Built, Scaled, Acquired, Divested, Exited, Private, Public? Link to heading

YES, I’ve done all those.
Paid the price, learned the lessons, and now I’m here to help you avoid the mistakes.
When people say “a techie with a business brain”, I’m what they mean. Let me explain.

How it all began Link to heading

“More cows than humans” is the perfect description for the distinctly low-tech village in Belgium I grew up in. But despite that, I grew up in a house filled with technology. At the time that looked like 4Mb of ram, original gameboys, no internet, and my dad programming his own low level printer drivers.
So while 5 year old me didn’t exactly understand programming, I was fascinated by the idea of making things happen on a computer; videogames and otherwise.

Fast forward 15 years and I’m studying computer science right around the turn of the millenium and the dot com bubble. It was my first encounter with large economic shocks in the industry, but far from the last.
With some luck, I got a first proper job at Tele Atlas, now the mapping division of TomTom. I was working on Points of Interest or as we’d call it today: “Big Data” and web scraping. My role specifically was straddling the middle ground between technical expert of the new system, and working with the operations teams to put it in production. An excellent place to learn about implementing new technology in a business beyond just builing it. I spent several incredibly happy years there, not the least because I was surrounded by people who graciously mentored me both in technical and business thinking.

The Great Financial Crisis of 2008 Link to heading

Leaving TomTom was a direct consequence of another economic shock: the release of google maps on the iphone and the collapse of TomTom’s share price that followed. In context: The shares peaked in late 2007 just over €100 and bottomed out just below €5 by mid 2009. Needless to say I lived through a company in full crisis mode, and ultimately decided in 2010 the opportunity was no longer there for me.

I ended up moving to Inter Access Belgium, a small consultancy subsidiary of a Dutch group, where I got my first taste of driving restructuring and divesting. After spending 18 months with a new leadership team to turn a loss making subsidiary into a focused profitable division, we were acquired by Laco, a bigger player in the Belgian data & business intelligence market.

All of this happened against the backdrop of an unfolding financial crisis. While I understood the basics of business and had a practical grasp on micro economics, I was baffled and intrigued by the bigger picture. And so my natural curiosity got the better of me and I started reading anything and everything. And above all, realized that my education had a glaring hole: corporate finance.

My role naturally diminished after the acquisition and opened the door for something new. In 2012 I was headhunted to join The Sun in London to bring a new engineering culture. So I left Belgium behind and moved to the big smoke.
Changing culture and leading transformation for an organization as complex as News Corp is where I really solidified my skills. People, Process, Technology, in that order, has been a mantra ever since. And because I didn’t have enough to do, I also worked my way through an MBA with a focus on corporate finance to scratch that itch and formalize my understanding. It was a chance to flex in all the areas I didn’t get exposure to in my day job.

The first startup Link to heading

As every good MBA graduate, I decided to start my own business. And since I spent the last few years of my career working through change and transformation, becoming an independent consultant was the natural step.

It was a short lived venture on account of my last client: Azoomee. As a consultant, I worked with the founders of the business to build out a technology plan fit for an early stage video-streaming platform. And over the course of a few months that relationship transformed from advisor to day 1 CTO. I joined a business from the early days, on friends & family funding and built out a team and industry leading platform.
The journey was a typical startup rollercoaster filled with highs and lows. But in the 6 years I covered a lot of ground:

Grew a B2B2C digital media platform from nothing to $10m annual revenue
Saw the complexity and opportunity of working with big telco partners such as Huawei, O2, Vodafone
Led a team of top notch engineering talent to build an industry leading platform. And saw what a small well-aligned team can achieve at speed
acquired Da Vinci Media
acquired assets from a distressed competitor
learned the practical and backoffice of funding rounds, share issueance, shareholder agreements, voting rights, employee options, bridge structures, … . Few stones were left unturned.

Eventually I left my full time role as CTO to join the board as a non exec, and helped navigate an exit to CosmoBlue in 2024.

Public & Private Exploration Link to heading

In early 2021, after 6 months off, I stepped in as CTO at CloudCall, a global integrated communications platform for staffing and recruiting. When I joined CloudCall was publicly listed in the UK with annual revenues around $15m.
By February 2022 Cloudcall was taken private by Xplorer Capital in an all cash deal valuing the business at £40m (~$50m).
The transition from public to private ownership was liberating in many ways. Not least with the shift in tone from European investors focused on fundamentals to US shareholders focused on growth. My time at CloudCall was a combination of technical debt cleanup, organizational restructuring and technology modernization. In short value creation that is at the core of driving growth through technology.
I left CloudCall in the summer of 2023.

CommVision, starting and stopping my own “AI” startup Link to heading

By spring 2024 I decided to start my own SaaS business.
The idea: IT Service Providers need a way of truly understanding the relationship with their customers. And the data that matters is hidden in conversations on phonecalls, tickets and digital meetings. So let’s use language models to extract the data that matters, and provide upsell, churn and retention signals.
Ultimately, the business didn’t manage to attract enough capital to take the post-MVP step and gain commercial traction.

As far as battle scars go, I’ve learned a lot about the importance of clarity on ICP, product-market fit and building with AI, and the art of fundraising.

And now? Link to heading

I’m working as a strategic advisor and at times hands-on fixer.

While I can’t name names, I can list impact of my work:

Restructured the product&engineering org for a Nasdaq listed media company to reduce cash burn. They’re now sustainbly cash flow positive and the market has rewarded them with a share price that has gone 4x since I completed my work.
Stepped in for a short term stabilization after a CTO unexpectedly quit a series A business. The focus was on bringing structure and process to the engineering org, as well as advise on broader fundraise strategy.
Mentored several CEO and CTO in EdTech as part of my Coaching role at the WISE accelerator