Built, scaled, acquired, divested, exited.
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.
~1995 How it all began
“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 — 4Mb of RAM, original Gameboys, no internet, and my dad programming his own low-level printer drivers.
Five-year-old me didn’t understand programming, but was fascinated by the idea of making things happen on a computer; videogames and otherwise.
2000s Tele Atlas, now TomTom
Studied computer science around the dot-com bubble — my first encounter with large economic shocks in the industry, and far from the last. Joined Tele Atlas working on Points of Interest, or what we’d call today “big data” and web scraping.
I straddled the middle ground between technical expert and operations — an excellent place to learn about implementing new technology in a business, beyond just building it.
2008–12 The great financial crisis
Google Maps landed on the iPhone, TomTom’s share price collapsed from over €100 to under €5, and I lived through a company in full crisis mode.
Moved to Inter Access Belgium for my first taste of driving restructuring and divesting, then on to The Sun in London to bring a new engineering culture — working an MBA in corporate finance on the side, to fill the gap my technical education had left. People, process, technology, in that order, has been a mantra ever since.
2014–20 The first startup — Azoomee
- Grew a B2B2C digital media platform from nothing to $10m annual revenue
- Worked with major telco partners — Huawei, O2, Vodafone
- Acquired Da Vinci Media and assets from a distressed competitor
- Learned the back office of funding rounds — share issuance, voting rights, employee options, bridge structures
2021–23 CloudCall — public to private
Stepped in as CTO of a publicly listed comms platform on ~$15m annual revenue. By February 2022, CloudCall was taken private by Xplorer Capital in an all-cash deal valuing the business at £40m.
Technical debt cleanup, organizational restructuring, technology modernization — value creation at the core of driving growth through technology.
2024 CommVision — starting and stopping my own "AI" startup
Now Strategic advisor, hands-on when needed
- Mentored several CEO and CTO in EdTech and a long time Coaching role at the WISE accelerator
- 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 in the 12 months after 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.
- Longrunning advisor & board member roles focused on helping non techical founders making the best technical decisions and think through them in terms of commercial impact. Where’s the ROI? How much would you bet on this range of outcomes? I love to bring options thinking to decision making.
- Restructured the product & engineering org for a Nasdaq-listed media company — now sustainably cash flow positive, share price up 4x in the 12 months after
- Stabilized a Series A business after a CTO unexpectedly quit — structure, process, and fundraise strategy
- Long-running advisor & board roles helping non-technical founders weigh technical decisions in commercial terms
- CTO/CEO mentoring in EdTech, and a coaching role at the WISE accelerator