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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

It's funny. This article paints a picture of incredible industrial innovation, but if you look at dutchstartupjobs.com, the majority of the startups here seem to be social media or marketing related, just like the rest of the country.

It's the service industry capital of the world.

Of course, some of the high tech startups/SMB's that do exist here can be pretty damn impressive! The list of Dutch startups on this site gives me hope: http://www.climate-kic.org/start-ups/

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There are two very different "startup scences" in the Netherlands. The social/cultural/financial startups seem to aggregate around Amsterdam. For the more interesting and high tech stuff you have to look at Delft, Twente, and in particular the Eindhoven areas. For food and agricultural stuff, the place to be is the Wageningen area. Often, from an international or Hollandish perspective, the Netherlands is equated to Amsterdam and vice versa, but that results in a very skewed image of the Netherlands and the startup scene in particular.

(For example, on the website you refer to, there seems to be only one Eindhoven area job and that's for front-end development to boot. Apparently, this website does not give a good representation of start-up jobs in the Netherlands, but focuses on Randstad webdevelopment jobs instead.)

Well..My first reaction is "Meh". Things you go to know. The startup who incubated in university incubation center are lobbied heavy by the student fraternities. If you are not part of it, you are probably not going to get in. Talking about rockstart and others, they do not really have enough talented startups. Ofcourse there are exceptions. Also, do not forget the government subsides that "sustainable" startup get.

According to me, the dutch startup scene is like any other european startup scene. Theres always few success stories and alot of failures.

> According to me, the dutch startup scene is like any other european startup scene. Theres always few success stories and alot of failures.

I agree with you.

To be honest, the high tech and industrial start ups I know of don't identify with the startup scene much. They're seriously working on solving a problem or pushing some new tech to market; they care about something more tangible than an app and growing big. In contrast, all the startup bootcamps, startup meetings, and other startup hypes seem to focus on apps and starting up as an aim in itself. But, given my background in research, I seem to be biased in my preference for startups with more depth with respect to research and development.

There's a lot of research going on in those areas. But startups? Not really.

It depends what you consider a startup. Off the top of my head I can name a few start-up companies that are operating in Wageningen, but in industries that don't receive as much attention as sexy computer start ups.

Anything interesting happening up in Groningen?

HackerOne is located in Groningen

http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/24/hackerone-bags-25m-as-secur...

Is sure does! See http://noordelijkeonlineondernemers.nl/leden-noo/ for online companies that have some serious footprint in this space :-).

HackerOne, The Launch Cafe, Voys Telecom, Crop-R, Spindle, Yellow Bird, we have a bunch more interesting companies but I'm heavily biased towards Python/JS.

What exactly are you looking for? I might be able to give you a nudge in the right direction.

Yeah, I live down the road from Wageningen, I like what I hear about what's going on there. :)

I'd love to get in touch with more of the startups in the second group you talk about. Can you shoot me an email? davedx@gmail.com

I'm not sure there are clear lists with "startups", the knowledge of them seems to be embedded in the network surrounding these companies. I did find one site with a bunch of companies on the High Tech Campus (in Eindhoven): http://www.hightechcampus.com/companies/, many of which are or were startups. Furthermore, there are a couple of startup meetups (meetup.com) and other startup initiatives in these cities/areas you can contact for more detailed information.

> This article paints a picture of incredible industrial innovation, but if you look at dutchstartupjobs.com, the majority of the startups here seem to be social media or marketing related, just like the rest of the country.

Yep. If there is one thing a particular circle is very good at it is slapping themselves on the back and having dinners in expensive restaurants. Fortunately not everybody is like that and most people here have their feet firmly planted in the mud.

I dislike hype like this, it's like talking to companies that exist for three weeks and immediately start branding themselves as 'world leader' in their domain.

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