Ten floors up, his fingers are the only thing keeping him on this side of the window. The only reason Robin Achterkamp doesn't jump is because he is too afraid of the fall. His fear of heights saves his life. Today he runs a company that exists to hire people who face barriers to employment. At Amsterdam Business Forum 2026, he was the speaker nobody saw coming.
“Judging someone isn't about the person you're judging, it's about you.”
Robin Achterkamp, social entrepreneur, founder of Lunch Bunch, and a champion for people who face barriers to employment, wasn't on the program. Host Ikenna Azuike brought him on just before the final speaker, in Block 3, about building organizations where people come first. At 18, Robin failed his way out of school. Then he sold mobile phones in the poorest part of the Netherlands to people who couldn't afford them. “If you weren't depressed before that, you sure as hell were after it.”
So, back to that window, and to the man who cannot jump. He collapses onto the floor, and his first thought is: another thing you suck at, loser. Right there he does the one thing he hasn't done in twenty-six years: he asks for help. There turns out to be a name for what is happening in his head: a severe depression and an anxiety disorder. He dreams about fresh coffee and croissants. Then comes a dog and his own lunch place. And then he meets Ruud, a delivery rider who hands him the principle his company runs on today: don't judge, see, help.
“I got annoyed with Ruud when I was stressed. When I wasn't stressed, I just found ways to work with his energy instead of against it.”
Ruud delivers lunches across Rotterdam on an electric bike. He has so much energy that he often switches off the battery and moves the heavy thing through the city on muscle alone. Everywhere he goes, people tell him to calm down. That he is too much. Robin hires him for exactly that energy, and then catches himself: on the days the pressure is on, it grates. On calm days it doesn't. “Same Ruud, different me.”
Robin knows what he looks like up there, squeezed between two headline speakers, telling 3,000 leaders about a colleague who wouldn't shut up. But this is a business lesson, and he can see it landing. All over the room, people are nodding, thinking of their own Ruuds: the colleague, the employee, or the supplier who was just too much of something. Too much energy, too much opinion, too much body odor. “Some of your best hires are sitting in the too much pile right now, waiting for someone to stop judging long enough to actually look.”
Concrete lesson for you: Take the last person you turned down for being too much. Ask whether that was about them, or about the meeting you were late for.
“My own trauma comes from not being seen for who I truly was, from people constantly judging me by their own standards.”
A school mentor tells him, in front of the entire classroom, that he will never become someone. Robin never forgets that sentence, and it follows him for years and years.
So he knows what the opposite does. Ruud is happy at Lunch Bunch because finally someone sees him for who he truly is. With the business running, something was still missing, Robin says. Ruud is the sign that he has found it: he can be the helping hand he missed himself and work on his own trauma while he does it.
Concrete lesson for you: Tell one person on your team what you see in them. Use words they have never heard about themselves.
“We don't hire people to make lunch. We make lunch so we can hire people.”
Not judging is hard, and Robin explains why. In a small tribe, people from other tribes could bring in disease, and trusting the wrong person could get you killed. That instinct never left. It just moved from the tribe to the boardroom.
Which is why Lunch Bunch doesn't run on good intentions but on a business model. It supplies lunches to companies and municipalities, it runs in-house canteens, and it does all of it with people who needed a chance in life. His friend Sven Rickly wrote a book about that idea, The Human Revolution, about companies serving humanity instead of the other way around. Robin reads it and thinks: finally, someone put this into words.
Ten years after Ruud, Lunch Bunch has locations all over Rotterdam, opens in The Hague this year, and hopefully in Amsterdam next year. Ask Robin why it keeps growing, and he doesn't start with the lunch.
Concrete lesson for you: On your next vacancy, start in the pile you normally skip.
Back to the twenty-six-year-old hanging outside his window. That night, three things are stuck in his head, three things he is convinced he will never have: a partner who loves him for who he is, children of his own, and work that means something.
Then the pictures come up on the screen behind him. His partner. His children. The place he built.
Today, he says, he is genuinely, deeply happy.
“I decided to stop judging myself and start loving.”
Robin had to learn to look differently. Your turn.