John Baekelmans

John Baekelmans speaks from a specific vantage point: a Flemish tech diplomat stationed in New York, watching Trump's second-term administration up close and translating what he sees into practical advice for Flemish companies trying to break into the US market. The thread that runs through his 2025 remarks is that something structural has shifted in Washington, and that Flanders needs to recognize it fast. He describes the $500 billion Stargate AI announcement as no accident of timing, arguing it was "likely demanded by Trump himself and staged for the day after his inauguration" ³, and he reads the optics literally: tech CEOs sitting closer to the president than former presidents did. His summary phrase for the new environment is blunt: "Het new normal in the US is Tech First, the rest later" ²³. He does not frame this as an abstract observation but as an opportunity clock starting to tick for Flemish exporters and investors.

His diagnosis of why Flemish companies lose deals in America is consistent across both podcast appearances, almost word for word, which suggests it is a core conviction rather than a passing talking point. Flemish entrepreneurs, he says, sabotage themselves with modesty. "Je mag niet zeggen we think we have one of the best products, we have the best product" ²³. He extends this into a broader philosophy of market entry: "Be more bold, standout, zorg dat je niet dezelfde bent als iedereen, en make money to do it" ²³. Crucially, he draws a line between confident positioning and dishonesty, insisting the "fake it till you make it" ethos he recommends "heeft niks te maken met dingen te doen die niet kloppen, dat heeft te maken met u sterker te gaan positioneren dan al de rest" ². For him this is a mindset gap, not a values gap, and he treats it as the single biggest inhibitor standing between Flemish companies and American contracts.

Baekelmans applies the same competitive logic to his own diplomatic work, which is one of his more distinctive positions. He runs the FIT office in New York like a company, with KPIs, sales calls, reviews, and rival-beating strategy documents, including what he literally calls a "Kill de Dutch plan om te zorgen... hoe kunnen wij die klant verslaan vanuit een business opportuniteit om die investering naar Vlaanderen te kunnen krijgen" ²³. He justifies this with a rhetorical question that doubles as his operating principle: "Hoe kunnen wij bedrijven kennen of snappen als wij zelf niet als een bedrijf functioneren?" ². In his telling, government economic diplomacy only works if it thinks and competes like the businesses it is trying to attract or defend.

The AIDaption (also referenced as AIdaptation) case anchors his argument that Flanders isn't merely a passive beneficiary of American tech dominance. He treats the company's decision to base its global headquarters at Droneport Sint-Truiden rather than the US as proof that Flanders can win specific fights: top university talent, test infrastructure, and above all a neutral national position, since staying in the US would have pulled the DARPA-derived autonomous technology toward defense applications ²³. He extends the underlying technology into a wider vision, noting that if a company "kunt doen in een racewagen" at 300 km/h, "stel je eens voor wat je allemaal kan met diezelfde technologie toegepast op robotten op slower speed" ³, framing autonomous racecars as a proving ground for broader physical AI. He also sizes the moment for a Flemish audience by putting Stargate's $500 billion in local terms: "Vlaanderen, alle export in Vlaanderen voor een jaar is ongeveer 500 miljard" ³.

He is not uncritical of the American picture. He is skeptical of the political promise that Stargate will create 100,000 jobs, since "datacenters employ few people directly" ²³, and he contrasts this with what he considers the more honest and fully counted FDI job numbers Flanders reports. He also registers unease about the direction of the administration's most visible tech figure, saying "Ik heb het gevoel nu dat Musk meer naar de darker side aan het gaan is dan Trump en dat is scary" ². On the substance of the current AI boom, he pushes back against comparisons to the 2000 dot-com bust, arguing today's boom rests on clearer business models and daily applicability, citing paid tools like Copilot that save "1-2 hours per day" ²³ as evidence that revenue logic, not just hype, underlies the investment.

Where Flanders itself is concerned, Baekelmans argues the region has a "right to play" in tech, rooted in genuine strengths, from imec's semiconductor work to what he calls Flemish-origin cancer technologies: "Heel veel van die nieuwe kanker technologieën komen uit Vlaanderen" ³. But he pairs this confidence with a warning about temperament. He faults Europe's instinct to over-regulate before celebrating what it has built, contrasting the plastic-bottle-cap regulatory reflex with SpaceX's chopstick rocket landing, and urges Europeans to "talk more proudly about innovations even before they're 100% finished" because visibility itself attracts investors ²³. This is consistent with his earlier work on Antwerp's digital twin project, where the underlying instinct was similarly forward-leaning: build the simulation before you build the thing, since, as he put it, the point "is to create or pre-create, to model, to simulate before you actually create" ⁴, and richer real-time data, drawn from hundreds of sensors including ones mounted on delivery vans, lets a city "make cleaner" decisions and better guide traffic before problems fully materialize ⁴.

Across these appearances, the throughline in Baekelmans's thinking is less about specific deals and more about posture: whether it is government diplomacy, a startup pitching in New York, or a city modeling its own traffic before intervening, he consistently argues that boldness, simulation, and confident positioning beat caution and understatement. His concrete takeaways for Flemish businesses are correspondingly simple and repeated almost verbatim across sources: claim you have the best product rather than one of the best, treat US tech-first politics as an opening rather than a threat, and build institutions, whether companies or diplomatic offices, that behave competitively enough to notice and seize that opening before rivals do.