It’s a few months before the pandemic. We’re sitting in a small cafe in the heart of Amsterdam. The city is one of the busiest in the world. Constantly evolving to accommodate the demands of modern living, sustainability, quality of life. Modern challenges for a very old city.
The age of collaboration
Like its sister cities across Europe, Amsterdam has been an economic and cultural hub for hundreds of years. It’s been able to consistently adapt to the needs of its residents and the world around it. Staying adaptive and receptive, Amsterdam’s created its own model of urban innovation. Innovation is not magic. It’s not a single effort by a gifted genius. Innovation takes a lot of peoples’ hard work. Innovation takes confronting problems with ardency and grace. And the best way to confront problems is to work together. Innovation is a group effort.
Today, the tools of collaboration have never been so powerful. Technology is everywhere - now the task is learning how to harness it. We (the founders) believe technology should be used to help people work together. Technology should be used with intention and deployed with care. We believe the current trend of commodifying people’s attention, violating privacy for advertising revenue, is a toxic and unsustainable model. We believe technology should help serious social and developmental goals.
Technology’s purpose
It’s a long and difficult road ahead grappling with where technology is taking us. We have a lot of questions to ask along the way, and a lot of battles to fight. These battle’s aren’t just about data privacy and addictive design patterns - we need to keep questioning the fundamental purpose of the tools. For us growing an honest business means building a business with real intent and real value. We want to bring our users together and facilitate their work on a global scale. We want to do our part advancing the tools of innovation. We believe innovation is not one platform controlling the narrative, it's many tools helping us collaborate.
What are we doing?
Heavy machinery runs in the family. One of our founding investors scaled an engineering and manufacturing company, and is now a key advisor. Projectlink solves the biggest problem his business faced - generating leads and sales for his niche equipment. Projectlink is heavy-industry’s answer to the platform revolution. We're building a tool to solve niche problems, and once we prove the concept there’s nothing stopping it from scaling into every industrial market. We're working closely with the people we serve in order to iterate on the best solution for them. From here we scale horizontally. The sky’s the limit.
- Timo & Bryan