Amsterdam stakes claim as springboard for startups

Amsterdam

FRUSTRATED by the difficulty of finding dates while living in London, Dutchman David Vermeulen started InnerCircle, a matchmaking website focused on highly educated singles. Yet rather than set up in Europe's biggest city, he moved to Amsterdam, home to about 800,000 people and a much smaller pool of potential customers. The city, he said, offered an inexpensive place to try out the idea as well as a launchpad for international expansion if the site took off.

"Amsterdam is the ideal market for testing," Mr Vermeulen said at InnerCircle's office, a shared startup workspace on the placid waters of the Herengracht canal. "The concept was initially set up in such a way that we could easily roll out internationally."