About

The longer version

Everything started with music. As a teenager I was DJing house as Mischaa and tech house as Ned Erland, and somewhere between buying records and playing sets I taught myself to build websites. The first one was for a DJ friend who needed something better than what the platforms gave him for free. I built it in WordPress over a weekend. It looked professional. Other DJs saw it and wanted the same thing.

That became Pixelstart, a web design agency in Haarlem building WooCommerce sites for creators. YouTubers, DJs, artists selling merchandise. The client list grew to include names like Headhunterz, Enzo Knol, and StukTV. At its peak I was managing over 100 websites and pulling in $10k in monthly recurring revenue. All of it run by one person, which was both the accomplishment and the problem. I was building a job, not a business. I sold it in 2021.

Before Pixelstart, between 2012 and 2016, I ran VOID Agency, a booking agency for DJs. That's where I learned the music industry from the inside: the spreadsheets, the contracts in Word, the invoicing tools that didn't understand German withholding tax. I kept a mental list of everything the industry needed and nobody had built. That list eventually became Stagent.

Stagent started as a side project. Lennert, who I'd known since I was nineteen and who I now work with at Ryde, wrote the first check without asking for a term sheet. The product grew from a prototype into a platform used by booking agencies across the globe. Along the way I co-founded True Identity, a booking agency and label in the harder-styles scene, partly to dogfood Stagent with a real operation. True Identity grew past what I could run on the side, and I sold it in late 2024 to an operator who could give it full-time attention.

In 2023 I announced a joint venture between Stagent and Artwin, the market leader in Dutch booking software. The plan was ambitious. It didn't work out. Two solopreneurs on one ship, different working styles, different continents. I learned more from that year than from most things that went right. Stagent found its next chapter at Ryde Ventures, and that's where it lives now.

Ryde is the venture studio I joined in December 2025, alongside Lennert and Marta, two people I've worked with for over a decade. The first product out of Ryde is Onoma, an AI memory layer that works across Claude, GPT, Gemini, and others. European, GDPR-first, built on the thesis that your context is the moat, not the model.

The building

I write code in Laravel and PHP. I'm not a framework expert, I'm a professional Googler who learned by reading docs and asking AI for help. Most of what I build is vertical software: products that encode the conventions of a specific industry so precisely that nobody has to think about them. Nightshift, the feature that knows a 2 AM set is Friday's gig, is the purest example of what I care about in product building.

I maintain a few open-source projects: Laravel TOON for token-optimized object notation, Ralph for autonomous Claude Code loops, and Taylor Says, a Claude Code agent that channels Taylor Otwell's Laravel philosophy.

The writing

This blog is where I think out loud. Product frameworks, AI tooling, developer workflows, and the occasional honest accounting of what went wrong. I write for builders and founders who are one or two cycles behind me. Not for readers who want to be impressed. For readers who want to go do the thing after closing the tab.

Opinions, not hedging. If I'm uncertain, I say so plainly. If I'm wrong, I update the post.

The rest

I'm a dad to Mason, who's four and already better at asking obvious questions than most product teams I've worked with. I work out 4 to 6 days a week on a Push, Pull, Legs split. I have an accountability partner who checks in every morning at 10 AM. I'm a recovering perfectionist. I still catch myself spending too long on things that don't need it.

Break of Dawn came later, a harder-styles act I started when True Identity needed its first artist on the roster. I don't play anymore, but the music industry is still where most of my software lives. The people I build for are the people I used to be.