I've been in digital publishing for 20 years, and AI is the biggest shift I've seen since Google changed how ads work. I'm building with it, writing about it, and figuring out what comes next.
Twenty years of building and scaling digital businesses globally. The throughline across all three phases: operational discipline, applied to whatever the work demanded.
I grew up in Belgium, studied in Brussels, and spent my twenties trying to figure out what I wanted to build. The answer came in 2006 when Google offered me a role in Dublin. The company was 12,000 people. No one in my family understood what the job was. I took it anyway.
Dublin became Singapore. Singapore became the launchpad for a decade-long career that took me across four continents. Belgium, Ireland, Singapore, China, the United States, and eventually Dubai, where I've lived since 2017.
The geographic arc matters because it shaped how I think about building businesses. Every market is different. What works in Europe fails in Asia. What scales in the US won't land in the Middle East. You learn that by doing it, not by reading about it.
I joined Google when the company still felt like a startup that happened to be enormous. Free food, massage rooms, the works. Over ten years I moved from Dublin to Singapore and took on increasingly larger responsibilities, eventually leading a 25-person global team managing a $1B+ advertising operations business across four continents.
The recognitions were generous. A Platinum Award for Strategic Impact, a BeGoogle Award, five Gold Awards, and 47 peer awards. I'm proud of those, but what I value most from the Google years is the operating discipline. The kind you only internalise by running a P&L at that scale for that long. It shaped how I've built ever since.
I also completed an executive MBA through Duke's Fuqua School of Business during this period. The programme gave me the strategic frameworks. Google gave me the operational muscle. The combination of both is what I took into entrepreneurship.
By 2016, I'd stopped learning. The comfort was real, but so was the restlessness. I spent months preparing for the transition. I had a baby on the way, a comfortable salary, and no guarantee that my business would work. But staying would have been harder in the long run.
In 2017, my wife and I co-founded mOOnshot digital . We bootstrapped a portfolio of online publications from zero to $80M+ in cumulative sales, reaching 100M+ users, with 90%+ profit margins. All without raising a dollar.
That was a deliberate decision from the get-go. When you don't have someone else's money to burn, you get very good at making every decision count. We were profitable from day one across all ventures. One property sold to a private investment group at a 3x valuation.
The agency side of mOOnshot digital served brands from prestigious groups such as LVMH, Richemont, Kering, Stellantis, L'Oréal, Ralph Lauren, and EMAAR. Working with premium brands taught us about quality standards, attention to detail, and the value of restraint in communication.
Before COVID, we made a bet that defined the company. We hired 15 writers with only 2-3 months of runway. Reviewed 800+ resumes in a week, interviewed and onboarded 30 people, confirmed 15 hires. Turned profitable in 6 weeks. Revenue 10x'd in 6 months, 20x in a year. 30+ articles per month at 95% profit margins.
Being profitable from the start gave us incredible flexibility and peace of mind. We could focus on what drives results instead of chasing investors and building pitch decks. Total control of our time. Very few meetings, by design.
When readers started turning to AI chatbots for the information they used to find on our sites, revenue declined and we had to act. We radically streamlined operations to a small team of operators managing a pipeline of AI agents. The infrastructure now covers market research, writing, editorial review, SEO, GEO, and programming, at a fraction of the cost. The operating model is fundamentally different.
Revenue is still lower than before even with dramatically lower costs. Organic traffic isn't what it used to be. The transformation is real but the business model is still being rebuilt. I'm honest about that because most AI transformation stories skip the uncomfortable parts.
Today I spend most of my time in VS Code with Claude Code, building AI-powered applications and businesses from scratch. Current projects include privileges.luxe.digital (an automated affiliate platform), business directories on Next.js and Supabase, safein.ae (a clean news aggregation platform), and the Latent Show (a short-form video experiment with 15 autonomous AI agents).
The building itself is the content source. Every project generates real insights about what AI can and can't do, where it saves time, where it breaks, and what it takes to go from prototype to production. This daily hands-on building differentiates from executives who manage AI initiatives but don't build with the tools themselves.
Build only what you need. Justify every process from zero. Use AI as the foundation, not an add-on.
Open to: Senior executive roles · Board seats · Advisory · Business partnerships
I'm keeping my options deliberately open. The common thread across everything I'm interested in is building and scaling organisations where AI is deployed with operational discipline, not as a buzzword.
The role I'm most drawn to is one that bridges AI research and business application. Helping institutions translate frontier AI capability into operational reality. Helping businesses grow with AI based on what actually works in production, not what sounds impressive in a strategy deck.
What I bring: twenty years of global operating experience, a decade managing billion-dollar operations at Google, a decade building and running my own profitable media business, and the daily practice of building production AI systems in code. I don't manage AI initiatives from a distance. I build with the tools every day.
If you're working on similar questions, whether at an institution, a high-growth company, or on your own, I'd like to connect.