Stephen

Whip-smart and ambitious, Stephen Garcia is the co-founder of Ngrane, an Amsterdam-based company that helps clients develop and implement digital strategies. He has always had an entrepreneurial drive, and he thinks Dutch high schools should do more to prepare students for entrepreneurial careers. Stephen believes that people are happiest and do their best work when they are interacting, and he envisions Ngrane as a kind of incubator that helps its contract workers build personal connections and professional skills. Stephen was born in Curacao and moved to the Netherlands when he was 19. He is now 34 and lives in Leiden. He’s working toward an MBA degree from Nyenrode Business University.

Stephen helped found Ngrane while he was still an undergraduate at Webster University in Leiden. “We started in 2009 … we had a fraternity for young entrepreneurs [called INFECT Brotherhood of Young Entrepreneurs] … a colleague of ours said that this guy David … is very good at making logos. So we invited him over and we asked if he wanted to help us make a logo, and of course we would pay for it … and he made an amazing logo, and finally he also gave it [to us] for free. Immediately I liked the guy, because he was helping us … we became friends … he asked me once if I knew someone who had an apartment to rent. I said I don’t have a contact for you, but I have a 2 x 2 room. You can stay there until you get something else. He stayed for three years. (laughs) That’s how we started the company.” 

“When we started we were living with four guys. It was a kind of a student house … We started together, but David and I were the main drivers of the company. The other guys were also the founders because they helped a lot. But in the end they focused on something else, and we continued.” Stephen is currently the managing director of Ngrane.

“The way we work [at Ngrane] it’s quite hard to say how many people we have at this moment … we have around 15 people at the office working with us all the time. But we also have a base of around 30 to 35 people that are within our community which are mostly freelancers … who work with us on special tasks. But some of them are also [at the Ngrane office space] most of the time as well. They’re also working on … their own projects sometimes, or with different companies … So we call it a hybrid organization. With fixed [staff] and contractors.”

Tapping the freelance army: “When things are going so fast you cannot be an expert on everything. We see that there is a big freelance army … with top talent. Before you didn’t really get the top talent with a freelancer. The talent that was very good was working on fixed contracts with the big agencies, or for companies like Deloitte and Ernst & Young. But now people from these companies, like Deloitte and Ernst & Young, are working with us on a contract basis. This is how we can also deliver [he same level] of quality as the big agencies while still being a small agency. I believe that the industry will keep developing in that way, in a more informal way where you get more project-related employee relationships versus a fixed employee in your company.”

“So you build a team toward a task or a goal that you have as a project … you may have a marketing project [that] requires someone [who is] a baker. Or you need a bus driver because … the project is oriented toward transportation. [Ngrane focuses on] getting the right people who have the right experience, the right skills, the diversity of the team … You don’t want to limit yourself. You have to be more nimble … Imagine you have a design company. And [a client] wants to design a camera, and you have one designer. What are the chances that that person, that designer, is very good in designing cameras or has experience designing cameras? It’s very limited if you have one person. Because next week you will have to make maybe a lion, and the next week maybe a tower. But if we stop focusing only on what we have in-house and start also opening ourselves to partners and co-create with people outside of the company, you have more chances of getting the right person who is passionate about cameras and has the experience or the skills to do it. So this is why I also believe we are delivering quality and why we are successful in the projects we deliver.”

Ngrane’s use of contractors “started quite organically … because … we weren’t in the positon to pay the [same] full salary as Deloitte or Ernst & Young. So because of that we started to work with contractors a lot. But now everyone wants to work with contractors, even the big companies … nowadays it’s quite ironic … we’re providing specialists to [client] agencies. For example, Ernst & Young. We provide them with the experts because they’re opening themselves up to working with outside contractors, which they didn’t do before.”

Even as a high school student, Stephen “knew I wanted to do something in entrepreneurship … I was always interested in business. But I wasn’t sure” what direction he would take. “I was good in science, so I always had in the back of my head that I wanted to finish my medical studies and then go into entrepreneurship in that field … My father is an engineer who started a company in the medical field … my father worked at Phillips, and he started together with my mother … a medical company called MediPro that specializes in X-ray equipment. They sold X-ray machines and fillings and chemicals” and other products related to radiology.

“So I think that also played a role, that my family was always involved with business … but I didn’t do it consciously. Maybe on a sub-conscious level. Later in my life I realized, hey, a lot of things I learned from my parents are helping me now in entrepreneurship. So I see the link. … It wasn’t a conscious decision. But my idea was always to do something when it comes to entrepreneurship. And I started to organize events. And this was also entrepreneurship, but I didn’t see it as entrepreneurship at that point. I just saw it as doing something fun … later on, in retrospect, with all the things I learned, I saw that was also a way of setting up something from scratch, which is also entrepreneurship.”

Stephen thinks high schools should do more to encourage entrepreneurship. When he was in high school, he did well in math and science courses “so my logical path led to medicine … I wanted to study medicine because I was good at biology and chemistry. But I feel that the choices were also limited.” There were only “two subjects that were representing business … economics and accounting … and for me that wasn’t representative of what I’m doing now at all. Because I’m doing much more than economics and accounting.” He feels the courses he took didn’t take the social aspects of business into account. “That’s my interest, the social side, the psychology, the marketing, the creativity. Very important subjects in entrepreneurship and business which … back in my time in education we didn’t pay much attention to.”

