How I work
Operating system
Personality
People work better together when they better understand themselves and each other.
Personality tests offer a valuable foundation.
Values
Beliefs whose importance has become increasingly clear to me over the course of my life.
When not followed, they lead to loss.
⏳ Time is our most precious resource
🗻 Think big — even bigger
🧠 Strive for learning as a habit
💬 Be precise in your speech
🎨 Create beauty, not just function
🛶 All paths are passable
👤 Look to the individual
🌱 New experiences = growth
👓 Recognize worldviews
Principles
Personal guidelines, inspired by Ray Dalio’s Principles,
shaped into clear best-practice rules of thumb for recurring situations.
General
🎗️ Strive for learning as a habit — or even identity
🎗️ Keep helping others, but you cannot want it for them
🎗️ Beware of harmful advice from ‘experts’
🎗️ Don’t let what you currently have stand in the way of what it could become
Product
🎗️ Set the bar ridiculously high and exceed expectations, time and time again
🎗️ Ideas in = ideas out
🎗️ Easy reading is damn hard writing
🎗️ Good is the enemy of great
Productivity
🎗️ Get to done
🎗️ Do things with intention — be deliberate
🎗️ High-quality output = time × intensity
🎗️ Beware of hurtful perfectionism
Strategy
🎗️ Thinking and doing
🎗️ Create self-reinforcing loops
🎗️ If you don’t think on where you want to go, you get caught up in choices that can undermine long-term symphony
🎗️ Let projects grow cumulatively
Company Culture
🎗️ Remember your Maslow and Frankl: happiness flows from meaning
🎗️ Extreme ownership
🎗️ Momentum and fire exist
🎗️ Have a strong conviction, loosely held
Hiring
🎗️ A growth mindset beats any diploma
🎗️ When in doubt: don’t hire
🎗️ Hire in order of: Values → Abilities → Skills → Other
🎗️ Look for people who dare to look at themselves objectively
Startups
🎗️ The struggle is guaranteed, success is not
🎗️ You are either on the bus or off the bus
🎗️ Consumer software is the new Hollywood — only the absolute best survive
🎗️ Look beyond regional borders
Marketing
🎗️ Over-promise and over-deliver
🎗️ It’s about the position in the mind
🎗️ Provide value as marketing
🎗️ Don’t promote by destroying — respect what others value
Design
🎗️ Design interfaces as coming home, not as puzzles
🎗️ Like belongings in a cleaned-up house, UI elements belong in their usual place
🎗️ Iterate to less
🎗️ Create symphony
Abilities
Inherent qualities and traits that shape
how someone naturally thinks, feels, and acts.
Visionary
Driven by vision — seeing what could be, shifting between future and now
Strategic
Entrepreneurship as a game of chess, flexible, anticipating, thoughtful and planned
Creative & Structured
Eye for design and aesthetics, sight on structure and content, symphony between systems
Critical Thinking
Objective, evaluative, layered reasoning and working toward core and essence
Growth Mindset
Hunger for knowledge, fast learner and self-reliant in complexity
Leadership
High standards, creating context, as a team, with energy and fun
Holistic & Detailed
Zooming out and zooming in, macro and micro, the global picture and the fine details
Problem-Solving
Approach as puzzles with flexibility, creativity and multiple perspectives
Skills
The current toolkit of skills, shown in percentages
based on experience, ability, and options.
Miscellaneous
From clouds to letters…
The leftover bits and signature quirks.
🌍 Intercultural
Over the years I’ve closely collaborated with people from diverse industries, countries, cultures, ages, and educational backgrounds.
🦉 Bilingual
Fluent in Dutch and English, with a Duolingo streak of 500+ in Japanese. 🙃
✏️ Blogger
Every now and then, I gather some thoughts or personal research into an (admittedly oversized) blog.
🎥 Aftermovies
Travel tours often end in a large video editing project with 1,500+ shots.
🚁 Drone
Certified drone pilot with experience in aerial filming. Own a DJI Mavic 2 Pro.
🚗 Driver’s Licenses
In possession of an electric car with driver’s license B, and certified for forklift and telehandler.