The full story

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.

I didn't study it from a distance. I studied the science of music, with a particular focus on music taste and how sound impacts us, and 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, including SXSW, 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.

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 millions in venture capital 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. Across those companies I'd seen both ends of being a founder. Scrappy and solo, and leading a team of 20. Bootstrapped, and backed by investors. Berkeley SkyDeck, one of Forbes' top five US university accelerators, accepted me into its programme.

I was deep in neural networks long before the AI hype, building state-of-the-art algorithms with my teams. So I know how these systems actually work, not just how to prompt them. Most AI advice right now pushes the newest tool for its own sake. I work the other way round. I start with the problem worth solving, and use AI only where it genuinely helps.

I'm a product builder at heart. But founders kept asking me to help with strategy, and I love that work, because I see patterns where others see noise. I've built companies and products in music, healthcare, wellness and productivity, and done every job in them. So I turned the mistakes I kept seeing into a method.

That method is the FOG® Diagnostic. In one 90-minute session I learn all the important things about your business. And within 3 business days I show you what phase you are in, Foundation, Optimization or Growth, and the most important thing to fix first. I write you a step-by-step implementation plan on how to fix it, and how to grow from there with the tools or team you need to make it happen. You choose if you want to implement it yourself or with me.

A music management company got two full days a week back for the founder, enough to take on five more clients.

I write about all of it every week in The Drop, my newsletter 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.