Yooooo, long time no email! Summer happened, amongst other things. How are you doing? What are you listening to? Me? Well... I turned 40 for the third time. But the real unexpected thing was that I got myself a real job for the first time in my life. Yup. I'm now Chief Product Officer at Prosus. They bought Boomerang. "Ooops, I did it again" You know the Boomerang story. WeTransfer changed its terms, people felt fucked, and I couldn't help myself. Try again. Upload, share, done. No ads, no tracking, no AI training on your files. Zero marketing budget and it went kinda viral anyway, because sharing a file is telling someone about it. Then Prosus called. First for a coffee. Then for a sprint. Then they bought the thing. And in the deal, they got me. They bought the vision, and got the guy who keeps pushing it hahaha. I hear ya think; "Wait... you joined a corporate?!" The way I see it is that corporate is going founder mode. I like things before they're obvious. This is definitely one of those. So yes. I joined a corporate. Okay, but why tf would you join a corporate? Fair question. I asked it myself, out loud, in a room full of people who were about to hire me. Would there be enough freedom to create, explore, break a rule or two? Here's what I landed on. One. Prosus isn't the typical corporate corporate. It's a weird giant with many faces. Back in the day these folks put money in a little Chinese startup called Tencent. Today they own the app that brings your Friday night pizza, Thuisbezorgd or JET, iFood in Brazil, OLX, PayU, a chunk of Swiggy in India. A billion people use something they own. They based in Amsterdam, yet most people have never heard of them. The invisible giant. Sooooo I'm like.... let's make it visible like the air in the AirMax 90. Two. Europe. In March I told you sovereignty is a race to the bottom and I still believe that. I'm not gonna build walls. I'd rather build bridges. But somebody on this continent has to actually build at global scale, instead of writing another paper about how we should. Look at who's shaping the next decade of tech. Zuck. Sam Altman. Elon. With that dude from The Apprentice as their landlord. Do you really trust them? Do you really care? Both are fine answers btw. Mine is that I'd rather have a seat at the table than a comment in the section. Prosus is one of the very few companies in Europe that's positioned to make a difference on the global stage. Real products. Real users. Real money. AI that learned from how people actually buy, sell and run a business, instead of scraped Reddit threads. That combination is rare. Rare enough to wake up for. Three. Fab. Fabricio, the CEO, is contagiously ambitious. Asks better questions than most founders I know and moves between strategy and product without pretending those are separate worlds. He's out to wake a sleeping giant and asked if I wanted to help. It's hard to say no to such an adventure. I said it before; choose the adventure, not the job. My own words, so now I have to live by them hahahahahaha. Four. Learn by doing. I've done the zero to one thing a few times now. Blog. WeTransfer. Adelee. Nternet. This is something bigger. Counter culture at scale. Raising the GDP of countries when done right. And an environment where I'm going to learn A LOT. So... doing. What.... do you do? What's your plan? What's your OKR? What's your KPI? What what what? I hear these questions a lot these days. Lemme phrase it like this; think of Prosus like Xerox back in the day. Lots of technology. Brilliant engineers. Euro, our Chief AI Officer, built the AI from the ground up since 2018. Paul, the new CTO, turns it into things that work, from Amsterdam to São Paulo to Bangalore. But features and technology don't make a product. Somebody has to turn all of that into something people actually want to touch. That's the job. Productise the stuff. Make something people want. MAGIC! That's what I do hahahaah. Also, Boomerang stays. Still no ads, still no tracking, still no training on your files. And no, Nternet isn't going anywhere. That team is high agency, moving forward with little direction from me, and honestly shipping more without me in the way. Foto Foto, Nendo, Claro, Rumicat. Still ours. Still weird. The hardest part of the new gig so far? The amount of meetings. Send help! Really... I need help. Designers assemble! Not "a designer". Designers. Plural. Lots of them. UX/UI designers. Product designers. Visual designers. Motion designers. The kind of people who can't stop fixing the kerning on a restaurant menu. Folks who believe design is how it works, not the paint. Here's the pitch. A billion people. A mountain of technology. A CEO who wants to ship like a startup. Sure, the office can be better, but Zuidas is a funny little bubble though. What's missing is taste. Judgement with receipts. The Apple thing, from Europe, for the boring important stuff in life: food, rides, payments, houses, jobs. We're building a product design group from scratch. Embedded in real products with real users from day one. No agency deck. Just shipping and learning and making the user experience delightful. We're gonna design this future yo! Not just for you. Not for your agents only. For many, many humans. If that's you, or someone you know, hit reply. A portfolio, a link, and three sentences on what you'd fix first. I read everything. Amsterdam is home base. Remote is fine if you're good. See you on the other side whenever I have vakantiedagen. N. |
