Bits vs Bytes: Recent Episodes
Amer Grgic
Bits vs Bytes is a podcast by Amer Grgic. Amer Grgic is the founder for Livebytes. This podcast is about business, leadership and tech and will revolve around important leaders within these fields. Want to be on the podcast? Got something interesting going on? Go ahead and mail amer@bitsvsbytes.com!
Lars Speekenbrink is the Country Manager for The Netherlands for Bolt (https://bolt.eu). Bolt provides ride-hailing and scooter sharing services all over Europe and Africa.
In this podcast we discuss their launch in The Netherlands but also their plans and vision for the future of mobility.
Ingrid van Rossum (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ingrid-van-rossum-4471b8/) is innovator at Fuenta, Co-Founder of the I AM College and Co-Founder for Great Places to Grow.
In this podcast we discuss education and how the I AM College is evolving the way students learn and also Great Places to Grow, which are companies that help their employees grow in the best of ways.
Marilijn Boumeester is a brand strategist, coach and author of the book "Wennen aan Wenden", which translates to "Getting used to changes". In this podcast we discuss everything about branding, but also how people can get more used to an ever changing world.
Evelyn van Kelle is a Strategic Software Delivery Consultant at Xebia. In this podcast we will discuss all about Socio-Technical systems like Domain-Driven Design and we'll also go into interesting topics like hiring technical people.
Ado Kukic is Developer Evangelist Lead at Auth0. Auth0 is an identity provider that integrates within your application, so you don't need to create that yourself. We talk about the advantages of using an identity provider and where online security will go in the future.
One interesting project is for example Webauthn, which we discuss as it's a standard that is being developed to make the use of passwords obsolete.
Roeland Kuipers is the CTO at Schuberg Philis. Traditionally a hosting company supplying dedicated hosting for their clients, they have since transitioned into creating more than just hosting solutions.
We talk about how this transition was for them and also the possibilities of the cloud in helping build solutions for clients.
Jeroen Broekema is the Founder of Funding Circle The Netherlands. He grew the Dutch branch of Funding Circle (originally founded in the UK) from himself to at the time of recording 65 people.
We talked about his journey but also the problems SME's are struggling with and how Funding Circle tries to help in these struggles.
Damir Perkic is Co-Founder at BE O Bottle, they create waterbottles made of out of bioplastic. This bioplastic is made from residu from sugarcane and fully recyclable.
Damir started this company because he worked in the plastic industry and saw that almost all (99%) of the plastic is made from crude oil and he set out to change this, and their first product is the BE O Bottle.
Pablo Santos is the Founder of Codicé Software, creators of Plastic SCM. Plastic tries to provide a different take on version control software like GIT or SVN.
We talk about the future of collaborating on code, but also what makes Plastic SCM so unique in regards to other systems.
Eelco van Collenburg is Art Director at Macaw. Together we go into the future of design agencies, but also what makes an Art Director an Art Director. We also talk about why design and tech shouldn't be seen separately and even a little bit of philosophy.
Quintin Schevernels is the CEO at Funda.nl. Funda.nl is the biggest real estate platform in The Netherlands. We talk about the housing market and how his entry as CEO into the company was, but also the technological advances that are taking place in the real estate market.
Quintin is also the author of the book Suits and Hoodies, a book about startups and why some of these startups reach extreme heights and why the majority fails.
Peet Sneekes is Creative Consultant at Mirabeau. He has a really unique view of how technology will evolve in the future and loves to talk about it. In this podcast we discuss all things technological. Subjects are things like Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Blockchain and Human Centered design.
Kees Veldhuizen is Owner and CEO of Kroodle. Kroodle creates products like a connected car insurance and connected health insurance app which can provide valuable data to insurers about for example someone's driving style. This data means that people that are insured through and insurer working with Kroodle can receive discounts for good driving behaviour.
We also talked about product development and how the transition was from being part of a larger company (Aegon) and moving to a startup.
Edhem "Eddie" Custovic is the Co-Founder for the BH Futures Foundation. With his foundation he strives to create a better future for the youth in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
They do this by providing scholarships which include things like travel to other countries but also a very extensive mentorship program with mentors from the Dijaspora. We talked about how he started the foundation but also his dreams of building a future for people in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Joris Leker is the Co-Founder of Valsplat, an agency that focusses on researching how users use applications for numerous companies. This qualitative research is mostly a manual process that is measured by interviewing people and asking them about their experience.
These interviews were previously bundled into a report and sent to the client, but Joris and his team noticed that this sometimes meant that information wasn't landing where it was supposed to. They created Sticktail to combat this problem and he talks all about what Sticktail does in this podcast.
Daniël van der Schoor is Project Director at TWNKLS. TWNKLS is a full-service augmented reality agency. They create Augmented Reality solutions for clients, and most notably they created the IKEA Place app.
The most interesting part about this app is that their initial version only took 9 weeks to create and launch, which for a global app is insanely fast. We talked all about how they did this, but also augmented reality and it's future applications.
Bart van Raalte is Technology Principal at Merapar (https://merapar.com), which focusses on creating software solutions and architectures for their clients. Merapar is based in The Netherlands, Poland, France and the UK.
