This week, I sat down with Max Schalow, co-founder of AMS Tech Week, to talk about why tech events in Amsterdam often feel off and corporate – and what he’s doing to change it.
What makes a good tech event?
Go to a startup event in Amsterdam and you’ll know within two minutes whether it’s going to be worth your time. Often it’s not. 😬
You may have dropped €1K to attend. There’s a lanyard. A big open room that’s slightly too large for the crowd. A main stage with a panel of people you half-recognise, sharing high-level observations you’ve heard before. There are sponsors. Booths. People wearing suits. 😳
They feel off …corporate? And like the wrong people are in the room: consultants, corporates, government, wantrepreneurs.
I used to go to a lot of these events. And I kept walking away with the same feeling: where are all the builders at?
Where are the founders who are dreaming big, but also heads-down, hustling, figuring stuff out as they go? Not there to perform, or look flashy in a suit, but to connect with, and learn from, like-minded builders?
Where’s the energy you feel when you walk into a room in San Francisco, New York, or Berlin? I’ve been to tech events in those cities too. They feel different. Everyone is working on something cool, everyone is slightly obsessed, and the scrappiest person in the room is often the most interesting one.
There’s not a suit in sight. Plus, everyone is very willing to share, help each other, collaborate. And make intros to potential customers, hires and investors.
That energy is hard to describe until you’ve felt it.
The best tech event I ever attended
Was when my startup was going through Techstars in NYC. One of the founders of DigitalOcean came in for a fireside chat – and before he started he said:
“I’m going to tell you the real story of how we built this company. Please don’t share any of this outside this room.”
What followed was the most honest account of failure, chaos, and near-disaster I’ve ever heard (told as he downed numerous beers on stage).
It was awesome! Honest, unhinged, inspiring – and unlike anything I’ve seen at an Amsterdam tech event before or since.
That scrappy, unfiltered energy – sharing the real stuff – is what I think is still missing from most tech events in Amsterdam.
In Silicon Valley, builders are the heroes. At Amsterdam tech events, they often seem to be an afterthought. Events feel more designed for corporates and consultants.
Which is ironic, because if I think of the founders I admire most in the Dutch tech scene, they’ve got that scrappy builder mentality too. I’m thinking founders like Hans Scheffer, Thomas Vles, Nicola Ebmeyer, Job van der Voort and Nalden.
This isn’t a criticism of Amsterdam’s tech scene – it’s world-class and growing fast. It’s just a criticism of how we gather.
I’ve felt this way for a while. And to be honest, I just stopped going to these events.
AMS Tech Week to the rescue?
Which is why I was happy when I came across AMS Tech Week. And jumped on a call with Max Schalow, one of the initiators.
Max is direct about what goes wrong with most tech events and conferences in Amsterdam:
“They’re in it for the money. Which makes sense, it’s also a business. But at some point, sponsors want to get in, and they have a different agenda. Because they’re paying, they kind of dictate how it works.”
The result is what you’ve already seen. A format designed around sponsors, not founders. A room that’s more designed for performance, not connection.
AMS Tech Week was built as the opposite. Max and his SELANA co-founder Chingiskhan were in the US and stumbled across Miami Tech Week. It was mostly side events, hosted by all sorts of different people, at different locations across the city, with people constantly moving around. There were house parties. There was real energy.
“That made it super fun and interesting,” Max told me. “And we thought we could do the same thing here in Amsterdam.”
So they did. Last year AMS Tech Week ran 17 events across the city. At startup offices, VC HQs, a pub, a boat party. No main stage. No big sponsors dictating the vibe. Just the community hosting its own events, in spaces that feel like the community. 1,500 people (founders and investors) showed up.
The format is deliberately decentralised.
“If you bring people into somebody’s office and it’s a little bit more chill,” Max said, “that already creates a completely different atmosphere.”
What is AMS Tech Week?
“We wanted something different.” Max told me.
AMS Tech Week is a decentralised tech conference built around a simple belief: startups are their people, and those people need better ways to find each other.
Over four days, 16–19 June 2026, dozens of community-organised events will bring together founders, builders and investors, from the Netherlands.
It’s only side events, all at different locations, with people moving around the city to join. Each event is hosted by an individual organisation, which means the energy is theirs, not a committee’s.
There are no rules on the format of events: they can be breakfasts, dinners, hackathons, workshops, bootcamps, rooftop drinks – or something Amsterdam tech has never seen before.
This year there are 48 events across five categories: Masterclasses & Talks (17), Work & Hack (10), Raise & Pitch (3), Connect & Party (16), and Product Lunch (1).
The website puts it well: connections don’t happen in loud conference halls – they happen at dinners, parties, hackathons, and intimate gatherings. AMS Tech Week is trying to create that at scale.
Who it’s for
Max is clear about the audience. “We’re completely focused on founders and investors,” he told me.
“It won’t be about making sales or finding new projects. More like – how can you further your business? How can you work together? How can you get some advice?”
