Twenty years in business. This is how it started.
I grew up with the internet. Just in time to watch it change from something for hobbyists into something no one can do without.
As a kid I couldn't keep my hands off the computer. I wanted to know how it worked and make something with it myself. I delivered my first websites when I was about twelve, to people who still asked whether they really needed one. I said yes. I wasn't sure. I just felt the world was going that way, and I've never lost that feeling.
I was there when social media arrived and brands suddenly had to listen. Then I watched the smartphone, the webshop and the cloud turn the field upside down. I learned fintech from the inside, with a payments company we built from nothing. Crypto taught me a few expensive lessons and a few good ones.
In 2007 it got serious. I started gracious in The Hague with little more than a laptop and the idea that brands had to go digital and nobody was explaining how. Sixteen years later we worked for Nike, bol, MediaMarkt, ANWB, Hunkemöller, Amac, Oppo and Vogel's. In 2022 I sold the agency to Happy Horizon. I'd been through that once before with eCurring: come up with it, build it, grow it and sell it to Mollie in 2020. Saying goodbye twice to something you made yourself. I learned a lot from that.
After that I moved to the other side of the table. As partner and M&A director at Happy Horizon I bought companies and guided founders through their own exit. For nine years I sat on the supervisory board of Rabobank. There you see how big decisions get made, and how often it's right to say no. By now I've sat in almost every chair at that table. That helps. When someone says something in a meeting, I usually understand why.
And now there's AI. I've seen a lot of waves and this one feels different. Earlier technology took work off our hands. This one takes over thinking, and everything moves faster than most organisations can keep up with. So I invest in founders who are where I once was, and I speak to leadership teams that have to make choices now. I write about the question that keeps me busy: what do we do when intelligence gets cheap, and responsibility doesn't?
How I help organisations
For entrepreneurs and leadership teams, and for those who oversee on behalf of shareholders.
- Becoming exit-readyA company that is worth what it's worth without you. I know what buyers look at, because I looked at it myself.
- Selling your companyFrom the first coffee to the signature. Done twice myself, guided several times.
- Buy-and-buildGrowing by acquiring, and what integration really demands afterwards. The mistakes I made, you don't have to.
- PositioningWhat you stand for, for whom, and whether that still holds in five years.
- Strategic commerceHow to sell to customers bigger than you. Learned at the table with Nike, bol and MediaMarkt.
- GrowthFrom ten to a hundred people without the company falling apart. And what you have to let go of along the way.
- Technology and AIWhat to build, what to buy and what to leave alone. I don't sell software myself, so I have no stake in the answer.
- StrategyThe few choices that really matter, on one page.
- Governance and supervisionAs a board member or adviser alongside the executive team. Nine years at a bank teaches you the difference between sharp oversight and interference.
