Feb 2025 – Present · 1 yr 3 mos

• You go to The Hague every now and then to talk to policy makers about Dutch startups. Slowly, there’s some momentum to make it suck less for those founders.
• You organize a little meetup for startups who also want to stay here and make it better, instead of complaining and leaving. Their main problem? Employee stock option law is ridiculous here.
• You launch a petition called Flywheel ("Vliegwiel" in Dutch) and another 1,500 nerds sign it. You officially hand it to a Minister and hope for the best. Many others push for change as well, and the best happens: Stock option law in The Netherlands becomes not-so-ridiculous.
• You keep organizing for action on tech policy that helps startups really grow, even below sea level.

Sep 2022 – Apr 2025 · 2 yrs 7 mos · Amsterdam

• You start really getting into Dungeons & Dragons, and you wonder why all of those cool game masters haven't build video games yet. Maybe AI can help translate their words into worlds? You start prototyping the first game and hack something together. It... kinda works!
• Turns out that building games is hard, and you have to relearn your craft. You've done that before, but not like this. You project what you know and it doesn't quite fit the mold. Hm. Weird?
• You meet a bunch of great people, building amazing games, but it doesn't map to your skillset or your passion. You ignore it for a while but slowly it hits you: This won’t work out.
• You shut down game development, and pivot. It's one of the hardest things you do. You lose 100 HP but gain 200 XP.

Sep 2018 – Apr 2022 · 3 yrs 7 mos

• You look back at how you've built your professional network over the last decade, and it doesn’t look anything like the recruiter swamp that LinkedIn is today. Maybe you should build a better professional network.
• You try to do everything in your startup right from the beginning. Repeat-founders gonna repeat-found. That just slows you down and you become pretty scrappy again. You change the name from Cooper to Quest, hoping that helps.
• Y Combinator calls you at 2 am in the morning with good news, and for three months your life changes again. Everything you thought you knew about startups is different now.
• You find out how hard consumer social is as an industry. Like catching lightning in a bottle and getting horribly electrocuted, over and over again.
• The best co-founder, team members, and investors you've ever worked with can’t bail you out. You build eight prototypes but don't find real traction. It sucks to shut it down but you’re also happy to have tried.
• Your tweet announcing the closure gets more likes and replies than any other you’ve ever posted. A famous rapper is in your DMs asking what you’re doing next. You feel pretty cool for a second.

Mar 2016 – Sep 2018 · 2 yrs 6 mos · Amsterdam Area, Netherlands

• Google is funding a building in Amsterdam so it can be a startup hub, built by TNW. They just need someone to run it. You move back to The Netherlands (it's somewhere near Denmark) and get to work.
• You don’t have a desk, or an office to put it in, or anything really, so you start hiring people to help you out. They’re young but grow up faster than you can keep track.
• You bike around town and visit every shitty office that ever housed a startup, telling them to come to you instead. It works and your building fills up with 50 startups. Even Flexport, Miro, and Shopify join at some point. You make sure it’s not just an office and help them raise funding, get customers, skip mistakes, unclog a toilet or two, whatever they need.
• One day you find yourself in a parking garage in the basement, a blacked-out van door swinging open, shaking hands with Eric Schmidt. He walks into your event space and on stage says something about how this feels like "early Silicon Valley". You didn't even tell him to say that. That's nice.
• Then one of the people you work with becomes so good that you feel like starting a company again because they can handle it. They hang a plaque in the restroom with your name on it, commemorating your efforts. You frequently relieve yourself there with great delight.

Dec 2013 – Feb 2016 · 2 yrs 2 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

• After a few weeks of “fake it till you make it” you get hired by Google. You’re now a product manager, having no clue what that means, but maybe your engineering skills will be sufficient.
• When people ask you what you do though, you can just say “I work at Google!” They think you fly a spaceship to work every day but really, you’re just in a cubical. You thought they didn’t make those anymore, but oh man, do they.
• You stay the course and like, holy shit, people are smart here. And so nice! Really, annoyingly, nice. You’re a grumpy startup founder used to agony and conflict, but you decide to go along with it. Then one day you get so frustrated about how they're ignoring your team, you speak up at an all-hands meeting. Your boss’ boss makes a strangling motion with his hands at you, as a joke… you think.
• You say hi to Sergey in line for coffee. Sundar says hi to you at the gym. (Or was that because of your Google t-shirt?)
• Your boss keeps saying you’re “solving unemployment”. It feels like you’re actually just eating lunch in fancy campus cafés for a living, but you’re happy he’s happy.
• Later you find out that, for millions of people every day, you did actually solve their unemployment. That AI-job-matching-engine thing you worked on, Google for Jobs, is now built right into Google Search and Google Cloud. Cool.
• For the rest of your career when someone tells you a problem, you say “well at Google we…”. You wish you could really stop doing that.

