mur.mu.rs

Appsterdam Worldwide

When we announced we were expanding Appsterdam to Delft, many people exclaimed with glee, but some people responded with confusion—and concern that we were diluting or diverging from the mission of Appsterdam. Haven’t I, myself, said, on this very blog, that location matters, and that the best location is Amsterdam?

Indeed, but you have to look at the bigger picture. We have made Amsterdam the best place in the world for App Makers, because we want App Makers to come to Amsterdam, because we want to bring App Makers together.

In a perfect world every App Maker in the world would live in Amsterdam, and we’d all be together all the time. In the real world, a lot of people can’t make it to Amsterdam just yet, but we can still help them in their careers, thereby instilling in them our values—chief among them the benefit of getting together with other App Makers.

This is what it means to be a center of gravity. We want people to come here, entice people to come here, and help people to come here. But more than that we want people to look to Appsterdam—for help, for guidance, for culture. We want to be the first name, and the last word, in apps.

Outside of the Netherlands, our facilities will be called Appsterdam Embassies, because they are exactly that—a little piece of Appsterdam in another city. What better way to show people what we are all about, and in doing so entice them to join us in the City of Apps?

Inside the Netherlands is where we have always drawn our borders, because it’s easy enough to get around inside this tiny country that even someone in Maastricht can make it up to Amsterdam for an Appsterdam Family Weekend once in a while. Moreover, for most of the world, Amsterdam is the Netherlands.

I know a lot of people resent that, but it is what it is. Amsterdam is a powerful brand, which is one of the reasons we chose it as our home. But we are not in the business of building walls, nor of excluding people. We are building Appsterdam not as a fortress of solitude, but as the capital for a unified world of App Makers.