Guus Frericks is working in the most unique circumstances in Europe.
Frericks is founder and CEO of HighTechXL, a global high-tech hardware accelerator based in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
He has built his company into one of the most successful accelerators in Europe, attracting promising high-tech hardware startups from all over the world to HighTechXL’s buildings on Eindhoven’s sprawling High Tech Campus. Frericks is one of several Dutch entrepreneurs here focused on elevating Eindhoven’s profile as High Tech Capital of the World. Which is tough when no one has ever heard of it.
Yet, Eindhoven is one of the few European innovation centers that doesn’t aspire to be the next Silicon Valley. Eindhoven already has an ecosystem comparable to Silicon Valley, bolstered by semiconductor suppliers ASML and NXP, the Dutch equivalents of Hewlett-Packard and Intel.
Intel actually owns a minority interest in ASML, which produces the photolithography technology that etches nanocircuitry onto chips. Qualcomm just acquired NXP for $48 billion. Yes … billion, with a “b.”
And like Silicon Valley, Eindhoven has a stand-out university, Technical University Eindhoven, that’s not so dissimilar to Stanford in that it constantly creates new high-tech startups.
Yet this dominant European high-tech hardware hub, with an outsized base of the high-tech businesses in Europe including ASML and NXP, remains inexplicably unknown.
