For far too long now the spotlight in Sandbox Spain has been on Barcelona. Events such as the recent Mobile World Congress have overshadowed the other city which forms this hub, Madrid.  It was before Katia Yakovlyeva (from Spotify) inspired me to host the next Sandbox event in Madrid, that I doubted whether the city would equal its Catalonian rival!

Madrid is well known as a centre for some of the world’s biggest companies, and because of this we were privileged to be joined by Carlos Domingo (CEO of Telefónica R&D) for a dinner. Carlos gave exciting insights into how cultures of intrapreneurship could be fostered in companies the size of Telefónica.

However beyond the conversations at dinner the most exciting part for me was just being able to have such a wonderful group of guests to share stories with: Katia Yakovlyev, Byron Stanfor, Alex Barrera, José Cobian, Maria Fanjul and Carlos Domingo.

When you are enjoying something, you often find that time seems to slip away quickly. Something I realized as we toasted our gin and tonics to an increasingly exciting future for Sandbox in Madrid!

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Josep Amorós is Sandbox Co-Ambassador for Spain. He is the co-founder of Tetuan Valley – a project that aims to inspire and incubate future European entrepreneurs

At the most recent Sandbox dinner in Singapore, it was humbling to discover how much prominence social enterprise takes in the lives of our Sandboxers.

Social enterprise projects being led by both new and potential Sandbox members encompassed solutions at the forefront of thinking in this field:

- John Roberts introduced Heal the World, which has plans to establish a University of West Africa, an online university that uses sources of open educational resources and courseware to bring higher education to that region.

- Sayanee Basu enthusiastically spoke about ChallengeFuture, a global youth Think Tank behind a competition entitled “Fun + Meaning² = 2030”. The competition seeks to find solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges through the creation of new products, services, platforms, organizations, networks, regulations, educational programs – whilst making it fun!

- Sandbox Singapore Ambassador Zhihan Lee described how only 3 out of every 100 college graduates in the Philippines pass the selection exams to work in a call center. Zhihan’s startup, BagoSphere, aims to empower youth through training to succeed in this growing industry.

SGEntreprenuers, Futuregen International, Optiras, McAfee, and Medboxs were also represented at dinner. Hearing everybody’s stories inspired us all to focus our discussion on how social enterprise start-ups can have an even greater impact in Singapore and the region. Everyone is looking forward to the next dinner!

Sandboxer Clayton Miller is a former Fulbright Scholar in Singapore and Co-Founder of Optiras, a startup company focused on building energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality.

After a week in the mountains this Summer, two weeks in Frankfurt in September, the Sandbox crew just arrived in Berlin! Nico, Noor, Lilly and I will spend two weeks at Betahaus in a temporary office.

We love to change location whenever we can: it re-energizes everyone and makes us more creative. More importantly, moving to new cities allows us to deepen our relationship with the local Sandboxers and to strengthen our hubs. Tomorrow, we will be attending TEDxBerlin and in the evening, Rainer – our amazing Berlin Ambassador – is organizing a dinner with the local community.

We are  based in the Kreuzberg borough, a really nice neighborhood full of cafés and bars, and we spent our first hours in the Bundeshauptstadt exploring the area, stopping by for a Currywurst at Curry 36 yesterday evening and for a gigantic brunch at Café Atlantic this morning. More about Berlin soon. And a surprise guest will join us next Saturday, stay tuned

Antoine is a co-founder and the CEO of Sandbox and sees Berlin as a culinary paradise. He also took his sport apparel with him to not loose the good habits.

Sara has been interning with us in Zurich and was our community manager for the last 5 months.

She did an amazing job, always having a look for creating mutually beneficial relationships between Sandboxers and making them feel at ease online or at the events. She welcomed more than 100 new members, followed us to the Palomar5 Summit in Berlin, wrote 21 blog posts, supported the Sandbox Ambassadors, came up with a lot of brilliant ideas on how to improve the community and contributed actively to the office decoration.

Her permanent good mood spread into the whole office and it was a great pleasure for all of us to have her around. She is going back to Cologne tomorrow to finish her studies. We are sorry to let her go but wish her the best of luck for the future!

Antoine is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Sandbox. He is attending the Sandbox dinner in Zurich tonight – 35 guests are announced! Lovely, as Sara would say

We were in London last week, mainly for meeting with potential partners. On Monday evening however Severin invited us for a Sandbox dinner, an informal meeting we organize with selected talents wherever we go. We use the excuse of good food for meeting new talents, exchanging ideas and telling them more about Sandbox.

And so the main topic on the evening was also about … food. Louisa Baxter, a medical doctor and LSE master graduate, Sirikanya Narongtanupon, a young M&A specialist from Thailand and LSE graduate and Fabian from the Sandbox team talked passionately about the best food they ever had. Andrew Fogg (Cambridge graduate and Founder of Kusiri) and David Stone (co-founder of pistach.io) talked with Felix Gruendorfer (founder of a mobile gaming platform and VC consultant) about the future of advertising on the web. Most of the guests were graduates from top universities around the globe and had at some point thought about working for a consultancy. It turned out that the perfect employer would offer the lifestyle (traveling, mobility, diversity), the professional attitude and payrole of a McKinsey etc co. but would focus on doing good with this knowledge, like by working on NGO projects etc. This kind of job would be very appealing to most of them.

Many thanks for this inspiring evening: We cant wait to see some of the discussed ideas being turned into reality and look forward to seeing you all again soon!

On the picture, from left to right : David, Fabian, Sirikanya & Louisa