Hendrik Halbe is the co-founder of Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship, apart from being a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Unknown Group. Unknown is an early-stage venture capital and business development firm, supporting founders and industry leaders to successfully bring innovations to the market: a ‘Venture Engine’. Currently, Unkown Group is guiding +50 ventures and has invested in over 20+ of them.

The most renowned part of Unknown Group is Get in the Ring, the most global startup competition in the world. The mission of Get in the Ring is to discover promising founders from all corners of the globe that can solve the challenges of today or tomorrow, and support them to prove their solutions and scale globally. Having conceptualized it in 2021, Hendrik scaled Get in the Ring from a local event to a global platform active in 100+ countries and 200+ cities, supporting thousands of entrepreneurs every year.

Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug at the age of 14, Hendrik’s first venture was selling books and antiquities while being a Dutch cycling champion. After graduation cum laude from Erasmus University Rotterdam with a Masters in Entrepreneurship & Innovation and authoring Handboek Informal Investment; De Kunst van het Investeren (The Handbook for Informal Investment: The Art of Investing), Hendrik laid the foundation for the company that has evolved into Unknown Group.

Hendrik’s accomplishments include at the age of 26, developing Europe’s leading entrepreneurship centre for Erasmus University Rotterdam: Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship. In this period, he was also responsible for co-developing a 33.000 m2 incubator, The Rotterdam Science Tower, leading the Holland Program on Entrepreneurship (HOPE) and securing over €10 million in funding to improve the innovation ecosystem in South Holland. He was also the Director of the Dutch national think tank SMO (Stichting Maatschappij en Onderneming, founded in 1968). Most recently, Hendrik founded his own entrepreneurship university, the Global School for Entrepreneurship, to fulfill his dream of giving the next generation of entrepreneurs the education he wished he had received.