European Young Leaders

Xavier is an engineer in computer science who is passionate about the digital renaissance. In 1999, while still at secondary school, he founded Tribal, a site that gathered student content from around Belgium for publication in a magazine that was distributed to 30,000 students nationwide. Ten years later, he co-founded Storify, a social media curation platform that enables users to create stories or timelines using content from social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Storify is now used by top brands, organisations and publishers around the world, including CNN, the New York Times, the United Nations and the White House. More recently, he co-founded OpenCollective, a company that enables groups to collect and spend money transparently without having to create a new bank account.

Adil co-directed three movies, one TV series and two award-winning short movies. His two first feature movies, ‘Image’ (2010) and ‘Black’ (2015), co-directed with his friend Bilall Fallah, are set in run-down districts of Brussels. ‘Black’, which features non-professional young actors, premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. The plot brings a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ love story to street gangs in modern-day Brussels. Adil became a celebrity by winning ‘The Smartest Person in the World’ quiz on Flemish television. In 2016, the renowned American producer Jerry Bruckheimer entrusted him and Bilall Fallah with the direction of ‘Beverly Hills Cop 4’, the latest in a series of movies starring Eddie Murphy.

Wouter is the founder of Newsmonkey.be, a social media tailor-made news website, partly funded by a successful crowd-funding action. In 2013, he made a documentary and book about the future of the news business: Stop The Presses: the Golden Age of Journalism starts now. The documentary was partly based on his experience as the Editor-in-Chief of De Morgen that he managed for over 2 years. Before that, he worked at De Standaard, as a political journalist, and won several Belfius-press prizes. During that period he acquired his passion for politics and the inner workings of the system, which resulted in a fiction series about Belgian politics that he co-wrote for television and that will air in Belgium. He holds an MA in Political Journalism from the Columbia School of Journalism in New York. He also has a Master in Business from the Vlerick Management School in Ghent and a Masters in Politics at Ghent University and Université de Bretagne Occidentale.