Officially, the doors are open to anyone who’s part of building and backing the next generation of technology companies: founders, investors, operators, engineers, builders, any age, any stage. But the spirit is clear: come to build, not to sell.
“We want people who are actually working on and building something,” Max said. “That’s the difference.”
Where it happens
Events are spread across Amsterdam.
Not in one big venue, but in intimate, deliberate formats designed for real connection. As they say on the website: Your next customer, co-founder, hire, investor, deal, or friend is probably in one of these rooms.
“We’ll try to get a bit crazier with the locations this year too,” Max said.
The point is that the space shapes the conversation. Put people in someone’s office with music on and the right-sized room, and people stop performing and start connecting.
The dream outcome
I asked Max what his ideal outcome AMS Tech Week would be. This is what he told me:
“Just a lot of people connecting with the right people – people that can help them further their business.”
He mentioned one moment from last year that stuck with him: one event was 10-minute sessions with investors, just to get their honest take on what founders were building.
“In the end, that simple 10-minute format led to quite a few actual investments.”
👀 Watch the AMS Tech Week promo video for a sense of the vibe, where Max gets thrown into a canal 😄:
What’s on – and 10 events I’d go to
The schedule just dropped. Here are a few highlights that I think are worth checking out.
Note: all of these require you to request to join, and the hosts decide based on fit, so apply early:
If you want to know what makes a fundraising story land or fall apart, this is the event to attend.
It’s a private breakfast limited to 20 people with croissants, Chatham House rules, and no recordings. There’ll be panel on storytelling and fundraising with communication experts, a financier, and VCs (Northzone and Motive Partners).
Anonymous questions from founders, Uno reverse cards, and a hot seat format designed to keep panelists honest. Co-hosted by DB Advisory and OSÉ.
Homemade pizza, drinks, and a relaxed evening at Promptwatch’s space in Amsterdam.
Hosted by Arches Capital and Promptwatch – just good food and the kind of low-pressure conversations that actually lead somewhere. If the breakfast is where you pitch, this is where you actually connect.
An early morning bootcamp workout for founders and operators: burpees before slide decks. Brought to you by No Such Ventures and Builders Studio.
Showers on-site. Coffee and breakfast after. The kind of thing that sounds slightly painful and turns out to be the best conversation you have all week.
A full co-working day dedicated to founders and builders at Max and Chingiskhan’s SELANA HQ. Free coffee, cold beers, 30 spots.
No programme, no agenda, just a room of people building things and occasionally talking to each other about it. Steve Jobs in Jedi spirit form is apparently also attending.
A one-hour workshop for early-stage founders working on PMF and go-to-market, run by Jeroen Coelen, aka “Dr Market Fit”, who has mentored over 350 startups across 25+ European accelerators.
You’ll sanity-check your product-market fit, identify gaps, lay out your GTM strategy, and get live feedback on your beachhead market. Tight format, practical frameworks, real input. If you’re pre-PMF and want an honest outside perspective, this is worth an hour of your afternoon.
Drinks on the Amsterdam canals with Y Combinator founders. A short lightning panel on getting into YC, what broke afterwards, and where they’re headed. At The Hacker Building – one of the best venues in the city for this kind of thing.
Already full, which tells you something. The European Builders community opens up Mollie’s space for an evening of working on ideas, demos, pizza, and beer. Bring a prototype, a side project, or just curiosity. The format is low-pressure by design. You can still join the waitlist.
A founder session, run by the founders of Thred, on what happens after the demo: getting users, building sustainable operations, pricing AI products, finding distribution. Lightning talks and founder discussions with builders working on AI-native companies.
Borrel outside, karaoke in the meeting room, dancing in the basement. No badges, no panels, no pitches. 70 spots. “Just nice people in better moods.” Run by GoDutch. This is the one you go to when you’ve had enough of talking about what you’re building and want to celebrate it.
Most hackathons are about building fast. This one is about building something that actually matters too. Over 48 hours, teams of five will work on a single challenge: designing AI tools that help Yasmin, a 38-year-old woman with severe cerebral palsy, communicate freely and live more autonomously.
She currently operates a speech computer using only eye movement. The challenge: go further. Voice synthesis, predictive AI, eye-tracking, dedicated sensors – whatever it takes to give her a real voice. Teams work alongside technical experts and coaches from challenge to working concept.
Hosted by my old Techleap colleagues Eva and Davinia.
Amsterdam has the talent and increasingly the ambition to be one of Europe’s great startup cities.
What it’s still building is the culture – the sense that building something from scratch is the most interesting thing you can do, that a founder who’s figuring it out is more worth listening to than a corporate speaker who already has.
Events like AMS Tech Week won’t fix this on their own. But they’re a good signal. A group of people saying: this is what we think the Amsterdam tech community should feel like.
If you’re a founder or investor – just go! (And leave your lanyards at home)
