I am currently CTO at Abbove and I started multiple small companies in the past. This enabled me to learn a wide range of executive skills.
Blueshift
Blueshift is a company that sells various consumer products online through online marketplaces. Most of these
products are designed by us and improve on existing solutions. We mainly sell in the USA.
I co-founded the company with another founder and we both tackled all roles: market research, budgetting, strategy,
inventory
forecasting, product management and design, marketing, advertising, negotiation with suppliers, legal, regulations
and customer
support without any ambition to hire full-time employees. We did hire a lot of freelancers for various tasks. I did
this
fulltime for 2 years. The company was quite profitable but deviated a
bit too much from my real passion for IT so I switched to a more passive role for another 5 years. This experience
was quite valuable to learn a bit of everything in the whole chain of a company. It thought me about the importance
of moat in a product, about the hyper competitive international market, about the difficulty of scaling a company
from 1 to 10.
Brainshift
Brainshift was founded to solve problems using computer vision through machine learning. We developped a prototype
of a product that would classify images on small IoT devices. I was responsible for a lot of the technical work. The
project did not take off commercially because of various obstacles and challenges. It mainly learned me that finding
a market fit and first customer is not easy for high-tech products as a budding start-up.
Senior Engineer
For many years as a Senior I took up many supporting task in leadership from mentoring juniors, to giving tech talks
to the rest of the team, to writing documentation, challenging and collaborating with product and design. All the
things I try to instill
in Seniors.
Tech Lead
As a tech lead I took it one step further organising agile ceremonies, setting up the technical vision,
guidelines and backlog, setting up processes to keep the team happy and efffective, providing leadership bandwidth
to adjacent
teams and managers. See also my blog post
about it.
Languages
Dutch(native), English(fluent), Spanish(fluent), French(fluent)
My master thesis was written in English. My engineering studies were in Dutch. I obtained a French and Ecuadorian high school diploma and did one year of "classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles" in France.