Techleap

What a trip! 🚀 Just traveling back from an incredible journey with Techleap exploring the full AI scene in San Francisco 🇺🇸 Highlights? Visiting Anthropic and meeting their CTO, then heading to OpenAI for a great chat with their CSO. 🤯 The AMA sessions were packed with insights, and the energy among SF founders was just next-level. If there’s one big takeaway, it’s this: AI is not coming, it’s here. Think about it, adapt, and get ready, because the wave is massive. 🌊

Back from an inspiring week in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area! It was fantastic to connect with entrepreneurs, investors, and leading companies driving innovation globally. We had a great opportunity to showcase how our technology competes at the highest level and creates value in the future of computing, including AI hardware infrastructure and many other valuable use cases. Now back home, energized and focused on following up on exciting opportunities — and accelerating even more! Special thanks to Techleap Constantijn Van Oranje-Nassau Lech Bakhuizen van den Brink Annemieke Wisse Tamara Franssen for the support and collaboration that made this journey so impactful.

Three weeks in the US as we kicked off our 🇺🇸 chapter with HelloPrint: packed agendas, lots to figure out from scratch and exactly why I love building companies internationally ;-). First stop: San Francisco on a full week with Techleap and 15 brilliant Dutch AI founders, a group deep tech entrepreneurs and 15 CEOs or large companies. Deep dives, AMAs about the future of compute and the direction of models, visits to all the big AI labs, VC meetings, lots of founder discussions and long days and veeeery short nights. SF is SF, and every time I’m here I want to do everything different and 100x our speed. The energy is incomparable to anything, people move incredibly fast, ambition is visible everywhere and someone in AI is literally sitting next to you always. Big thanks to the TechLeap team (Davinia Levie Constantijn Van Oranje-Nassau Bob Rietveld 🙏 and all founders involved for bringing the ecosystem together again. I can't stress enough how valuable these founder-to-founder trips and meetings are, discussing common challenges, cracking solutions founder mode together in a coach, during a walk or breakfast being in the bubble and challenging your approach to anything you do. Wouldn't miss it for a thing 🫶 . Then straight to Florida, meetings with some of our most valued customers in Miami, and next week to Orlando for PRINTING United Expo. Can’t wait to see our full industry there again, especially our Echelon partners! (For everyone around: drop me or Erwin Paaij a DM if you want to meet) 🙌 With everything AI and our launch in the US, everything I love of being an entrepreneur comes together; decoding problems, deep innovation, crazy high speed, making impossible things possible and disrupting old industries, business models and processes by the power of technology. The US will be a key market for our global platform ambitions, with AI as our primary driver and we’re just getting started. 🚀.

When you're building in the AI space, things move so fast that it's sometimes difficult to see where you need to go with all the noise and news announcements. To really cut through that chaos, you need to go to the eye of the hurricane where it all comes together. So together with 10 other AI founders, we packed our bags and spent 3 days meeting with the best and brightest in Silicon Valley. From the CSO at OpenAI, the CTO at Anthropic, and the co-founder of Salesforce to the inventor of RAG and over a dozen YC founders, they all made time in their agendas and opened up. The goal? Test our (product) strategy, learn where AI innovation is really heading, figure out how to improve output accuracy and adoption, and have fellow founders challenge everything we thought we knew. Lots of learnings to process, but here's what stuck with me: 🌟 The SF advantage is real (but it's not about IQ) Yes, there are many smart people in SF, but they're not inherently smarter than Europeans. The difference? The entire city operates as one massive AI laboratory. From startup pitches happening at lunch counters to venture partners debating model architectures in Ubers (sorry, Waymos). When you're surrounded by that level of focus and ambition 24/7, it changes how fast you move. 💡 The technical gap isn't what you think In our conversations with several very well-funded AI companies, their core technology isn't dramatically more sophisticated than what European teams are building. What sets them apart: access to unlimited capital, laser-focused execution, that 9-9/6 mentality, breakneck development speed, and unwavering belief in their strategic direction. ⚠️ Stay away from generic solutions The big AI players will build anything generic themselves that will support them on their path to achieve AGI. The real opportunities lie in vertical expertise, unique data access, adoption, and solving specific integration problems that foundation model providers won't touch. 🎯 Conviction over perfection We often overthink strategy. Silicon Valley's approach: make a decision, commit fully, execute fast. Pivoting is fine, you need to micro-pivot constantly in this industry, but fully commit. Half measures kill momentum. ⚡ Buy, don't build mentality Speed matters more than anything else in this market. Focus resources on your unique value proposition and buy everything else off the shelf. Getting 2-3 weeks back in development time is massive. But measure obsessively to ensure it's actually working. Huge thanks to Techleap for organizing, Davinia Levie, Bob Rietveld and Constantijn Van Oranje-Nassau, Peter Jan Kok and Theo Peters for hosting us and to our fellow AI founders for an incredible experience filled with "tough love", new perspectives, and a lot of fun. Time to bring some of that Silicon Valley velocity and grind back to Amsterdam! Let's go🚀 #SiliconValley #AI #Techleap #EuropeanTech #StartupLife #lleverage

