Meet a Sandbox member: Andreas Brenner
Sandbox Ambassador Andreas Brenner is a 23 year old German, living in Switzerland and currently studying in Singapore. Besides his studies he is organizing dinners and events for the growing Sandbox community in Singapore. He is passionate about new technologies, especially in the ICT sector and loves skiing as well as delicious food.
Tell us the story of your latest project / occupation
Which one are you referring to? One thing that makes me being me is that I’m always working on several things that are part of a bigger picture. Let me focus on my activity as Sandbox Ambassador Singapore. As such, together with two friends, I’m driving forward a small conference that’s co-organized with local entities, such as Spring and Swissnex. We are bringing three young entrepreneurs (Sandboxers) to Singapore and put them together with three outstanding young entrepreneurs from the local scene to share their experience with a total of 150 aspiring young entrepreneurs. I hope we can inspire other Sandboxers around the world to create similar meeting spaces to foster the exchange within the global community.
What are you doing and how did you get there?
I’m currently a candidate in the Msc in Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the University of Washington in Seattle. In paralell I’m also trying to get involved with an exciting IT startup company. Getting there for me came natural after I had figured out that the beaten “business graduate” path wasn’t for me and my exchange semester at the University of Hong Kong infected me with the Asia fever.
Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?
One thing that certainly worked well was my membership in the International Student’s Committee (ISC). While the success of our work was certainly not attributable to my own work only, I still look back at this intensive year as some of the best time of my life. It taught me a lot about professionalism, communication and working under stress. A thing that I consider a general failure was my initial approach to understanding culture. Though I always thought of myself to be openminded and considerate, as a “Westerner” it takes some time to realize what it means that 90% of the world’s population don’t live in “the West”. They think, learn, work, love and live in a fundamentally different way and there are significant differences between regions and countries, too. That’s something easily said but not as easily reacted to when working in groups or when living in another country. It takes some time to realize that a lot of things we consider to be normal and we think are also normal for the rest of the world simply are not.
What do you want to achieve in a) the next week, b) the next year, c) the next 10 years?
a.) Rock the upcoming strategy simulation game, host a great Sandbox dinner and fix the details for the upcoming conference
b.) To fix my involvement with the startup company, help launch a new project that looks at development aid from a new perspective, build an exciting Sandbox community in Singapore and visit at least three places that I haven’t been to before
c.) To change the way we think about the internet by successfully launching the business, probably get married and grow a family and travel to many countries and places that I haven’t been to.
What was your most inspiring moment during the last two weeks?
Funny enough, the most inspiring moment for me was when I finally had some time to walk through the beautiful autumn forest in Switzerland and just think. Essentially spending two years on the road hasn’t left much time to process what happened and my current hunger for action to shape my own professional future as well as the amount of daily information intake made this some of the most creative, inspiring and valuable moments I’ve had in a long time.
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