Daniël Koster (12 november 1992) is an visual artist, software developer, storyteller and life coach. He is widely recognized as a pioneer in Virtual Reality storytelling. As a founder of FreshSaga, he built an interactive virtual world that helps people with achieving personal goals in real-life.
Daniël was born in a moderately Protestant Christian family, as a son of Hilbert Koster and Elena Scholten.
Both his parents were born into a family of sailors. Hilbert was 12 years old when his father passed away and together with his mom he took over the responsibility of driving their ship. They mostly drove inlands. Elena on the other hand sailed across open waters, along the coasts of the Netherlands, Belgium, France and England.
Daniël has two older brothers, Michel (1982) and Vincent (1987).
Born: 12 november 1992
Place of birth: Zwolle, The Netherlands
Place of Residence: Kyoto, Japan
Annual income: €5,000,000
Pets: Kitsune (cat), Kazama (Shiba Inu)
For approximately the first six years of his, Daniël was raised on his parents' ship called Rival. Daniël was a calm child who was able to entertain himself with Lego, Knexx or drawing. Before he was able to read, he was solving word finder puzzles. He became instantly fascinated by computers when his parents bought their first Compaq computer in Rotterdam. Through trial-and-error, he started to understand the operating system and learning English along the way.
Due to his parents' occupation, he was only able to visit elementary school every now and then. But since education is mandatory from an age of 6, he had to go to boarding school. He enrolled in primary school one year early and was homeschooled for the first semester. It turned out that he had made more progress in that semester than all of his classmates.
Boarding school was hard at first. Having to say goodbye to his parents every Sunday was tough, but most of the homesickness disappeared after a year. He was at boarding school until his 17th, only seeing his parents during weekends and holidays.
After graduating from Atheneum, he chose to study Small Business and Entrepreneurship at Windesheim. This was higher education, but not university, and Daniël felt unchallenged by the courses and tests. He left after 5 months and enrolled at the University of Groningen to study Business Administration. During his bachelor's, he studied one semester abroad at the University of Turku, Finland. He truely enjoyed the living environment, with about 90 international students. This inspired him to become a guide for ESN in his hometown Groningen. After obtaining his Bachelor's degree, he picked two Master's in Marketing (Marketing Management and Marketing Intelligence) and wrote his thesis about the predictive value of several performance indicators in an Dutch insurance company.
Desire to work independently, not bound by office locations and work his hours.