The record 07 entries

Built, scaled, acquired, divested, exited.

1980s & 1990s 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
What started as a consulting engagement turned into day-1 CTO. I joined on friends & family funding and built out a team and an industry-leading platform.
  • 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
Exit to CosmoBlue, 2024
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
The idea: extract the data that matters from sales calls, tickets and meetings using language models, to surface upsell, churn and retention signals. The business didn’t attract enough capital to take the post-MVP step into commercial traction.
ICP clarityProduct-market fitBuilding with AIFundraising
Now Strategic advisor, hands-on when needed
Industry expertise in EdTech, media and telco. I can’t name names, but I can list results:
  • Restructured the product & engineering org for a Nasdaq-listed media company to cut burn. Now sustainably cash-flow positive, with the share price up 4x in the 12 months after.
  • Stabilised a Series A business after the CTO quit without warning: structure, process, and a broader fundraise strategy.
  • Long-running advisor and board roles helping non-technical founders weigh technical decisions in commercial terms: where’s the ROI, and how much would you bet on this range of outcomes?
  • CTO and CEO mentoring in EdTech, and a coaching role at the WISE accelerator.
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