We talk about how using services from AWS (Amazon Web Services) can dramatically reduce startup costs and creating Proof-of-Concepts. The huge deal being that companies can focus on their core business and focus less on the underlying infrastructure.
Sytse Sijbrandij is the CEO at Gitlab, software that aims to make it easier for developers and engineers to build and deploy software. They have integrated Continuous Integration and Deployment into their already existing code repository software to give users one place where they can work on their software.
We talked about how they got started, their reasoning behind putting everything together in one product but also some of the challenges of scaling to a larger scale company of around 500 people.
Koen The is CEO at Lendahand, a crowdinvesting platform geared towards investing in companies in emerging markets. The platform provides a fast and easy way for entrepeneurs in these markets to set a goal they want to raise, and fund their idea.
All about their challenges and the way they help improve the world in this podcast.
Daniëlle Koeken is the founder of qlinker (https://www.qlinker.nl), the first fully digital housing company in The Netherlands. Started as a startup by housing company Mitros in Utrecht it aims to provide social housing completely through digital channels like chat and Whatsapp.
Being the first of it's kind comes with a lot of challenges but also gives them the freedom to rethink the processes involved in providing social housing. Find out how they did it in this edition of the Bits vs Bytes podcast.
Bob van Luijt (https://www.bob.wtf) is the founder at SeMI (https://www.semi.network/), and together with his team he is creating a decentralised knowledge graph called Weaviate. They are trying to be an open alternative to existing knowledge graphs made by Google and Amazon.
Curious to find out how they want to do this? Find out in this podcast.
Ali Niknam is the founder of Bunq, the first fully digital bank of the Netherlands. In this podcast we discussed all the challenges that were faced by Ali and his team in creating and starting a tech company in one of the most regulated sectors in the world.
Other topics in this podcast are cryptocurrency, company culture but also his view on the banking sector as a whole.
Jochem Verheul is the CEO and co-founder of VMC.ai. VMC is an innovative platform based on blockchain technology used in multiple projects. Their goal is to create a platform where mobility providers can connect to and use, for example for payments but also for ride information. We also talk about blockchain in general, and the confusion and hype around blockchain.
Arnoud Martens is the Managing Director of Valtech Netherlands, which in turn is part of Valtech, a large digital agency with more than 2500+ people employed in 16 countries. Valtech Netherlands was created by the acquisition of eFocus, and we talked about this transition, what it meant but also the bigger strategy behind this acquisition.
Tim Zuidgeest is the co-founder of ST&T Research. They are specialized in a new form of measuring the impact of marketing called neuromarketing. They apply multiple techniques like eye-tracking but also EEG (Electroencephalography) which is used to measure electrical brainwaves to see how people respond to certain bits and pieces of for example advertisement.
Another field they are in which we also discuss is how for example website speed can affect buying decisions, but also how font sizes have a big psychological impact into buying.
Ohad Gilad is the co-founder at Keadyn, an investment company that invests in numerous technological startups. He is also one of the founders of WeTechRotterdam, a startup hub that tries to bring together startups from Rotterdam under one roof.
We talked about startup investment and also what the dynamic is of being an investor. And also his views on what is actually important for an investor to invest in a startup.
Paul Manuel is one of the founders of Dept, a large full-service digital agency. They have grown a lot over the last few years, buying companies with different focusses and bringing them al together in Dept. Some of Dept's clients include Microsoft, Adidas, Philips and many more.
We talked about their strategy and also some of the challenges of bringing together this many companies under one entity and how they did it.
Ron Kersic is Enterprise Architect at ING, and in his role primarily revolves around helping creating a company culture that is rooted in platform thinking. He is also co-author of the ING platform architecture curriculum.
We discussed how he has contributed to changes within ING, but also company culture in general and also the challenges banks face in the digital age and where they have to improve.
You can get in touch with Ron at ron.kersic@ing.com.
Stefan Leijnen has been CTO for ‘Can’t Wait to Learn’, a programme developed by War Child Holland and its partners, since August 2017. Can’t Wait to Learn aims to provide quality education to children affected by conflicts. By playing educational games on tablets, children can keep on learning mathematics and reading.
Working in resource constrained areas bring its own challenge: no power, no internet, very little infrastructure and extreme weather conditions. Find out how War Child and programme partners have been solving these problems since 2012 in this podcast.
Lara Ankersmit is Head of Digital at NOS, a public broadcaster in The Netherlands. For the last few years they have made a switch to a more digital platform with a website that delivers the news and features a lot of innovations especially in the area of events.
During the World Cup Soccer in 2018, they introduced a new way of watching highlights of a game by providing an interface to be able to watch a particular highlight with different camera angles, essentially creating a 360 degree view.
We also discuss their new voice interface that they created for Google Home and how they innovate and create new channels to deliver the news.
Michiel Fokke is CTO at Quby, a company that has created Toon, a display placed in the spot you normally have your thermostat. A lot of people in The Netherlands know Toon as a smart thermostat, but it's a lot more than that.
