I'm a third culture kid. Dutch by birth, raised in Ibiza with English as my first language, formed somewhere in the gap between the two.
I started playing an instrument at nine, rhythm guitarist in a high school blues band. Turned professional DJ at sixteen. Resident at Pacha by twenty-four. Then I started tech companies.
A dancefloor gives you feedback in real time and it does not care about your plan. You learn to read a room, hold attention, move energy, and know the exact moment to leave. Every one of those skills followed me into business.
I knew music was powerful, but I wanted to understand why. That question turned into twenty years of studying musicology and the science of what sound does to the human body and brain.
Not from the cheap seats, either. I've worked alongside researchers at the University of Chicago, Berklee College of Music, the University of California, and with professors at Melbourne, Sydney and NYU, on studies into music, emotion and cognition. It all points one way. Music isn't entertainment with a beat on top. It's a physiological event.
That's where the TEDx talk came from, at the first ever TEDx in Ibiza, on how the right music at the right moment can literally save your life. I've presented keynotes, spoken on panels and presented at workshops across Belgium, Spain, Australia and the US, and even lectured MBAs in Berkeley.
In my early thirties I started building the tech. First came Muru Music, my first AI music company, venture-backed. It's where I invented the AI Music Brain™, a system that analyses music the way a brain does rather than the way a database does. Not tempo, key and genre tags. What a piece of music actually does to the person hearing it. Physiological!
Muru would later become PRSNL.ai, said “personal”, built around a single question. How do I feel right now, and what should be playing because of it.
Then in 2019 I founded Music Health and aimed the same science at healthcare. That's where I invented VibeDNA®, the engine running underneath it. Two companies, one obsession, coming at it from opposite ends. One pointed music technology at delight. The other pointed it at brain health. I raised five million in venture across the two companies and won several awards along the way.
I also made every mistake a founder can make. Hired the wrong people. Scaled before the thing actually worked. Kept projects breathing for months after I already knew they needed to stop. The reason I can spot those patterns in someone else's business now is simple. I ran every one of them in mine first, at full volume.
Last year I closed that chapter and opened this one. No investors. No employees. I build my own products and turn my own ideas into revenue. The twist this time is that I'm doing it in public. Curtain up, including the parts that fall over.
Here's the part most people don't clock. I've been building digital products since 2014, and working with state of the art AI for just as long. It was a different animal back then. Different name, different shape, same fundamentals. I understand how these systems actually work under the bonnet, not just how to prompt them.
That's the lens I bring. Most AI advice right now is someone pushing the shiny new tool for the sake of it. I work the other way round. As a business owner I know where the friction actually lives and which problems are worth solving in the first place. So a big part of what I do is help people see what AI genuinely can and can't do for them yet.
Half of my time goes to working with people one on one, getting them unstuck. That's what the FOG® Diagnosticis for. It works out which phase of the business lifecycle you're actually in, then installs the systems to reach the next one. Most companies aren't stuck on the wrong thing. They're running the right thing in the wrong phase.
I also founded Optimize Labs, an agency that helps small businesses build their own AI harness and application layer instead of renting someone else's. LLM agnostic. It learns as it runs. It stays the company's own IP. Most businesses buying AI right now are quietly building someone else's asset.
I've built a few tools you can grab and use yourself too. My Website Sucks, BigMoneyIdeas and The First 100.
I write about all of it every week in The Drop. My weekly newsletter delivered on WhatsApp. I'd love for you to join.
Music taught me to hear patterns. Business taught me to see them where everyone else sees noise. The goal hasn't moved. Help people see what they're capable of. Myself included.