About Jeroen
Jeroen van de Waal is building a network to do good. He works with children, academics, explorers, inventors, schools, universities, multinational companies, and research labs. Using his business, Orca, as an accelerator, Jeroen is focused on bringing like-minded people together to turn the tide on destruction and pollution, and start putting the oceans, planet and nature first.
Entrepreneur
Jeroen believes the best way to do good is not to rely on governments and charities, but to create the means and funding to be able to take action yourself, and to empower others to do the same. Jeroen’s business, Orca, is growing quickly, and is already operating across Southeast Asia. It provides adventure travel and education services to schools, universities, and families, and while it is a profit-making business, its underlying purpose is conservation and doing good.
Conservationist
Jeroen wants to develop a worldwide movement for positive change, which reconnects people with nature, which creates and shares educational material, which actively protects the oceans and wildlife, and which enables children to become explorers and adventurers, with the ultimate goal of stopping destructive and wasteful behaviour.
SEE JEROEN'S OCEAN MANIFESTO
Free Thinker
Jeroen believes that people need to disconnect from mainstream and social media, which blasts them 24/7 with endless channels of noise and information. Instead, he believes people can benefit greatly from reconnecting with the natural world, and by thinking about and developing their own core values. Jeroen wants to wake up tens of thousands of explorers and discoverers, by instilling hope and ambition in young people, by helping them question the status quo, and by helping them learn, love, and live in nature.
SEE JEROEN'S OCEAN MANIFESTO
Sportsman
Jeroen is a keen sportsman. He enjoys most sports, especially squash and golf, but perhaps his greatest passion is for judo. As well as relishing its physical challenge, what Jeroen particularly likes about judo is its philosophy. Judo-ju literally means “the gentle way”. It relies on a few key principles: maximum efficiency with minimum effort, mutual welfare and benefit, and softness controls hardness. In the judo match context, this means resisting a more powerful opponent will usually result in your defeat. On the other hand, adjusting to and evading your opponent’s attack, will cause them to lose balance, their power will be reduced, and you will defeat them. In other words, it is possible for weaker opponents to beat significantly stronger ones. This is an interesting metaphor for so many more aspects of life.
SEE JEROEN'S OCEAN MANIFESTO
Diver
Jeroen has been diving for as long as he can remember, and has spent the last five years working his way through PADI’s advanced diving certifications. After qualifying as a PADI IDC Staff Instructor, Jeroen established Orca Scuba in 2015. In its first years of business, Orca taught divers in Singapore swimming pools and from its diving headquarters on Pulau Rawa, Malaysia. As the company has grown, its operations have expanded across Southeast Asia, and new locations are added on a regular basis.
Adventurer
For Jeroen, Orca has opened up a world of opportunities for adventure – from the rainforests of Malaysia and Borneo, to the spellbinding wildlife in the Komodo National Park. Jeroen is equally at home carrying a backback or a scuba tank, and he and his family enjoy nothing more than spending time together in the great outdoors.
Businessman
Jeroen’s early career was spent in mechanical engineering and business administration. After graduating he found work in fluid power, which took him and his wife, Hilde, all around the world, to the USA, Argentina, Brazil, China and Singapore. Prior to starting Orca, Jeroen spent ten years as a CEO – working in several large multinationals and in private equity. Although he wishes he’d followed his passion earlier, he acknowledges that it was this career, and the travel that came with it, that allowed Jeroen’s passion for diving to develop.