Petr Andrýsek

JA is an epic experience. It is a must try. JA helped me to find my way while still in school, understand what I am capable of. JA showed me the real enterprising world.

Today I am running a social media agency which employs 15 people full time. 6 years after my Company Programme experience, I volunteer for JA and I recruit my team mainly from JA alumni.

Ida Backlund

In high school I ran a mini company in Umeå, up north in Sweden. Together with my classmates, we had a travel company, arranging ski trips. That year with the mini company was awakening for me. I realised that I could accomplish things on my own.

This is what gave me the courage to start my own company at age of 23. At first I had the stock in my living room, packing the orders on the kitchen table. Today, six years later, we export to over 60 countries, we employ 50 people in Umeå, Sweden and we will this year reach a turnover well over EUR 11 000 000.

Sebastien Deletaille

The JA experience is a concentrate of entrepreneurial candy: once you start, you can’t stop. Whether during my young enterprise or during the entrepreneurial club, I got the opportunity to test myself in a risk-free environment. I learnt how much easier it is to sell when you have a great product, how talent will attract talent and how you only actually become a leader if you manage to inspire your team. Without any doubt, JA was the most defining programme I have had the chance to participate in.

Sébastien is the co-founder and CEO at Real Impact Analytics. He drives the company’s vision, strategy and growth as it transforms telecom data into action. Sébastien’s leadership is taking a great team of 80+ exceptional achievers to 30+ countries.

Karoli Hindriks

Karoli is the Founder and CEO of Jobbatical.com. Jobbatical is where techies and creatives meet employers across the globe who want to borrow their skills. She has previously founded three and managed five companies in television and marketing field. She was nominated for JA Young Entrepreneur Award in 2008.

Having founded a student company with JA at the age of 16, Karoli became the youngest inventor of Estonia after registering a patent for soft pedestrian reflector. Thousands of her products have been and are still sold in Northern Europe. In total she has two registered patents, three registered design solutions and two international trademarks in her name.

Kim Kristian Humborstad

The JA programme added value to my studies in a way that it gave me a chance to see the theory in university in a more practical light. This also gave me the necessary understanding of the importance of interdisciplinary innovation processes. The JA Start Up Programme gave me a nice insight into the entrepreneurial world and the project that I started with is currently my company, Zwipe.

Zwipe developed the slimmest, fastest and most energy efficient fingerprint algorithm in the world. We are able to collect all the energy required to perform a verification of fingerprints from standard infrastructure on everything from credit cards to smart phones without power. In October 2014 Zwipe and MasterCard launched the world's first contactless payment with built fingerprint sensor.

Boris Kolev

"JA gave me the amazing opportunity to learn by making great mistakes when I was still a student and had nothing to loose in business. Now I can truly say that most of my success and motivation to go forward is coming from what I experienced and learned back then in school. Thank you JA!"

Boris founded his first company at the age of 18. Today he manages a group of companies and NGOs with more than 25 people staff. His most recent enterprise is a mobile solutions agency, DigiMark. He was awarded from BusinessWeek with 2nd place for "Best Young Entrepreneur of Europe" in 2008.

David Mata

“If I have to think about the greatest thing that I learnt in the JA programme, it has to be the confidence in my own intuition and hard work. Before the programme, I had great doubts about our capability to build a stable company and generate profit. Now, I am aware of the difficulty of the challenge, but feel confident about our capacity to achieve success.”

David is a young entrepreneur with background in architecture and design. He develops the ERGON DESK, an ergonomic smart desk designed for collaborative office work, a product that matches technology and design and is oriented towards the improvement of health and productivity conditions in office environments. The start-up has been awarded with “AmCham EU Youth Entrepeneurship Award 2014” and “Hyundai Brilliant Young Entrepreneurs”. They also joined the Innovator Under 35 (Spain) MIT 2014 Program.

Karl Paadam

“The student company programme was one of the most valuable lessons I learned from school. I have always found entrepreneurship appealing. The JA programme gave me valuable skills and experience on how to start and run my own company. Plus it was one of the most fun things I did in school. JA has of course gave me valuable practical skills about starting and running my own company but even more important is that it encouraged me not to play it safe and settle with a job but challenge myself and become an entrepreneur.”

Karl founded PwC Legal Estonia in 2012. The company offers legal services focusing on business law and consulting and employs staff of 10 people.

Philip Perera

“The JA Start-Up Programme was really amazing. It guided our journey to become entrepreneurial. It made it clear that you had to work for yourself and it helped me to make decisions about my future. My team was recognized as the best JA Start-Up company in the UK. We also took home Hyundai Brilliant Young Entrepreneurs award which was very valuable. It was the biggest and best achievement we had. Suddenly we had the money and mentoring support to actually do what we wanted to.”

Following the success with JA programmes, Philip appeared on Dragons’ Den where together with his business partner Omar they impressed the venture capitalists on the jury enough for all three business stars to put bids on the table.

Claudia Suhov

“As a female entrepreneur, I believe that support and information are one of the most important gifts someone can receive when they start on the business journey. JA offered both, putting me on an amazing and international path where I learned life-long lessons and to fully live my dreams.”

Four years ago Claudia started her first company which provided educational courses, camps and events for children aged 5 to 13. She is currently the founder and creative director of Kidster, a company that offers educational programs for children, with activities in Bucharest and Pitesti.

She also founded her second start up, tortulet.ro, an online cake shop. In March 2014 Claudia was included in the Top Forbes Romania “30 under 30".

Christina Vaeting Nergaard

In 2010, I was picked to be a part of a start-up in school. The idea was to help Norwegian youth under the age of majority to get their first work experience. We build a website, www.jobbunder18.no, where employers could post advertisements. The project did very good our first and second year, and won 11 different prices in the regional and national competitions for start-ups. Today we have 15 full time employees and additional 15 summer interns.

The JA programme was probably the most important and also the most exciting part of my high school education. I got to work with challenges and solutions within different parts of society, where other topics as physics and mathematics came in handy. The programme taught me how to build a successful business and to always believe in my own talents.

Thomas van Durme

“Participating in a JA programme was a great opportunity, it opened my mind. Every teenager should be part of it. It gave me a lot of entrepreneurial insights that I wouldn’t have had in the regular university programmes. The most important thing that JA thought me is that if I have a good idea, I should go for it. And I should build a strong team around it.”

The story of ThinkNexT starts in 2005 when co-founders Thomas Van Durme and Jelle Van Gompel met at university and began experimenting with all kinds of software technology. They developed the online multi-player game Cities of Faith which won the Best Online Application award in ING’s Start Academy competition (powered by JA Belgium, Vlajo).