When Brian and I started Gozynta nine years ago, we made a decision that shaped everything that came after.
We would be a remote company.
At the time, it wasn’t a bold cultural statement. It was a practical one. We wanted to hire great people wherever they lived, not wherever we happened to put an office. We wanted to serve MSPs across time zones. We wanted our customers to be able to reach us early in the morning on the East Coast and still get support late into the afternoon on the West Coast.
That model still defines us today. Our US operations continue to run through Gozynta Inc., our Delaware-based company, with a full remote team serving customers across North America. But we expanded.
About four years ago, Brian and I made a personal decision to move to the Netherlands, to the city of Haarlem. We weren’t trying to move the company. We were looking for a different way of life. We wanted a walkable city. We wanted to bike instead of drive. We wanted a walk to a market for fresh produce instead of navigating traffic and those endless parking lots.
Today, we don’t own a car. We bike across town for meetings. We walk to the grocery store. The pace of life is slower, more human, and much more connected.
As Gozynta grew, we began to hire locally in the Netherlands, also. We partnered with a coding academy in Amsterdam called Codam and brought European developers into the team. Those team members became part of our broader organization, working alongside our U.S. staff and contributing to the same products and services our customers use every day.
That work now operates through our Netherlands-based company, Gozynta BV, which supports our growing European development presence.
And then a question started coming up.
“Is there somewhere we can meet to work together?”
This wasn’t a rejection of remote work. Remote work still works. But what we were hearing was a desire for connection. A place to collaborate in person sometimes. A place to be around other people building technical things.
At the same time, we were getting to know the local tech community. Haarlem has incredible talent, but most events happen in Amsterdam. If you want to meet other developers, founders, or engineers, you get on a train. It’s just a 20-minute trip, but that is considered far here.
We started to see a gap.
What if there were a place in Haarlem where technical people could gather? Not just an office, but a community. A space built around collaboration, learning, and shared resources. A place that supports open source development and encourages independence in a world where more and more technology power is concentrated in fewer hands.
That idea became Launchpad023.
Once we started talking about it, the energy was immediate. Our team was excited. Local developers were excited. Friends in the Haarlem tech community were excited. Tech people from farther away said they would travel to Haarlem to be involved!
There was just one problem.
We needed a building.
