Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

I'm a Serial Internet Entrepreneur. I started my first company in 1997 and sold it during the hype of 1999. Starting companies, inventing innovative technology and coming up with new ideas is my daily work. A lot of my time is spent on keeping up with new trends on the web, internet and in technology in general and looking for opportunities.

I am one of the founders of The Next Web Conference, Incubator and blog. More about that on http://thenextweb.com

I live in the center of Amsterdam, the Netherlands with Tessa and our two daughters.

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten’s Specialties:

ideas, starting up business, innovation, creative input, design, interaction design, logo, Public Speaking

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten’s Experience

Founder

TwitterCounter

(Internet industry)

June 2008 — Present (1 year 6 months)

TwitterCounter is a service for Bloggers, Social networkers and other well connected individuals to communicate and track the number of followers they have on Twitter. Add the TwitterCounter to your blog or profile to attract more followers. Also check out our top 100 and add your own name too!
Shareholder/Advisor

Wakoopa.com BV

(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

January 2007 — Present (2 years 11 months)

The Wakoopa founders came to us when they were hardly more than an idea. We offered them office space, guidance and helped them getting their first funding. Now they are incorporated we are official shareholders and advisor's and proud of it!
Initiator

The Next Web Conference

(Privately Held; Online Media industry)

June 2006 — Present (3 years 6 months)

The Next Web Conference is a yearly Internationally focused Internet Conference where attendees, start-ups and speakers from all over the world come together to discuss the future of the web. The first edition took place in 2006 with more than 300 attendees. The second edition was in 2007 with more than 500 people and the third edition attracted more than 700 people from more than 30 countries.

The next Next Web conference will take place on April 15, 16 and 17, 2009. More information on http://thenextweb.org/ and http://2009.thenextweb.org/
Founder/CEO

Preople.com

(Privately Held; Internet industry)

March 2005 — Present (4 years 9 months)

Preople.com is an experiment to try out some ideas for a new search engine based on my ideas that search engines are not focused and interactive enough. Preople let's you search for a name and add a profile to that person. It is also a fairly sophisticated Blogging service. Check it out. All in beta...
Founder

Meganova BV

(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Venture Capital & Private Equity industry)

2001 — Present (8 years )

Meganova is a private incubator. Several projects have started in Meganova and grew into companies. Check Meganova Website for more information
Owner

Bomega BV

(Privately Held; Myself Only; Internet industry)

1997 — Present (12 years )

Bomega Holding BV is my personal Holding company in which I hold shares in all the other projects I co-found. I also do some consulting work now and then and use Bomega to represent myself.
CEO/Founder

Fleck.com

(Privately Held; Internet industry)

October 2005 — January 2009 (3 years 4 months)

Fleck was an attempt to create a Web Annotation service. We worked hard, raised some money, launched and relaunched but never could get it to work. Oh well..
Chairman

IPAN

(Non-Profit; 201-500 employees; Internet industry)

May 2005 — April 2008 (3 years )

IPAN (Interactive Professionals Associatie Nederland) was founded in 1998. At this moment there are 600+ members. The purpose of IPAN is to enable dutch creative Professionals to get together, be inspired by fellow creative Professionals, connect with other members and to simply enjoy a cold beer among friends. Every first tuesday of the month we all come together at Hotel Arena. More information can be found at http://www.ipan.nl
Founder/CEO

Junker BV

(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

July 2004 — 2005 (1 year )

Junker is a challenge/response anti-spam service that I started with Caspar Wenckebach. You can find it at http://www.junker.nl and try it for free for a few months. It works great!
Founder/CEO

HubHop.com

(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)

March 2002 — 2004 (2 years )

HubHop, wireless internet service provider. Started in 2002, sold to KPN at the end of 2003. Currently named KPN Hotspots. I'm an advisor there now.
CEO

Jippy.com

(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

2000 — 2001 (1 year )

Jippy.com is a webbased and interactive Birthday calendar. Way ahead of it's time and still growing strong with now 900.000+ active members. Social networking before I ever heard of the term. Sold my shares on June 4, 2007.
Advisor

FortuneCity / FlyNote

(Internet industry)

1999 — 2001 (2 years )
Founder/CEO

V3 Redirect Services

(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

1997 — 1999 (2 years )

I was the founder (together with Hans Poul Veldhuijzen van Zanten and Eric Visser of V3.com. We hosted come.to, surf.to and a bunch of other domains and used them to redirect people to their personal homepages. e.g. http://come.to/boris

We sold the company (in 1999) to Fortunecity.