The Speaker(s) you dream of having...
Guest Post by Johann Quassowski, Co-Founder of MemoBoo SC and student in the MSc I.B. Entrepreneurship track at SBE.
Last Sunday, I had a rather interesting conversation with one of the organisers of this event. We mainly talked about other things, entrepreneurship more generally, but at some point we also talked about the MeWeek. I have been around the MeWeek since the beginning: There have been three editions so far, the fourth is coming up in May.
During the first, in 2009, I was the "speaker buddy" of Nelly Kostadinova, the founder of Lingua World, a translation service company. (If you are really good with languages and enjoy translating, apply to work for her company!)
The second time around in 2010 I was "just" a plain-regular participant.
The third time - I missed it! I had my not-so-abroad semester in Berlin at the HU and I couldn't get myself motivated to go back to Maastricht for this event. Also, my room was sub-rented and...
Anyways, if you see a pattern of declining engagement here, you may be right. Right in the first edition, we had Suhas Gopinath of Globals Inc as a speaker. As his claim-to-fame was being "The world's youngest CEO", and he's a "quite a big deal" for that, that was enough to hype me up, the first time around. I thought that he must be quite awesome, at the time, and he probably is - for achieving what he has achieved. Even though I later heard from a friend that he allegedly used some spam-like emails in the beginning to build his customer base. And that's not really "awesome" at all, in the minds of most people. But maybe it's clever, maybe it was the only way to get started, maybe it's not even true that he did that, I don't know. (Maybe I should ask him that myself, what do you think?) In any case, this is not the time to talk bad about the speakers of previous years - let's be positive, we are trying to be enthusiastic here! (I am back to "engaging") ;)
Let's think of the ideal case: Which speaker do you dream of having at the Maastricht Week?
For this year, the speakers are more or less "set", as I heard. I am quite excited that Edial Dekker ofGidsy will come, because just like Alex Ljung of Soundcloud (who I "met" - more or less, we didn't really talk - at WHU's Idealab last year), he is one guy in the growing group of "buzzworthy" foreign entrepeneurs based in Berlin. While I don't really understand how Gidsy will ever make the kind of turnover or profits that would be needed to justify their investments (Feel free to try to convince me of your business in May, Edial! ^^ ), I am quite excited about this development of entrepreneurs coming from abroad to start their companies in Berlin. Maybe next year, we can get the American part of the Amen team to come here? That would be cool.
My "conversation partner" from Sunday dreams of a different speaker though. Unfortunately, I can not tell you who it is right now - she's really going to try to get him to come and maybe that would jinx the effort! ;) - but I can tell you my "dream speaker": Richard Branson. While saying "Richard Branson" on this question now sounds a bit like saying "Jessica Alba", on the question who you think the "hottest chick" is at some time, I got some "justification": I read his autobiography and another one of his books. Everyone knows about Virgin - Virgin Music, Virgin Airlines, Virgin Galactic and so on. That's what he got really famous with (and rich, too), but that's not what I would like to hear him talk about, or - ideally - want to talk with him about. I would like hear more about the first venture he started, a magazine called "The Student", and his current (political)activism with The Elders.
So, tell me: Who is your "dream speaker" (for the Maastricht Week, or just for any entrepreneurship event in general)? And why?
(Bonus question: You can also try to guess her "dream speaker"!)
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