Trains are great. Almost door-to-door high speed trans­porta­tion, such as the Thalys, con­nect­ing major cities in the Benelux and France. Within a short 3,5 hours, the Thalys is tak­ing its pas­sen­gers from Oh La La Paris back to the good ol’ Hague. The clear con­science that comes from choos­ing to travel green is of course an extra bonus.

And as most of us surely have expe­ri­enced, trains are great for meet­ing peo­ple. You’re seated next to a stranger for sev­eral hours, and if one has the nerve and energy to pick up con­ver­sa­tion, there is always some­thing to be learned. Some­times just about someone’s des­ti­na­tion or ori­gin, the book they brought along to read and some­times their whole life story … which surely may be inter­est­ing, but surely not always is rel­e­vant for busi­ness. Which of course also is not what one always looks or hopes for.

But yes­ter­day, on the Thalys storm­ing over the Low Coun­tries, the seat­ing arrange­ment was surely a jack­pot from a busi­ness point of view. Not only was the gen­tle­man next to me witty, ener­getic and inter­est­ing: he was also the inter­na­tional sales direc­tor for a major Amer­i­can com­pany deal­ing exclu­sively in dif­fer­ent kinds of safety prod­ucts, and with an annual turnover of over 1bnUS. Sli­i­i­i­ightly big­ger than my Mum­my­Mug Inc, thus. But nev­er­the­less, we found lots to talk about: he gladly shared his expe­ri­ence and insights, and I gladly shared the energy and chal­lenges I meet in my startup ven­ture and we both had fun. The 3,5 hours from Paris to The Hague lit­er­ally flew by as I got my feed of real-life sto­ries about the chal­lenges and oppor­tun­ti­ties in set­ting up inter­na­tional dis­tri­b­u­tion agree­ments, defend­ing trade­marks and man­ag­ing an ever evolv­ing and large prod­uct port­fo­lio on inter­na­tional scale.

So, thank you Thalys for offer­ing me not only a ride from A to B, but a mini-MBA mod­ule and a con­nec­tion that I surely look for­ward to stay­ing in touch with.

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