Entrepreneurs on Being in Your Element
By Carolina Bluemke | News | September 10, 2024
Cover Illustration: Oxygen – Startups for sustainability event hosted by the University of Amsterdam. Carolina Bluemke / The Amsterdammer
Reporter Carolina Bluemke interviews Giulio Pavesi, one of the student organizers and founders of the sustainability start-up Oxygen.
On April 22, 2024, the student sustainability group “Oxygen” celebrated Earth Day by hosting six guest speakers who gave rousing speeches about their sustainable solutions. This event was supported by various student associations, such as SEC, Mercurius, SEFA, and SIB. Additionally, it was sponsored by the UvA Faculty of Humanities and Reusify. The speakers included entrepreneurs Melissa Wijngaarden (Legal and HR at Project CECE), Sofie Wijlens (Sales at Tex Tracer), Brad Vanstone (Co-founder of Willicroft), Katarine Dabo (CEO at Reusify), Steef Fleur (Creative Director at Billie Wonder) and Merijn Everaarts (Founder and Owner of Dopper). From changing our everyday habits to transforming the global business landscape, all agreed that addressing their daily challenges was the first step.
“Our mission is to be out of business because this means that the problem is solved,” said Merijn Everaarts, whose brand specializes in reusable water bottles. The core objective isn’t to sell — it’s to solve.
The solutions presented by the speakers ranged from fashion to food, but all of them emphasized daily issues. Melissa Wijngaarden noticed the absence of a platform for sustainable brands while shopping for clothes and began brainstorming at UvA’s Science Park campus in 2016. Meanwhile, Steef Fleur noticed the flaws within baby products while changing her baby’s diapers, and Katarina Dabo thought of the waste we leave behind with coffee cups while sipping on her daily brew. Additionally, Brad Vanstone highlighted the green shift in the business landscape due to recent EU policy updates. He advocates introducing more product variety on the dinner table to lower our carbon footprint and make dairy net-positive. Sofie Wijlens mentioned that 90% of investors consider ESG issues (environmental, social, and governance-related standards) before investing, showing a shift in investor mindset.
The Amsterdammer reflected on this event with Giulio Pavesi, a UvA student and organizer at Oxygen, who is also the co-founder of Gen Z Now and founder of GP Creative Services.
What sparked your interest in working on this event?
Together with Elena Cecconi and Dave Siebel, we came up with the Oxygen format because we realized that there was a gap in the event sector: on Earth Days a lot of conventions are being organised, most of which are filled with empty and rhetorical speeches, with pessimistic looks at the future. We wanted to make an impact by offering, instead, a stage to the realities (which exist for real and are many – and we discovered it) that achieve something concrete for the benefit of our future: startups with innovative and concrete ideas, with a focus on sustainability. Hence, the name “Oxygen”. This has been the main motivation behind the concept of this year’s initiative and our commitment to work.
Could you walk us through the process of event planning and coordination of the Oxygen event from your perspective?
Organising an event is always a difficult and stressful activity: a rollercoaster of emotions. Speakers cancelling, then re-confirming, then cancelling again. The eternal quest for funding and the complex financial administration; most of the time these processes are not noticed from the outside, as it is normal. We started with the ideation phase of the format in February and we proceeded with the selection and recruitment of the startups and speakers. Then, the support of partners was sought and we defined the marketing strategy (very important since it was a new occasion, unknown to the public). The search for sponsors was instead an ongoing process in the background of all the phases. The most hectic part is the days right before the event, when a lot of unexpected things happen, and you have to solve them all. With Elena and Dave, we collaborated synergically.
“Our mission is to be out of business because this means that the problem is solved” – Merijn Everaarts, CEO of Dopper, elaborating on the source of sustainable change in organisations
In which way did you reach out to the potential speakers of this event? And what made this event different to other events?
The search started online, by looking at the profiles and stories of different companies related to sustainability. We selected the ones that were more in line with our aims and contacted its representatives. Overall the reactions have been positive, and we managed to bring to the event the speakers that we were more interested in. The presence of Mr Everaarts, founder of Dopper, was unexpected: we are very happy about it.
How have you maintained relationships with attendees and sponsors after the Oxygen event?
With the sponsors we engaged in a dialogue that started in the period before the event, to understand each other’s needs. A couple of weeks after we analysed together the performances and the data we retrieved from the event. Even if people might not imagine it, Oxygen had a lot of costs, mainly due to its marketing, that has been amortized with the help of the companies which supported us. Regarding the attendees, we received feedback, especially on social media, which is very important for us to improve.
With Oxygen we wanted to give a more optimistic look at our future, showcasing concrete efforts that can – and this was one of our biggest aims – inspire students to start their own sustainable projects; basing ourselves on the assumption that profit and sustainability could and should coexists, becoming best friends. The future is indeed, in our view, about keeping the businesses of the people profitable while enacting the green transition. I think this has been our point of uniqueness.
Are there any future projects you are excited about working on? Do you have a specific dream event? (An event you would really like to work on in the future, if you had the chance to)
We hope to develop the Oxygen project further, with Elena and Dave we are already thinking of innovations to evolve the format and bring it out of the more classical “congress style”. It has been a small but important start: we will see where the future gets us. I don’t know if I have a dream event I would like to work on. For sure, I try to make an impact, not just “training” event organisation as a skill per se, but by combining it with meaningful causes. If this will lead me to new working fields, I will be keen to explore new possibilities, in new sectors.
Carolina Bluemke is a university student in Amsterdam. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of The Amsterdammer.