Plot twist
Yooooo, long time no email! Summer happened, amongst other things. How are you doing? What are you listening to? Me? Well... I turned 40 for the third time. But the real unexpected thing was that I got myself a real job for the first time in my life. Yup. I'm now Chief Product Officer at Prosus. They bought Boomerang. "Ooops, I did it again" You know the Boomerang story. WeTransfer changed its terms, people felt fucked, and I couldn't help myself. Try again. Upload, share, done. No ads, no tracking, no AI training on your files. Zero marketing budget and it went kinda viral anyway, because sharing a file is telling someone about it. Then Prosus called. First for a coffee. Then for a sprint. Then they bought the thing. And in the deal, they got me. They bought the vision, and got the guy who keeps pushing it hahaha. I hear ya think; "Wait... you joined a corporate?!" The way I see it is that corporate is going founder mode. I like things before they're obvious. This is definitely one of those. So yes. I joined a corporate. Okay, but why tf would you join a corporate? Fair question. I asked it myself, out loud, in a room full of people who were about to hire me. Would there be enough freedom to create, explore, break a rule or two? Here's what I landed on. One. Prosus isn't the typical corporate corporate. It's a weird giant with many faces. Back in the day these folks put money in a little Chinese startup called Tencent. Today they own the app that brings your Friday night pizza, Thuisbezorgd or JET, iFood in Brazil, OLX, PayU, a chunk of Swiggy in India. A billion people use something they own. They based in Amsterdam, yet most people have never heard of them. The invisible giant. Sooooo I'm like.... let's make it visible like the air in the AirMax 90. Two. Europe. In March I told you sovereignty is a race to the bottom and I still believe that. I'm not gonna build walls. I'd rather build bridges. But somebody on this continent has to actually build at global scale, instead of writing another paper about how we should. Look at who's shaping the next decade of tech. Zuck. Sam Altman. Elon. With that dude from The Apprentice as their landlord. Do you really trust them? Do you really care? Both are fine answers btw. Mine is that I'd rather have a seat at the table than a comment in the section. Prosus is one of the very few companies in Europe that's positioned to make a difference on the global stage. Real products. Real users. Real money. AI that learned from how people actually buy, sell and run a business, instead of scraped Reddit threads. That combination is rare. Rare enough to wake up for. Three. Fab. Fabricio, the CEO, is contagiously ambitious. Asks better questions than most founders I know and moves between strategy and product without pretending those are separate worlds. He's out to wake a sleeping giant and asked if I wanted to help. It's hard to say no to such an adventure. I said it before; choose the adventure, not the job. My own words, so now I have to live by them hahahahahaha. Four. Learn by doing. I've done the zero to one thing a few times now. Blog. WeTransfer. Adelee. Nternet. This is something bigger. Counter culture at scale. Raising the GDP of countries when done right. And an environment where I'm going to learn A LOT. So... doing. What.... do you do? What's your plan? What's your OKR? What's your KPI? What what what? I hear these questions a lot these days. Lemme phrase it like this; think of Prosus like Xerox back in the day. Lots of technology. Brilliant engineers. Euro, our Chief AI Officer, built the AI from the ground up since 2018. Paul, the new CTO, turns it into things that work, from Amsterdam to São Paulo to Bangalore. But features and technology don't make a product. Somebody has to turn all of that into something people actually want to touch. That's the job. Productise the stuff. Make something people want. MAGIC! That's what I do hahahaah. Also, Boomerang stays. Still no ads, still no tracking, still no training on your files. And no, Nternet isn't going anywhere. That team is high agency, moving forward with little direction from me, and honestly shipping more without me in the way. Foto Foto, Nendo, Claro, Rumicat. Still ours. Still weird. The hardest part of the new gig so far? The amount of meetings. Send help! Really... I need help. Designers assemble! Not "a designer". Designers. Plural. Lots of them. UX/UI designers. Product designers. Visual designers. Motion designers. The kind of people who can't stop fixing the kerning on a restaurant menu. Folks who believe design is how it works, not the paint. Here's the pitch. A billion people. A mountain of technology. A CEO who wants to ship like a startup. Sure, the office can be better, but Zuidas is a funny little bubble though. What's missing is taste. Judgement with receipts. The Apple thing, from Europe, for the boring important stuff in life: food, rides, payments, houses, jobs. We're building a product design group from scratch. Embedded in real products with real users from day one. No agency deck. Just shipping and learning and making the user experience delightful. We're gonna design this future yo! Not just for you. Not for your agents only. For many, many humans. If that's you, or someone you know, hit reply. A portfolio, a link, and three sentences on what you'd fix first. I read everything. Amsterdam is home base. Remote is fine if you're good. See you on the other side whenever I have vakantiedagen. N. |