“There are many options for types of career. However, in school the options seem so much more limited. You get on a certain track, for example, the science track, because you are better at, for example, biology. However topics such as behavior, which you learn in biology, are essential in business as well. So having this interest in behavior might lead you to a track that might actually be taking you away from the actual area or job that better fits your interests and skills. I believe that with a better focus on the strengths and interests of the students, the process of choosing the area of study should be dynamic and not by eliminating options early on or taking sort of a package you need to stick with.”

Ngrane’s business: “Technology is developing fast. Actually faster than ever … and companies are realizing that it’s very hard to keep up. We help companies make sure they’re prepared for everything digital that is coming their way. So basically … we are a full-service digital agency that focuses on digital strategy and platform design. So what we do is we help a company develop a strategy for the digital environment. And then our expertise is in designing the tools … that support the digital strategy … So let’s say you have a taxi company that is thinking ‘we need to do something with digital, we need to start selling our taxis online’ … we would be the company to help this company develop ideas and develop a strategy that would hopefully translate into the next Uber. And then we have the capability also to develop a prototype and a product which could be the Uber application.”

“We helped one of the biggest insurance companies in Holland, called Independer, develop their chatbot. This chatbot is, of course, is based on artificial intelligence. And as a customer … you can chat with the chatbot” when choosing an insurance product.

“Nowadays a lot of [technology] products are [viewed by consumers as] commodities, and the key is to distinguish yourself by having a great customer experience … so the key is to know when to make it sound like a person or not sound like a person … the interaction of course should be as fluent as possible like a human, but you also make sure that people know that it’s a chatbot and not a human … it’s one of the most important things that we had to decide on. Do you want it to be almost human [so that the customer] doesn’t even know it’s a robot, or do you want to be clear that this is a robot?”

“We have a lot of customers in the financial industry. A lot of Dutch insurance companies.  But we’re also working on a lot of projects from Dubai. And there we have a lot of automative companies like Mercedes Benz. But we also do in-flight entertainment systems. So the projects we do are quite diverse. But they’re always platforms or software that play an essential role in the direction a company is going in the digital field. So for example, for Fly Dubai we did the in-flight entertainment system. It was very important for them to upgrade their customer experience using technology. So we brought the idea to reality ... this was our main task. How can we bring this idea of theirs to have great entertainment in flight, and what kind of things can you offer to the in-flight entertainment system. Can you [add] games or movies or can you put a camera so people can see outside of the airplane while traveling? So all these ideas we evaluate these ideas possibilities with our engineer who knows about how things really work, with our designers to prototype things and of course people from the company who know what the limitations are.”

“It is a very competitive space … nowadays a 10-year-old boy in his room can make an app … So a lot of people can make the products we make. But we distinguish ourselves not only in making the product, but also in the quality of the products we deliver. And also the technology. We build a network as well that takes time to develop … so it’s about understanding the industry, understanding the problem. So a lot of times companies come to us they want maybe a software or a platform, but maybe they return [after meeting with Ngrane] with a better solution.”

“The market is definitely very competitive and it’s changing rapidly. You could start to see all companies, even our own clients, as your competitor. Because all companies want to be technology companies right now … The clients are developing their technology departments. And that’s why instead of only doing full service consultancy and design, we also have a recruitment company. So we can help our clients get the right people in their company to work on site and on long-term projects. So that’s how we also stay involved with our clients. We are more focused on a holistic approach to see how we can help them instead of only focusing on one part of the company.”

Reimagining the office: “We’re very focused in reimagining the work experience for our people. The way we work is more flexible. We want to become the best workplace in the world. And to become the best workplace in the world you need to think a lot about the work experience that people have … And to think, OK, how can we make them as successful as possible … and being successful for us is also being happy. You see a lot of millennials nowadays [who are] struggling with burnout. One of the reasons is a lot of people feel that they’re doing things that they’re not passionate about, and that they’re not enjoying. We want to change that. The whole way that they organize their career. And focus more on their strengths, and not on their weaknesses.”

“Most [company] platforms are now mostly focused on the client side. But not on the people who are bringing value in the company … and if you’re not distinguishing between an Uber driver that’s working full time and someone that just does this only occasionally, you’re not … catering to these people’s needs. If you want to be the best employer, you need to look at each and every individual’s needs and how can we improve their work experience … how can we make it personal? how can we make the worker central in everything? … we want to have a platform where all our creators are in the platform … and make it in a way that they feel they’re going to work, but also engaging with people in person. Because we believe that the closer you are to each other, the better the relationships are also … better relationships increase the chance of success, but it also gives you a better experience which ultimately makes you more happy doing what you’re doing … so we want to make sure that people have a physical space for the people to come together and work … We are working with different co-working spaces to facilitate this.”

Fostering relationships is the most rewarding aspect of his work: “Especially when we see the relationships between people and to see the fruits of our open system of communication that is focused toward self-development and improvement … When we can make a change in someone’s life because we facilitated something that even they didn’t see as possible, that is something very rewarding.”

“You see a lot of people who are very unhappy doing what they do. When we do [at Ngrane] a workshop where we come in and we’re very creative and we’re very positive and we see what impact it has on our organization … sometimes you see that people are on the table and celebrating …  that is quite rewarding. Because you got people that had everything in them to be happy and to be satisfied, but they didn’t know how. And just by sparking this creativity, people tapped into themselves and they became a lot more confident in what they do. And if we can spark that change, we believe that we’re doing a good job. Because these people will go back into the organization and hopefully they will continue this positive energy … which will open everyone up to change. And live a more fulfilling life because of this.”

Information about Ngrane is available at www.ngrane.com