is a pick up service.
Last but not least for the day, a great tech talk by Google’s Eric Brewer. Eric Brewer, the inventor of the CAP Theorem has been leading the rewiring of Google for the past three years. His talk was about “Cloud Native” applications and involved discussing VMs, Containers, kubernetes and other areas of Google’s cloud infrastructure.