Today Robert Gaal (Wakoopa.com) and me were speakers at Sprout ChallengerDay in Hilversum. The whole office decided to be there to see us do our thing and even a few friends decided to join us. It turned out to be a very inspiring event and we met lots of new and interesting people. [The photo here shows the audience during a small break session about financing your start-up.]

Yesterday we hosted the speaker dinner at my house. 22 people showed up and we had a lot of nice food and wine and had a chance to get to know each other.

When Louis Hoeks (Editor in chief from Sprout Magazine) first invited me he asked me what I wanted to talk about and at what time. Having some experience with my own conference and canceling speakers I proposed to keep me as a back-up speaker. I told Louis that my experience was that some speakers will drop out at the last moment and that it is really convenient to have a back-up speakers ready when that happened.

And just as I had predicted two days before the conference a very important speaker canceled so they simply gave me his spot.

As usual I didn’t use a Powerpoint (or Keynote) presentation but just told a few stories about my negotiations with KPN for HubHop and my ideas about how big companies should reward entrepreneurship by acquiring smaller companies instead of trying to be innovative themselves. This resonated well with both the (500+) entrepreneurs and big firm employees in the room.

They told me that the whole thing was videotaped and I also did a radio interview and video interview and several other interviews and I will post those here as soon as they are published.

[bad photo by me, good photos by Lennaert!

More photos of ChallengerDay:
www.xs4all.nl/~glserne/Sprout/WebSproutChallengerDay2007/

Detailed report of ChallengerDay:
www.frankwatching.com/archive/2007/11/03/sprout-challengerday-people-with-passion/

RADIO: (including interview with me)
http://challengerday.angrybytes.com

More Radio: (radioarchief, 01-11, 13.45u)
bnr.nl

And a lot of info on sprout.nl
http://www.sprout.nl