On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Van den Kroonenberg Award for successful young entrepreneurship, we spoke extensively with former winners. This episode features Gert Meppelink, co-founder of Besamu Electronics. He won the Van den Kroonenberg Award (in the time known as the UT Entrepreneurship Award) in 1986.
Interview by Erik Tissingh & Maurice Essers
Text by Lidewey van Noord
Lazy bastards
When Gert Meppelink drives his electric car, a Polestar 2, he regularly wonders what those software developers in Sweden are actually up to. The infotainment is really worthless, he thinks. And the controls are not intuitively logical. “There's a lot of crazy stuff in there. Yesterday I also had something: a small white car appeared at the top right of the driver's display. At home I tried to look up what that meant, but I don't think I could find it anywhere.” Meppelink does not understand why it takes so long for these cars to be fully developed. “Why are there still strange bugs in the software? I once said to those representatives: 'Just send me to Sweden. I want to know how they handle it there, because something is clearly going wrong.'” Laughing: “I'll tell you one thing: software engineers are lazy bastards.” And he should know: he was one himself.
On campus
Meppelink was born in Rhee, a small town above Assen. At the age of eleven he was already repairing radios for people in the neighborhood. “Those old tube radios. I had no sense at all, but I was interested. At some point I just discovered how those radios worked and how to get them working again.”
At the secondary school in Meppel it was confirmed that the science subjects for Meppelink were better than the humanities subjects. He was particularly interested in technology, so after high school he chose the THT, Technische Hogeschool Twente (Polytechnic Institute Twente). There they taught Applied Physics, Electrical Engineering and Chemical Technology. “The real subjects, so to speak. The first year, the propaedeutic year, was communal. After that I started studying Electrical Engineering.”
Meppelink lived at Campuslaan 57. “A notorious flat at the time, I had a wonderful time there. We still have a reunion every five years. ” He made many friends during his studies and also met his future wife in Enschede. Perhaps because he enjoyed it so much, he extended his student years considerably. “I studied from 1969 to 1980, 1981, I think. Very common back then.”
Developments in the field of electronics went incredibly fast. Meppelink remembers that during his student days, a scientific employee invited him and other students home to proudly show them a device. “It could subtract, add, divide and multiply with one memory location. And it cost 'only' 1500 guilders. Then I thought: but I can do that without a device, I don't need that, do I?"
In those years, Meppelink started his own microelectronics company. “I was actually making computers when computers didn't exist yet. If I lived in America and had a different name, I could have come up with Microsoft. But hey, I was in Twente.” Meppelink developed his own motherboard and the software was written in machine language. This allowed different devices to be created by writing custom software, unique at the time. In the meantime, he was also a student assistant and taught at 't Venderink (college). “I did all kinds of things together.”
In 2021, Meppelink attended a reunion at the UT, 50 years after the agreement with the flatmates to see each other every 5 years. “We then stayed in the old EL building, now the U Parkhotel. We walked to the seventh floor. “That's where the strings were,” I said. If you make circuits with electronics, you need wires from A to B. We called them strings. It was really nice to be back.”
Temperature displays
Besamu Electronics was founded when Meppelink lived in Hengelo, in the special Kasbah district. “I dabbled in electronics, transistors, and the first chips. There was a small company Besamu nearby that developed mechanical things, which they wanted to make electronically. “I might try that,” I said. I grew into that, and together we founded Besamu Electronics.”
The company made, among other things, temperature displays and temperature controllers for buildings. For example, a school could use such a controller to ensure that the room was warm when the students came in in the morning. Something like that was really new in those years.”
The company employed a few developers, and “people for the better soldering work”. Meppelink was able to use the university facilities. “They had large workshops there with IBM mainframe computers. With today's knowledge you say: they couldn't do anything. What is now calculated in a fraction of a second, you then had to wait hours for after punching in. In the meantime, we went for coffee so that the computer could calculate in peace.”
The UT Entrepreneurship Award
In 1986, Meppelink was awarded the UT Entrepreneurship Award, the current Van den Kroonenberg Award. “I thought that was a great honor. I was working very hard on Besamu Electronics, we employed seventeen people. At that time it was difficult to get loans from the bank, because the bankers did not understand what we were doing at all. Everything was so new. Fortunately, we have always had black figures, but it was sometimes difficult to pay the salaries.”
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Ultimately, Meppelink decided to leave Besamu Electronics. “I felt like I had to keep running the business all the time. If I had been on holiday and came back, I felt like I had to put everything back together. I don't know if that was right, but the responsibility for running the company, the idea that it was all up to me, felt like a burden on my shoulders.” What also played a role in his decision was that the company focused on hardware, while Meppelink wanted to focus on software. “That was the future.”
