In Amsterdam, it’s not just the City government, big companies and universities that are responsible for innovation, but also the smaller institutions and businesses, the social entrepreneurs, the neighborhood communities, and the bottom up movements of citizens who drive change. People in the city, collectively make the city in the most literal sense of the words. This creates a unique ecosystem of social and technological innovation characterized by inclusiveness and creativity.

Amsterdam’s Pakhuis de Zwijger was one of the partners who wrote the bid which won Amsterdam the Innovation Capital title. This unique cultural organization opened its doors in 2006 and has grown to be an independent platform for urban innovation, for and by the city of Amsterdam and its inhabitants. Pakhuis is a combination between a theater, creative industry and a place to ignite civic dialogue about important issues that should  be discussed in society.

For the last two years, Pakhuis de Zwijger organized the WeMakeThe.City festival, inviting people to Amsterdam to hear and live the story of the Amsterdam Approach. WeMakeThe.City is considered to be the largest city festival in Europe that celebrates urban life and working on important urban questions like: “How do we make better cities?”.

With the occasion of the second edition of WeMakeThe.City Festival, which took place between 17th – 23rd of June 2019, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Egbert Fransen, founder and director of Pakhuis de Zwijger.

Egbert, can you tell me a bit about you, your story, and why you founded Pakhuis de Zwijger?

Well, I did a lot of different things. I studied communications, and I worked for some years at KPMG, a consultancy firm. And after that, I started my own company, it was the combination of things in the domain of arts and culture on one side, and on the other side, it was about changes in big companies.

While having my company, I was also director of a big theater festival, in the North of Amsterdam. After doing more commercial, big projects for different companies, and at the same time arts and culture projects, I decided I wanted my own space in the city.

At that time, there was nothing here at Pakhuis, really nothing, it was only sand. And there was almost nothing between here and Central Station. It was really one flat place, a part of the old harbor, and some of the old warehouses were still there. The city was looking for somebody who had some ideas for transforming this place into a cultural space. So I said, “Okay, I will do this.” It took me quite a lot of years to transform it. But, I did. In 2006, we opened this building, with a new interior, with a new vibe,  with new ideas. 

We have now been here for 13 years, and built a platform in the city to address its urban challenges. I think we are the only one in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, and actually I’ve never seen a place like this in the world. Yes, there are places that are centered around design, or architecture, or other  issues, but not the way we are doing it. Because we are really working with the issues, the challenges of the city, the people in the city, their needs, their daily life in cities, and we are working to develop solutions and ideas.

We’re focusing on the urban daily life of people working, living and entertaining in the city. And, we’re making a lot of programs, about 600 a year, within a broad palette of issues. It’s about mobility, it’s about smart digital, it’s about circularity, it’s about education in the city, and what kind of work are we doing in the future in cities. But it’s also about loneliness, debts of the people who cannot afford to pay for their house anymore, it’s about area development, it’s about almost everything. 

What we strive to do is to look from the perspective of the people who are living in this city. In the institutional world, in a municipality, things are usually looked at in silos, but we, as people living in cities, are not operating from silos. It’s our life. We are doing everything at the same time and meeting all of these issues together. We bring in a lot of people discuss, present, share, and co-create, etc., around all these issues. 

In addition, we are not only staying here, but we’re also going out into the City as well, and doing all kinds of things. We now have two other small places in the city, in completely different neighborhoods, because the people who are living there were not coming to the center. So we’ve decided we will go to them. Here in the central building, we’re looking at the whole city, we’re looking at the region, we’re looking at what’s going on in our country. But going into those two neighborhoods we are really connected to what’s going on there, with the children, with the elderly, with the disabled people, and with the local economy. 

We are looking at neighborhood economies as well as what is happening with the harbour.  The biggest concern is fossil fuel energy, and the goal is to turn it into a circular harbor.  Together with the city, we are bringing people in from other cities to discuss the idea of the circular harbour.

How come the city administration doesn’t do that for themselves?

