I grew up in a small village in the Dutch province of Zeeland. During my childhood I spent a lot of my free time outdoors playing with my friends, climbing trees, building tree houses, playing football and swimming in the sea. My father was (and is) a watchmaker and as a small boy I was always intrigued seeing him repair watches and clocks. Looking at all those small parts ultimately forming one single system that tells time. I guess that during those days my passion for technology started, although at that time I excelled taking clocks apart, not repairing them…
Later I got intrigued by the possibilities of computers as we got at home in the late 1980’s: a Commodore Amiga 500. Initially we used it to play games, but soon after that I tried coding new games myself.
At relatively young age I already knew I wanted to be an engineer and I ultimately decided to study Mechanical Engineering at the Delft University of Technology. During the Master phase I specialized in the field of human machine interaction. This is all about making sure you provide people with the right information at the right time to make sure they will be able to make the best possible decisions. This is the red line in my career so far: utilizing (software) technology to help people make timely and well-founded decisions.
My Cuurios-story
Gaëtan and I started Cuurios in 2018 because we’ve noticed that many industrial big data analytics projects face difficulties to make it into daily reality. In our vision you need to add business value in the early stage of digitization and transform data into prioritized (and assigned) actions for it to be taken seriously. The underlying technology to transform the data does not need to be complex (i.e. AI or learning algorithms), the trick is to select the right mechanisms for your particular use case! Most importantly, make sure you well manage the actions resulting from these data analytics: your average dashboard does not do any of this!
In my current role I get a lot of energy bridging the gap between the customer’s daily reality, new technology and software development. I’m enthusiastic, curious and people oriented. We typically like to listen very carefully to our clients ideas and requirements and ask the right questions in order for us to be able to deliver software solutions with a WOW factor: always go one step further!
Both professionally and privately I like complex puzzles, varying from large data sets, challenging customer use cases all the way to large LEGO Technic sets. I am confident that this mindset helps me to keep pushing boundaries in search for that missing piece!