Meppelink sold his shares in Besamu Electronics to his partner, ensured a proper transfer and left. Those around him reacted in surprise. “They asked how I could do that, stop, while I had two small children. I replied that it would work itself out. If you don't believe in yourself, why would an employer do that?”
Golden years
Thanks to his good network, Meppelink provided assistance to various companies for six months. Then he receives a call from CMG, a software company in Amstelveen. “I didn't understand anything about their software, but I didn't show that. At that time you had a series of ‘Bluff Your Way in …’ booklets, for example Bluff Your Way in Management.” Laughing: “Well, I bluffed my way into programming language. And that actually worked out very well, I had golden years there.”
Although he had been a director at his own company, Meppelink had to start at the bottom of the ladder at CMG. “Everyone was better than me. But I liked it, I could finally go on holiday again in peace. The home front was also happy with that. And my wife and children also really liked that I was regularly home at seven and could just join them for dinner in the evening.”
According to Meppelink, CMG was a great employer. “They appreciated it if you were enterpreneurial, if you showed that you mastered the profession. But we had to deliver results. If you came in one minute past eight-thirty in the morning, they immediately asked: 'Do you actually like working here?' They were very strict when it came to performance, if you didn't deliver, you could leave again."
Over the years he held various positions within the company. “I was able to do really wonderful things there. I have worked in all sectors: government, industry, banking, really everything. And I've had all kinds of positions, as a software engineer, salesman, director. And there was a grand finale: when CMG opened a branch in Enschede, I was allowed to go there. Back to Twente!”
Meppelink never completely lost the bond with Twente. He knew former rector magnificus Harry van den Kroonenberg quite well. When an option came his way in the early 1990s on a tender from Rijkswaterstaat for the development of the Maeslantkering, the storm surge barrier in the Nieuwe Waterweg, CMG was very keen to win that order. An important requirement for the storm surge barrier was reliability: it had to close automatically in the event of a storm, without human intervention. “We had major players in front of us, IBM, Volmac, Logica. But I took UT with me. I created a steering group with the university and asked Harry van den Kroonenberg as chairman. He was no longer rector at the time, he was now working at the ECN in Petten. He wanted to cooperate. The steering group checked remotely whether we had developed the software properly, thus providing us with an additional check on the reliability requirement. And we got that assignment, partly because the UT stood behind us! I am also very grateful to the university for that.
Home coming
Working for CMG in Enschede felt like coming home for Meppelink. Because he had had his own company in Twente for eight years, he still knew most of the players in the entrepreneurial world. “I enjoyed working there in recent years, but at a certain point I said: I'm quitting.” Meppelink transferred his work and devoted himself to several supervisory positions. He also started helping other entrepreneurs. “Novice entrepreneurs, sometimes still students. At CMG I have gained knowledge and experience in many areas, from sales to administration to dealing with people. I can help other companies with this.”
When guiding young entrepreneurs, he believes it is very important to recognize their value. “As an experienced hand, you have the tendency to say: 'Step aside and I'll do it for you.' You have to suppress that tendency. I consciously adopt a reactive attitude, not an active one. Only when they ask me a question, when they indicate that there is a need for my knowledge, do I become active and help.”
Twente and the rest of the world
Meppelink has always found it a shame that Twente sometimes seemed so disconnected from the rest of the world. “After studying in Twente, people went elsewhere to work. It was a temporary stay, almost an annoying interruption. I have always done my best to change that, to get Twente out of that damned corner. That really needs to change, so many beautiful things are happening in Twente.”
Meppelink not only sees that contact between Twente and the rest of the world did not always run smoothly, but that the students sometimes do not know each other what they are doing. “We were in the BTC for a while, where all UT spinoffs could get cheap office space. The idea behind the BTC was that you could learn from each other's experience, but in practice little came of this. These companies knew little about each other. I made another questionnaire. I visited all the companies to ask what they actually did. I eventually linked a competition to that.”
He sees that good things are still being invented and made in Twente, but that they often remain under the radar. “There was recently a large article in the newspaper stating that Zwolle wants to become the high-tech region of the Netherlands 'alongside Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Delft'. Damn, I thought, and then they don't mention Enschede? So many great, innovative companies have started in Enschede. Even in my time. Take Xsens, or Booking.com.”
Meppelink notices in his work that where you sometimes have endless discussions about the use of facilities and patents in collaborations with TU Delft and TU Eindhoven, this is less difficult at the University of Twente. “Stimulating collaboration is what characterizes the University of Twente.”
He is very grateful to the University of Twente. “Not just for the Entrepreneurship Award, although that was a nice confirmation that I was doing well. The THT was very important in the previous period. The education, the enthusiastic people, the professors, the fun we had, the discussions about entrepreneurship. All that meant a lot to me.”