Maastricht student entrepreneur wins 3DS Amsterdam

If you want to try Indonesian food in Maastricht, you must go to one of the two Indonesian restaurants in town. This is problematic because restaurant food is expensive, it is not entirely healthy since it usually contains lots of salt, oil and additives to make it taste better, and even though they try to re-create the cultural ambience of the food, they rarely succeed entirely, which leaves you eating a meal that is detached from the social context where it comes from. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a platform through which people could experience home-cooked, healthy and authentic meals?

That’s what Samuel Tettner is working on. “When I was in rural south India, one of the memories I treasure the most was when I shared the fish I caught with local Tamil fishermen. We want to create a platform through which everyone can enjoy these types of experiences”. Tettner is a Venezuelan graduate student at the department of Technology and Society studies at Maastricht University. He is also part of the pre-incubator program at the Maastricht Centre for Entrepreneurship. With the help and support of the centre, Samuel has been carefully crafting his idea of a system for people to break free from the hold of restaurants. The hard work paid off; Tettner recently attended a startup event for student entrepreneurs called three day startup. Three day startup puts together a selective team of programmers, designers, marketing and legal experts in a room and leaves them for three days. After the third day, the young minds have come up with a business proto-type which is then pitched to a panel of investors.

 

Tettner’s idea, www.dishout.in, was well received at 3DS, receiving the most number of votes in the final round of voting. Tettner is not working alone; he has a multi-cultural team of designers, programmers and others, all equally as passionate about creating valuable experiences through food as he is. The dishout team is currently conceptualizing ways to adapt the plan to facilitate cultural exchanges between travelers and locals in developing countries. In many parts of the world, cooking skills are the only type of skills that people have, and this project can be a way to provide economic livelihood.

Tettner plans to use all the intellectual resources available at The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences to strengthen the project. He believes that such an idea has aspects which can be interesting for philosophers, historians, anthropologists and the like to analyze. He also believes a startup website is a great platform for two groups who do not talk to each other much, the academic and the internet- entrepreneurial, to get meaningful dialogues going on.

 

For more information Tettner can be reached by email at Tettner@gmail.com