Jan 2012 – Nov 2013 · 1 yr 10 mos · New York City, United States

• To make it easier, you choose an industry for your next startup that has a lot more bleeding-edge innovation than market research: Mobile providers. (Kidding, it's worse.)
• You do TechStars and David Tisch becomes your idol. The people who fund SpaceX fund you too. Everything is uncomfortable as heck but fun.
• You appear on national TV and everyone you’ve not met for twenty years sends you a text message.
• You make the horrible decision to build a team on different continents. You and your cofounders slowly float onto different islands. You have a volleybal with a face pained on it, they have actual fun.
• You get out of the way and the brand grows and grows. It still has a special place in your heart. Not just yours, but also of the Dutch prime minister, who sometimes wears his Karma t-shirt when he need to appear casual for the press. (Thanks again, Mark!)
• Much later, someone else takes over the company and messes with your cofounders (still your best friends) in the process. They leave and the company implodes. He is still an investor today, ruining companies one board meeting at a time. You try to make peace with it. Oh boy, do you try…

Jan 2007 – Dec 2011 · 4 yrs 11 mos · Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• You’re 20 years old and you meet someone just like you. What should you hack on together? Whatever the hell you like, of course. And you like finding new apps (the desktop ones) and Last.fm and social networks, so you combine those.
• You launch on TechCrunch and get an award from BusinessWeek. Someone offers a good sum of money to buy the company but you decline.
• You learn that “build it and they will come” isn’t a valid business plan and there's actual work involved in growing a consumer social network. Who knew?
• Then Google, Kantar, and other biggies knock on your door and say “hey can I have that for my business?” And at first you’re like “sorry I don’t talk to anyone over thirty”. But then you’re like “oh this revenue thing is quite nice”. So you write the code that becomes an AI research tool.
• Suddenly you’re in the worst industry in the world: market research, where everyone is just guessing and the results don’t matter. You hire more mature, experienced people to do a better job, and move on.
• Then one of your customers, GfK, buys the company. Neat. All you had to do to make your startup successful was get out.

Feb 2006 – Sep 2006 · 7 mos · Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• Three of the most fun geeks you’ve met are letting you build any social app you want. They call you “Ace” at the office and it's a potent drug. You build something that looks like Del.icio.us, and something that looks like Digg, and learn Ruby.
• Unfortunately, you realize after just a few months that you’re an entrepreneur. Crap. You have to quit. Every time you start a company after that you try to make it equally as fun.

Mar 2005 – Jan 2008 · 2 yrs 10 mos

• You install WordPress and write about every single startup you like that has the Web 2.0 label attached to it. It’s 2005 so it works.
• As a joke, you organize a Web 2.0 startup contest. About 50,000 people vote and Adobe buys everyone drinks. Everything is about rounded corners and tag clouds and it feels like this internet thing might become something big.
• You realize you would rather build startups than write about them for the rest of your life. You ask your friends at TNW for advice and redirect your Feedburner feed to theirs. You call it an acquisition because you haven't had one of those yet.

Sep 2003 – Jan 2006 · 2 yrs 4 mos · Dordrecht, The Netherlands

• A veteran from the Dotcom believes in you and gives you a job at his web agency. His office is behind a boat shop, so you know it's legit. You’ve already chosen not to go to college so why not.
• You learn PHP and all of a sudden you understand what this internet stuff is really about. He’s passionate and creative and everything you want to be. You grow fond of entrepreneurship and reconsider that profession.
• Then you tell that guy you’re quitting to work on startups in Amsterdam because that’s not happening in fucking Dordrecht. Your boss takes it pretty rough, and in doing so teaches you a valuable lesson about people management.