Both sides
of the table.

Aren teaches the thing that used to frighten him, which is the reason he is good at teaching it.

He founded De Zonnefabriek, a solar company, and ran it until 2014. Then he left to write, and De Lobbyist, a novel about a climate summit, came out the year after. Journalism before all of it.

For most of that time he could not stand in front of a room. Ahead of a Christmas speech for his own company he took a four-day course on speech anxiety, and it turned over: the fear made way for something closer to enjoyment. He went back to that school, Speechen.nl, to learn the method himself. More than five thousand people have been through it.

On the day he works on the nerves, the voice, the body, the presence. He is the one who gets a room of founders to do the uncomfortable thing three times, and to want a fourth.

Call Aren: +31 6 14 44 81 20

Jasper has been the founder doing the asking and the person in the room doing the deciding, often enough to know what actually moves between the two.

He co-founded Braincreators in 2016 and ran it as CEO for nine years, to thirty-five people and two products that were spun out as companies of their own. That is nine years of raising money and selling to enterprises, pitching to people who had already heard four versions of the same story that week.

Since 2024 he has mostly been in the other chair. He hosts AI Salon in Amsterdam and ran AI Salon Global as well. Founders pitch at those events, and he has sat through hundreds of them. He has mentored at Rockstart, Europe’s first AI accelerator, sat on the jury of the Computable Awards, and chaired a track at World Summit AI. He has spoken at TEDx and is a regular on BNR.

The avocado story on the front page is his. He was in that brewery off the Las Vegas Strip, watching a loud room ignore a dozen good companies and then scream one word back at a man who had no slides.

Sterre is the reason the day feels like what you paid for.

She ran people and operations at Braincreators, thirty-five people, then marketing and operations at AI Salon Global. Before either, operations and finance at MrStarsky.

She is the one who ends up holding everything together, the person who takes on the task nobody assigned and just owns it. That instinct runs from Braincreators through AI Salon Global, and at Avocado Pitch it looks like this: bringing people into a room and making sure something happens once they’re there.

Here that means the seats get filled, every founder arrives at the right building at the right hour, lunch is worth staying for, the camera is where it should be, and the clock holds all day. Four modules and three rounds on stage only fit inside one day if nothing else in that day is improvised.

None of it is visible when it works. That is the point of it, and it is also why it is the first thing you notice when it does not.