The Grandmother Who Set the EU's Digital Agenda: Neelie Kroes is Still Crusading

When she left her post last year following ten years as a European Commissioner – five of them as Vice President in charge of the EU’s digital agenda - Neelie Kroes announced she “would not be tending roses in my retirement.” Indeed, one could argue that “Nickel Neelie” or the “Internet Tsar” – as she has been called – has not at all retired at the age of 73, but is instead tending another kind of garden – cultivating fertile ground for growing companies at Start-Up Delta headquartered in Amsterdam. It’s designed to connect all the major innovation hubs in the Netherlands in order to attract new start-up tech firms to what the Dutch government calls the “West Coast of Europe.” It’s a role she was tapped to play by the Prime Minister personally.