edo van royen

For about a year I covered startups in the Amsterdam area as an editor for the Dutch edition of TNW. This was a hack that allowed me to meet and interview founders that I found interesting.

Co-founded Youngbits (a webhosting service) together with my friend Daniel Lippens because we liked the idea of running a business together. We provided webhosting together with web design for all sorts of clients. In 2006 we horizontally expanded our business into renting gameservers under the brand Serverking. We got tired of the responsibility of maintaining a webhost during schooltime (high-school) so we sold to a new owner in 2008. Youngbits is still operational.

A small webdesign "firm" I started as a curious 12 year old. Never actually did meaningful client work, but it got me my first experience with html and working on the web.

Spudu was a "multi-search engine" which enabled users to access several search-engines on a customizable startpage. It attempted to combine Google's simplicity with the functionality of existing startpages. Didn't work out.

Co-founded Studyflow, a web-based learning platform for all courses in Dutch Secondary education (Voortgezet onderwijs) as head of product with co-founders Philippe and Tom. Grew the company into one of the largest Dutch e-learning providers with over 200k paying students. Studyflow is still operational, and has a dominant market-share in arithmetics. For the first 5 years I was the sole UX/UI designer in the team. Over time expanded the product team to 5 developers and 2 designers.

Linkvive was a self-funded (from the proceeds of my previous company Youngbits) startup that crawled your website, generated a list of available urls, and then prevented 404's due to typos in the URL by redirecting users to the closest page matches. I hired a developer and designer to help me out on the product side of things. Technically a fun idea, unfortunately the niche turned out to be too small to be a real business.

Bachelor, Business at Nyenrode New Business School