Quby, with Toon, aims to show you energy consumption of your appliances in your home, showing for example if one of these appliances is using too much power, notifying you that it's maybe up for replacement. We also talk about the state of the smart home and where it could go in the future.
Troels Støvring is the CEO and Co-Founder of Twill, a Maersk innovation that focuses on making shipping containers all over the world, easy and clear.
In this podcast we discuss their challenges but also the amazing world of shipping which is going through a digital transformation and Twill is contributing to that. How about the containers themselves, do they need to get smarter? Are we going to see whole chains of IoT containers? Find out in this podcast!
Paul de Raaij is Technology Lead at Coolblue. Coolblue is one of the biggest e-commerce websites in The Netherlands and Belgium. We talk about everything from how they organize their teams to what they use to run their platforms. Their mantra is "Anything for a smile", find out how they do that in this podcast.
Ergin Borova is the Co-Founder of Peddy, a new and innovative way to reach your personal goals within your company and get rid of the old way of working with evaluations. We talked about leadership, how this creates new company cultures and also his vision about the way companies should operate.
Renate Sportel is Innovation Manager at Albert Heijn Online (www.ah.nl). In this role she is, together with her Labs team, involved in thinking about, conceptualising, building and testing new innovation in the online grocery shopping market.
Together with Transavia they worked on Appie Fly, a new and exciting way to order a grocery package on vacation which can be picked up at the airport so you don’t have to go to the store. We also talked about their pilot with smart locks and how to make shopping for groceries as frictionless as possible.
Niels Kaspers is Product Manager at Nu.nl, the biggest news website in The Netherlands with over 2 million unique users a day. They are part of Sanoma which has multiple publications and in this podcast we discussed how they test new features and concepts, but also how they work together with Sanoma.
Menno Vis is IT Director Retail at bol.com. Bol.com is one of the largest e-commerce websites of The Netherlands and part of Ahold Delhaize which also includes supermarket chain Albert Heijn. In this podcast we talked about how they organize, hire and innovate at bol.com and also how new channels will change e-commerce in the future.
Daniel Gebler is CTO at Picnic, an online grocery store. They are trying to crack the formula to get groceries to your door, swift and fresh. To do this they employ a mobile app to do all your groceries and multiple warehouses and hubs in cities to make deliveries that can be delivered in a time slot of about 10 minutes. Find out how Picnic does this in this podcast.
Amir Sabirovic is COO at TM7 Innovations and they built a platform for Natural Language Processing. This platform makes it easy for companies to process large amounts of documents and scan for things like personal data. We also talk about Articifial Intelligence, because the standpoint of Amir is that AI doesn't exist. Will robots take over the world, or is AI just a hype? Find out in this podcast.
Heini Withagen is CTO and Co-Founder of Mirabeau, one of the biggest digital agencies in The Netherlands. They were acquired in December of 2016 by Cognizant. In this podcast we discussed about what this acquisition meant for them and also what he thought about the future of websites and exciting things like lenses with built-in tech and using voice in interacting with the technology around us.
Olaf Molenveld is the CTO and Co-Founder of Vamp (https://vamp.io). Their mission is to make it easier for companies to do things like canary releases and AB-testing. They couple Vamp with already existing platforms like Kubernetes and DCOS.
Nick Kiran is Marketing Lead at TWTG an innovative company that creates IoT hardware and firmware. There is a lot of buzz around IoT and in this podcast we talk about what they do and how they actually use IoT, what he sees as new trends in IoT and what the future will bring.
Pepijn Schoen is CTO at Voya (https://voya.ai) and they offer booking business travel through a conversational interface. In this podcast, we cover how it is working in the airline business but also the work with his team which is remote from his own location and the struggles of scaling a startup.
Roger Tan is Associate Director at UNStudio. Roger is leading UNSense an arch tech company founded at the beginning of this year by Ben van Berkel (Founder UNStudio/ Principal Architect). UNSense designs and integrates human-centered technological solutions into the built environment (http://www.unsense.com) with the purpose to make buildings better for the people using them but also more durable.
Marjolein van der Aar is Project Manager Innovation at RTL Nieuws (Dutch RTL). She has worked on some interesting projects like personalising news and using voice assistents to provide a new content channel.
Niels Zeilemaker is the CTO at GoDataDriven, a company that creates and implements Big Data solutions for clients like Heineken and Royal Flora Holland. In this podcast we'll be talking about what he thinks of Big Data being a hype, but also what GoDataDriven is doing to implement Big Data for their clients.
BeterDichtbij is a chat app that is connecting patients to their doctor or nurse in the hospital, they aim to make communicating with your hospital an easier experience for both doctors, nurses and patients. Hear about their amazing story in this podcast.
In this podcast I talk with Murat Özmerd, CXO (Customer Experience Officer) & Co-Founder for Flow.ai, their software empowers users to create conversational interfaces and makes it easy to publish them on services like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistent and chat channels like Facebook Messenger and their own Live chat.
Marnix Korterink is COO at Tevreden.nl and we talk about customer & employee satisfaction research in general and also his vision on what qualities a COO or a leader needs to have.
You can reach Marnix on marnix@tevreden.nl, and Amer on amer@bitsvsbytes.com.