Well, sometimes they do, but they are not so good in it, especially in relation to really doing things together, because they are top down orientated. The thing is, after working as Pakhuis for so many years, we know almost everybody in the city, and we know a lot of people at the municipality. But, we also know a lot of designers, we know a lot of people, researchers and scientists, we know a lot of artists, etc. We’re quite specialized in organizing the dialogue, and bringing people together and exchanging experiences, etc.

What is the link between Pakhuis and the WeMakeThe.City festival?

The link between Pakhuis and the festival is that in 2016 we applied for a challenge in Brussels and the city of Amsterdam won the iCapital award (innovation capital of Europe). We were one of the partners to write that bid, and we won that award because we described the innovation ecosystem in our city. We described what we were doing every day, and that’s the story of what we called the “Amsterdam Approach”.

The Board of the city has members in the municipality, the big organizations, the big corporates, and the knowledge institutions. Those three big institutional parties are called the “triple helix” and they really believe that with those three stakeholder groups, they are running the city, and are responsible for innovation. We don’t believe those three parties are only responsible for innovation. Not on their own. So, we decided to bring in other parties: the smaller businesses, the startups, the social entrepreneurs, the NGO’s, the healthcare, the schools and the bottom up movement of citizens, with neighborhood communities, etc. We brought in another triple helix  and said, “This is the way we are going to innovate in the city.”

By bringing all the related stakeholders, six stakeholder groups, you will find sustainable solutions. The municipality and the Board of the city are really slow, but it’s changing, and they are now connected to this double triple helix and the Amsterdam Approach. 

So, we had a good story in Brussels. We won the award. And of course, after you win an award, you are asked to talk about it in all kinds of conferences throughout Europe. We were asked to tell the story about the Amsterdam Approach and so we did. But after one and a half years, we said, “Okay, it’s nice to go out but, maybe we should invite people to Amsterdam.” And that’s why we started the festival in 2018: to tell the story of how you work together, how you relate to each other, how you come to solutions in another way rather than only top down. How do you really connect to the people who are living in the cities, who are entrepreneurs in the city and who are living a more sustainable connection and ownership.

Scientists have their research. Business are always money driven, and the politicians are concerned about the way politics will move the next four years. But the people who are living in neighborhoods, will be there for five or 10 or 15 or even 30 years. So you really need to bring all those stakeholders together. And that’s that’s the story which we tried to tell for the second year at the festival.

Where do you see the impact of your work? Can you measure it? 

Yes, we can see differences. For instance, we’re now having a new coalition of politics in the city, so there’s a new Board of the of the city. They wrote their ambitions down and had a manifesto to start a new four year period. And a lot of things, really a lot of things in there are things that we discussed. I won’t say it’s our paper, no, that would be too arrogant, but we are quite good in agenda setting and putting things on in the minds of people and trying to rethink and redo things it another way.

So there is impact and the impact is coming out of bringing so many people together and organizing our events in a way that you have to meet the other people. We organize the exchange of experiences and knowledge, we bring in the research institutes, we bring in the people out of the of the city hall. That’s where the impact is coming from, because otherwise they would not have met. The impact is that we make things visible, we connect people, we share, we inspire and inform them and make all kinds of cross links. 

And what about the impact you have beyond the city, in other countries especially? 

A lot of people like us, really like what we do. It’s interesting to see that in the Netherlands there are some little copies of what we are doing, but also in Vienna for instance. So it’s related to what we are doing and they were inspired. There was a big delegation from Helsinki also, they really want to have a Pakhuis in Helsinki, and they decided that there will be, for the first time, a small WeMakeThe.City in Helsinki in November this year.

A lot of people recognize that they don’t have a place like ours in their city. There are not so many places in other cities which have constant programmes as we do, not once a week, or once every two weeks, but every day, to constantly update and address the things that are really happening today. At Pakhuis, the program is every day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and every night there are three events in the building that are all related to the city. Sometimes interesting and relevant foreign professors come to Amsterdam and they are then invited to have a public podium.

And which is the Pakhuis’s business model?

We are mostly independent, a big part of the money is earned by ourselves by running a restaurant for instance, but also renting the rooms in the building. Our own programming is at evening time, not during daytime, everything we do as an organization is at evening time. The rooms we offer for commercial prices during daytime, to organize all kinds of events, conferences, congress presentations, book launches, etc. So people pay to use it, and sometimes pay us to organize it. 

