Looking back at our journey with Silicon Canals, one thought comes to mind – it’s been seven years already! Time flies when you’re having fun, right?
It all started on a bright and sunny winter day in 2014. I was riding my bike along the canals of Amsterdam when I realised there were a plethora of startups located in the iconic and historical waterfront buildings. Once a place for colonial merchants (17th century) and bankers and lawyers (20th century), it now hosted and prospered as a hotbed for innovation. Wow!
‘What a great name for a startup news website,’ was all I could think of. In all fairness, I wasn’t the first to coin the term. The name stuck, and in the summer of 2014 (on this very day) we launched our first version of siliconcanals.nl with a couple of interesting posts in Dutch. We, that was me and co-conspirator Arjan Drost. The launch was celebrated with what appears to be prosecco.
One story on launch day involved a startup called Tampost. You may have guessed it: they mail-order tampons on a subscription basis. Whatever happened to them, I don’t know, but their domain now lists a 404 and we sure as hell never followed up on the story!
A lot of things have changed for the better. In the beginning, we described ourselves as owners of a fansite “who clearly weren’t aiming to be objective”. Since then, I have fired myself as editor-in-chief – clearly because of those highly unjournalistic remarks – and we’re now under the reign of our third professional editor-in-chief, Rahul Raj.
We switched from publishing in Dutch to English in 2016, purely out of opportunism. Travis Kalanick (then Uber-CEO) and Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO) came to visit Amsterdam for StartupFest. It would have been rather odd to keep all this exciting stuff happening in our fair city to ourselves!
The biggest leap we took was going for a full-blown European scope with the assistance of only a small team. Thanks first to Akansha Srivastava, who’s now with UKTech News, and our current editor-in-chief, who have established an editorial team in India that ensures timely and daily news coverage. I’m so damn proud of them!
Where to next? We have truly audacious plans for wider European domination in tech news publishing. It may possibly be that we have news of our own to announce soon. For now, it’s enough to stress that the future of Silicon Canals has been secured for years to come. Stay tuned, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
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