Builder of products. Lover of design. Follower of imagination.

I was the drawing kid in school. Later, the camera kid. When I first held a camera it felt like I found something I'd been missing without knowing it. I studied at the Photo Academy in Amsterdam, shot professionally on the side, won a prize or two.

But photography gave me more than a skill. It gave me taste — that instinctual sense of when something is working and when it isn't. Where function, composition, beauty, and simplicity come together. Knowing what you're looking at, what it's got, and what it's still missing. You can't learn taste from a tutorial. It accumulates through thousands of hours of looking, composing, and being honest with yourself about the difference between almost-right and actually-right.

That's what I carry into every product I build. I reach for a visual before I reach for a word. A mockup before a spec. A working prototype before a meeting. A single frame communicates what a page of requirements cannot.

In the early 2000s, I built a prototype of a GUI you could talk to. It used a voice markup language that barely anyone remembers today. No one called it a voice agent. There was no market for it. I built it because I could imagine it — and imagining things, then making them real, is the only reason I've ever built anything.

It was never about money. Always about that step from zero to one. The moment something that lived only in your head starts to exist in the world and changes how someone does something.

I was a product manager before that was a job title. I was building multi-agent systems before LangGraph, AutoGen, or Crew existed — because I needed agents running in parallel to get results to users faster, and I wanted to see if it was possible. I'm not saying that to impress anyone. I'm saying it because it explains something about how I work: I don't follow the map. I follow the imagination and figure out the map later.

I've co-founded companies, scaled a product to seven million users, and worked with founders, c-suite, engineers, designers, ops, sales, and marketers across twenty years. I've generally been well-regarded by all of them — and I think I know why.

I've done their work. Not as well as they do it — I want to be clear about that — but well enough to be a credible partner. When you can sit with an engineer and speak their language, or walk into a sales conversation and understand the pressure they're under, something different happens. You stop being the person who asks for things and become the person who helps figure out what's actually possible.

I burned out once. It was serious, and it changed how I work. What I learned is that self-direction isn't a perk — it's what keeps me sane and, frankly, what keeps the work good. I'm most valuable when I have room to think, not just room to execute.

My kryptonite? People who clutch the status quo as if their life depends on it. Everyone else, I usually find a way.

When the early ChatGPT API dropped, I didn't read about it. I started building. That's the only way I know how to understand a new technology — get your hands on the bare metal before the tooling arrives, before the tutorials, before the SDK. Find out what it can and cannot do. See which parts of your imagination it finally makes possible.

For me, one of those parts was a new kind of user interface. Booking a trip by filling out dropdowns and filter panels suddenly felt prehistoric when you could express exactly what you wanted — with all the nuance natural language allows — and have an agent swarm figure it out. I built TravelBot not as a chatbot but as a living travel guide that keeps adapting as you keep talking. Booking.com suddenly seemed very crude.

The AI coding tools that came later felt like handing a thirsty man a glass of water. I'd spent twenty years depending on engineers to build what I could imagine. Now the gap between imagination and working product collapsed. I'll never be the best engineer. But I'm a pretty complete product builder — and that just became a different thing than it used to be.

I don't want to be a one-man band. I'd rather be part of an orchestra. But knowing I can play every instrument changes what I bring to the group.

I was born and grew up in the Netherlands. Most of my career happened in Amsterdam's startup scene — scrappy, international, pragmatic. That environment shaped how I think about building.

In 2017, with three young kids and a long list of places we hadn't been, my wife and I decided to find out what we were actually made of. We set off traveling, kept working online, and eventually landed in Laos for four years — including the COVID years, which were something else entirely.

We moved to California in 2021. Our kids are trilingual. Our family has been on four continents. None of it was planned. All of it was chosen.

I've practiced and taught Chi Kung for twenty years. Not as a wellness habit — as a discipline. It's taught me more about patience, attention, and what it means to actually be present than anything I learned in a meeting room.

I still take photographs. Occasionally they're good.