We also have assignments, so the municipality is not subsidizing us, but is giving projects. If they need a program about, for example, loneliness in the city, they give us an assignment for one or two years to build a program.

We also have other partnerships. There are about 20 corporate organizations, and the Port of Amsterdam, the railway, and the waste company, who are bringing some money to address some of the issues. By doing so they become stakeholders. They are not telling us what to do but, they really like to have a program line about waste in the city, or a program line about the transformation of the harbour, or a program line about house building in the city. 

Our business case is around making events, organizing, communicating, and what we do is build communities.

How do you involve startups in what you do, how do you impact the startup ecosystem?

Of course, startups are coming in, fashion startups, technology startups, for instance, with the issue of loneliness, because there are a lot of technology and digital tools to relate to loneliness, healthcare related technology, etc. So the startups are coming in related to the issues, related to the needs of people, related to economics, but we don’t have really have focused startup programs. We’re not another startup hub, or a startup accelerator. But, we bring them in depending on the various issues.. So if it’s about mobility, about electric mobility, about mobility as service, of course, there are a lot of startups around that topic.

Finally, please tell me what are your future projects and plans

One of the plans is to go more into the neighborhoods, that’s really what we’re going to do in the coming years.

Our other focus is on education. We’re really working on a program for youngsters for children between 8 -12 and 12-14. I really like to work with youngsters, because I think they need to know how a city is working. There are almost no children who know how cities work. Where’s the food coming from? Where’s the electricity coming from? Where is the water coming from? How does it work in a city when new buildings are built? Who is building the buildings? Who owns the buildings? What about data in the city, they don’t know anything about it. And now we’re developing programs around this.

And then, we want to continue with the festival, doing better things here, but also going outside, in other cities.

The post The “Amsterdam Approach” and the city platform connected to its urban challenges: Pakhuis de Zwijger appeared first on Startups&TheCity.

Alexandra started ScaiData after she worked at KPMG as an IT consultant, where she was doing data analytics engagements for large corporations. Those engagements sometimes consumed a lot of time and involved manual work in Excel. Now, the platform she has co-created with Andrei Costea generates reports in real time, with everything being accessed by their customers while they drink coffee. And it all begun when, while at an event Alexandra was participating, Oscar Kneppers, founder of Rockstart, asked on the stage: “if you are so smart, and you have a brilliant idea, why don’t you quit your job and start a startup?“.

While she quit her job at KPMG, and started ScaiData, Alexandra has collaborated with her former colleagues to continuously improve the new platform she created. With the feedback from KPMG, she and her co-founder implemented some new features that lets users join data quickly through the UI without needing to code anymore, putting together the relevant reports in real time.

On a tour of exploring the Amsterdam startup ecosystem, I’ve met and spoken with Alexandra about their journey as a startup, since they founded it in 2017.

Who are you and what does your startup do?

My name is Alexandra Alan, I’m the CEO and co-founder of ScaiData. As the name says it, it’s a platform for data analytics and automation that lets users access their data and reports in real time and to extract quick insights out of it. 

You told me you’ve previously worked for KPMG …

Yes, I did and there I got the inspiration for ScaiData. I used to work as a data analytics consultant, within the Risk Management department of KPMG, where I was involved in data analytics engagements. While extracting reports for our clients, I was doing time consuming work for each client engagement. Thus, I observed this pattern and I thought about finding a way to automate this sort of work, while giving management a transparent overview.

I realized that it would be great if there was a platform, which would let users generate the final reports in Excel and send them to the clients with a couple of clicks. For that, users would need to be able to create reports in real time without too much effort, as well as to visualize the data and to let anyone in the organization access it, if needed.

What determined you to start you own company?

So, I actually participated at an event, where Oscar Kneppers, founder of Rockstart said: “if you are so smart, and you have a brilliant idea, why don’t you quit your job and start a startup?”. I got super excited about this. Plus, I also had an idea in my mind of this real-time data analytics platform. After some time, I thought I should give it a try and found my own startup with Andrei.

