Road Trip: Cologne, Germany & Italy

Spending a week in Cologne, Germany, for a dental event (IDS 2021) to unveil our new dental training simulator (Virteasy Dental V2) alongside our haptic partners, 3D Systems Corporation.

It was a really interesting week and a great experience to observe and soak up some of the skills of the amazing commercial team that they had. It was really the first time I met people who were great at their jobs, travel as much as I do for work and had all managed to successfully create a life, and family, around it.

The experience both increased my confidence because it validated that the work I was doing in a startup was of high quality and motivated me to see that these people had crafted good lives for themselves. It was also an enrichening experience to hear about the successes and mistakes they had made in creating the work-life balance – like the regret of missing out on the formative years of their children, but also the impact of small touches like surprising children at the school gates to pick them up – and I hope I will learn from them. It’s definitely one of the things I find growing up, is that I have a tendency to want to learn only from my own mistakes but there’s real value in learning lessons from the experience of others.

This event was one of my first true ‘work trips’ in the sense of how people imagine my life to be. Arrive, work, leave, without any slack time to see the city, explore or enjoy the social aspects. The truth is, normally, on each trip I have the opportunity to go out during the night, have some days off to explore and can even stay in the country a while whilst planning the next trip.

One of the few activities we managed to squeeze in was a night eating “proper” German food (1.2kg of meat!) and going to a really posh “Legends Bar” with an amazing view over the city.