A little out of breath, with an orange lunch box in his hand, Pascal van Putten (52) comes running. Pascal is the founder and CEO of VPInstruments in Delft. He lives around the corner, someone came to replace something in the kitchen, it all took longer. A quick tour, lunch starts at half past one.
A signed painting hangs above Pascal’s desk; ‘P van Putten 1998’. It looks like a Karel Appel-inspired Barbapapa with eyes. Pascal, then 26, had just set up VPInstruments. He tried to create a sleek logo with Paint on Windows 3, but that didn’t work. “If you look very closely you can see a v and a p,” says Pascal. We look very closely. “Then I just started painting, I liked modern art but I couldn’t really do it at all.” VPInstruments now supplies measuring instruments all over the world to customers such as Ikea, Siemens and Toyota. Pascal’s painting is still the logo.
In a meeting room there is a cupboard with square compartments. “This is our museum,” says Pascal. In each box there is a blue meter with the logo on it. VPInstruments makes sensors that can measure energy flows in factories on a large scale. Pascal takes a wooden plank with a square stretched metal wire on it from the back of a very messy compartment. “This is the concept of the first sensor that my father invented in 1974.” He was one of the first worldwide at the time. Marketing manager Joyce van Ruijven (44) enters. According to Joyce, this prototype should actually be under a glass bell jar. Pascal pushes it back into the cupboard.
A brother is now a professor in Seoul, studying black holes and gravitational waves. He’s ten times smarter than me
50 kilometers of cross-country skiing
“We are a bit of a family of technicians,” says Pascal as he pries open his lunch box in the canteen. Today four sandwiches, twice cheese, twice filet americain. He takes a sip of buttermilk from a drinking cup with a bear on it. His father, he and two brothers studied in Delft. “A brother is now a professor in Seoul, he studies black holes and gravitational waves. He is a factor of ten smarter than me.” Pascal’s two eldest daughters study physics and engineering, also in Delft.
Sjim Jansen (left) and Albert Assink.
Photo Simon Lenskens
Everyone brings their own lunch, the gray table only has electric tea lights and a salt shaker. The other five colleagues who are in the office today trickle in. Most people eat sandwiches and toppings from the supermarket. Cumin cheese, egg salad and roast beef. It’s about the weather, the weekend and the 50 kilometers of cross-country skiing at the Olympic Games.
Managing director Cynthia Kuiper (43) tips a bowl of pasta onto a plate and puts it in the microwave. Joyce also brought a hot lunch from home. She heated up her lunch in a plastic container. “You shouldn’t do that, if you put that plastic in the microwave, you get microplastics,” says Cynthia while Joyce is just taking a bite. “Oh, you already have that,” says Pascal.