OK, that’s cool. So who are the founders? What’s your background?

I have a background in applied mathematics and computer science. I came to Amsterdam, seven years ago, as a student at the VU University (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), where I studied Business Mathematics and Informatics, and afterwards I got a job at KPMG. Initially, I did my internship within the Big Data and Analytics department. Afterwards, I moved to Risk Management and started working as a consultant for data analytics engagements.

My co-founder, Andrei Costea, has a background in high performance distributed computing. He also studied at VU University (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). He was one of the lead engineers behind one of the fastest databases in the world. He worked at Twitter as a software engineer, as well. He is really passionate about building intelligent systems that are high performance.

You are incorporated in Amsterdam, can you tell me about your experience with the entrepreneurial ecosystem here?

I think one of the great thing of Amsterdam and the Netherlands is the fact that it’s quite similar to Silicon Valley, but it is still in Europe. It’s also one of the best places in Europe to actually build your own startup. That was also one of the main reasons why we started our company here, because it’s quite an organized ecosystem, in a great location and it is cost efficient. It also helped us a lot with the administrative part of building a business.

What are the benefits of having a startup in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands?

For us, it was a good place to start our own company because we managed to incorporate the company in a single day. We could also benefit a lot from tax deductions from the Dutch government. This helps a lot of startups or people who want to found a startup.

Tell me more about ScaiData, what problems does it solve, what type of clients do you target

Our software helps companies that need to extract quick insights and centralize reporting from multiple databases or data warehouses without having too much hassle. By having a centralized analytics platform, companies can make decisions faster, become data-driven and more transparent. The users do not necessarily need to be technical people, but also consumers of information and insights. At the same time, we also help companies that perform a lot of manual data reporting work, which is done in a repetitive manner, for example, either daily, monthly, or weekly. This sort of work can be automated. 

For one of our customers, we reduced the workload from week to minutes. We’ve automated about 13 financial, sales, marketing, and production reports, which used to take so much time to be created. Now, these reports are completely ready (all data, fonts, formulas, logo’s) and can be accessed in maximum 10 minutes, while they drink coffee and maybe check Facebook at the same time. People do not need to depend on anyone else to get the reports from, for example a business analyst. Thus, no more waiting, no more copy pasting, and no more manual mistakes.

Can you give me some examples of verticals who would most benefit from your platform?

The verticals that would benefit from using our platform are companies that need to make fast data-driven decisions, such as consulting companies specialized in data analytics, web digital agencies, gaming companies, fintech companies, or scale-ups that have a large amount of data stored in a data warehouse and they need an easy to use, cost-efficient analytics platform. 

You said KPMG tested your platform, can you tell me more about this?

Yes, one of the data analytics departments from KPMG headquarters has tested our product and we received a really nice feedback from them. A technical data analytics manager said that he was positively impressed how fast ScaiData platform was for extracting data insights, querying data and creating dashboards quickly, even though Scai was located remotely.

And how do you plan to develop the platform further?

We’ve obtained this really nice feedback from them and they also provided some valuable suggestions. Therefore, we have also implemented some new features that let users join data fast through the UI without needing to code anymore. This is done in a very efficient manner and it helps users spend significantly less time coding and put together the relevant reports with a couple of clicks.

How are you targeting your customers?

We are targeting our customers, either in the cloud or on premises. We are present on all three major cloud providers such as Google Cloud, Amazon AWS and also Microsoft Azure. At the same time, we also have customers that use ScaiData on their premises. Users can get started in 2 minutes with it. They have all they need to create their dashboards and reports in a couple of minutes. ScaiData does not require any data loading, importing and it does not lock-in with proprietary formats.

What are your plans now, what are you’re looking for in terms of team or maybe financing?

Our goal is to become one of the most important analytics & automation platform in the cloud and to scale. We know that we have built a great software platform with little resources and we have some new exciting ideas for the future. However, we know that we cannot do it on our own. Therefore, we need help and we are looking for strong business partners and investors that can open doors in the field of big data analytics.

The post “Quit your job and start a startup!”, the kickstart story of Amsterdam-based ScaiData, a real-time data analytics platform appeared first on Startups&TheCity.