For those who don’t know, Manic Monday is a simple concept of inviting a number of people for round table discussions with up to four different moderators or speakers, one at each table. Every 25 minutes, the participants move to the next table and take their discussion with them towards the following speaker/moderator.

The moderators yesterday were all very interesting people. First, there was Lorin Parys, co-founder of FlandersDC with a special interest in creative entrepreneurship. This lead our discussion topic almost immediately towards our Flemish education system where entrepreneurship is systematically under-valued.

Our group then moved towards Bart De Waele, co-founder of the webdesign company netlash and an all-round entrepreneur. This moved the topic from the general low sense of entrepreneurship in Flanders towards the differences we find in various cities, with Bart, obviously, promoting Gent here. :-)

After that, our group got a nice presentation from Luc Buntinx about his last 20 years in ICT entrepreneurship. Very inspiring! His latest venture, Story Nations seems pretty interesting.

Finally, we moved on to Giovani Oosters from the great Vous Lé Vous restaurant and found out we kept the best for last. His passionate story about cooking and his quest towards a Michelin star was truly inspiring and was really interesting listening to.

Overall, Manic Monday was a very successful evening, very well spent among inspiring people with great entrepreneurial spirit. What was very nice is that there were so many new faces. I was very happy to meet all of them.