What happens when you bring 13 Dutch founders to San Francisco in the heart of the AI revolution? You’ll get new inspiration, 24/7 business-case discussions, classic tech jokes and of course some serious tech talk. I’ve just returned from a trip that was full of inspiration, but also filled me with a strong sense of urgency about what we can still achieve in Europe and especially in the Netherlands. From learning about cutting-edge tech at the offices of OpenAI and Anthropic, to an in-depth session with Jason K. (OpenAI) and meeting inspiring Y Combinator founders, these 4 days in SF (yes, I am local now) made me realise how high the bar is for AI in the US globally, the speed of innovation and ambition are truly limitless. At the same time, being with this group of brilliant Dutch founders and CEOs brought home how much potential lies right at home. Meeting and diving into real technological knowledge and rich discussions with inspiring Dutch founders Michiel Prins (HackerOne) and Douwe Kiela (Contextual AI) learned me that we can build truly global tech leaders. So here’s what I believe and what I’m committing to: Europe (and the Netherlands) can build global tech leaders. But to do so, we need more than incremental progress. We need bold innovative founders, a scaling mindset, and a global focus starting today. The support network is key: The community, peer founders, scaling programs, access to capital and talent. The work of Techleap is vital here: they are building the pillars for scaling Dutch startups and scale-ups from matching talent, capital, and markets, to creating the community founders need. My vision for the Dutch tech ecosystem: if you can make it in the Netherlands, you can make it anywhere. 🚀🇳🇱🇪🇺 Big thanks to the Techleap team for organising and joining us on this trip: Constantijn Van Oranje-Nassau van Oranje, Bob Rietveld, Davinia Levie and Dylan Richts and to the Netherlands Consulate in San Francisco for hosting us and supporting the Dutch Tech ecosystem in the US. And to the brilliant Dutch founders and CEOs I got to join this week (you made my trip): Clare Jones, Hans Scheffer, Tim Beyer, Lennard Kooy, Angelique Schouten, Sohrab Hosseini, Ozgun Erdogan, Jelle Visser, Marnix Stokvis, Mathijs Gast, Rogier Fischer and Erwin Buckers. #Techleap #DutchTech #Scaleup #EuropeanTech #AI #Founders #Innovation #SF

Just returned from a 3-day trip to San Francisco organized by Techleap. Visited OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce and much more. What stuck with me most is the atmosphere. It's hard to describe. Where every billboard in Amsterdam is about toothpaste and clothing, every billboard and bus stand there is from a random AI company. Not even necessarily the big ones. You walk into a coffee bar and on the left side there's a conversation about agents, on the right about context engineering, and the girl making your coffee tells her colleague she just applied for an internship at Anthropic. It's not even that I left thinking we're far behind on tech. We're just behind on ecosystem and mindset. That being said, the group we were with did give me hope we can start catching up when we really try and get going. Big thanks Bob Rietveld, Davinia Levie and Constantijn Van Oranje-Nassau. Really appreciated.

This week, Techleap brought eleven of the most ambitious and fast-growing Dutch ventures in the 𝗙𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝘂𝘁𝗲 space to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, the global heart of advanced computing innovation. From semiconductors to quantum, AI infrastructure, chip design, and silicon anode technologies, Axelera AI, Nearfield Instruments , Morphotonics, SMART Photonics, Delft Circuits, Orange Quantum Systems, VSPARTICLE, QuantWare, QuiX Quantum, Innatera, and LeydenJar represented the next frontier of deep tech emerging from Europe. With this fully packed visit, we aimed to strengthen the bridges between Dutch deep tech and the world’s leading industry players, investors, and US deep-tech unicorns, accelerating growth and collaboration in this rapidly evolving domain. A big thank you to TSMC, Applied Materials, Synopsys Inc, NVIDIA, SiFive, PsiQuantum, and BlackRock for hosting us and the ones involved for sharing your insights and experiences. 𝘈𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘯 𝘋𝘶𝘵𝘤𝘩 𝘴𝘰𝘪𝘭 𝘵𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘺, 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘤𝘬 𝘮𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘌𝘶𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘕𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘴, 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘭𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘭 “𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘮𝘱𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘓𝘦𝘢𝘨𝘶𝘦” 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘯𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺. 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘪𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘦𝘯𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩; 𝘸𝘦 𝘯𝘦𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘵, 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘶𝘳𝘴, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘥, 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘤𝘶𝘴, 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘨𝘦, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. Some additional 𝗸𝗲𝘆 𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗹𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗮𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀: 💡 Think in adjacency matrices when approaching strategic decisions. 💡 Work with operator-experienced VCs and cross-over funds that truly understand the journey and stay co-vision-oriented. 💡 In the US, you can take a long-term tech bet if you have the smartest and most ambitious people. Time for a quick power nap to beat the jet lag, but before that, a big thank-you to everyone who helped make it happen (including all partners). Special thanks to my deeptech colleagues (Annemieke Wisse & Tamara Franssen), our friends at the Netherlands Consulate in San Francisco, and to Jorn Smeets (PhotonDelta) and Constantijn Van Oranje-Nassau. #deeptech #FutureofCompute #SanFrancisco #Techleap