Now: CMO @dealroomco | GTM, AI, Marketing, Growth | prev built Growth Tribe.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Joined April 2009
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Introducing the Rebuilder 🧱
The new identity for leaders rebuilding growth in the AI era. The constant rhythm to grow by building, judging, and aligning.
You're using AI to optimise workflows. Automate the busywork. Push productivity up. It's not enough.
This isn't an AI problem. It's a new intelligence economy, and that means managing intelligence, not a hierarchy.
Your company was built on assumptions from before AI existed. What execution costs. What a team should look like. How fast you're allowed to move.
Those assumptions are already dead. You just haven't rebuilt around that yet.
Wait until the numbers prove you wrong, and there won't be a company left worth rebuilding.
This isn't a new skill you bolt onto your leadership. It's a new identity. You're not starting from a blank page, you're rebuilding the company from the foundation while it's still running, while your team still trusts the old way.
That takes a leader who can move through three modes on purpose with the right energy: build fast with AI, judge what's actually worth building, align the humans and the agents around it.
I call that leader a Rebuilder. 🧱
The world needs to be rebuild for AI.
Example: 🏛️ AI-generated applications and complaints are flooding government services, testing systems never built for this volume.
I think the likelihood of the '🛰 Techno-colonisation scenario' has increased this month for Europe.
🇪🇺 Europe’s next chapter: 5 Scenarios, 10+ year horizon.
As tech accelerates, institutions drift, and geopolitical pressure rises, five future scenarios are becoming visible.
Crisis accelerates history.
💤 Status Quo / Decline
The EU drifts. No reform, no collapse, just slower growth, more brain drain, and geopolitical irrelevance.
🇪🇺 Federation Europe
Europe unites under a new digital-first constitution, with real powers over tax, defense, innovation, and capital markets.
Requires: Requires a big crisis/war + bold leadership + public buy-in for voting new constitution.
🌐 Network Society
Founders, citizens, and capital exit slow states and build decentralised, digital-first communities with their own governance, transparent protocols and currencies.
Already happening with crypto, DAOs based governance, encrypted voting, on-chain identity.
⚠️ Balkanised Europe
Europe fragments into incompatible blocs. North vs South, East vs West. Each with its own laws, alliances, and agendas. Each block make separate deals with global super powers.
🛰 Techno-colonisation
U.S. and Chinese tech giants quietly take over infrastructure, platforms, and data. Europe becomes a digital dependency zone, governed by foreign platforms and protocols.
Real controls are in AI, LLMs, chips and energy.
And capital flows bypass Europe.
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Which scenario is most likely? 🤔
What I don’t understand is why the Dutch tech sector keeps nodding along to the comfortable lies Femke Halsema spreads about AI, tech bros, and the tech economy.
Almost nobody pushes back online. Too many people seem afraid of losing the next roundtable invite or NGO invoice.
Not surprising the sector is struggling when almost everyone is too scared to say the uncomfortable parts out loud. 🙃
Which is necessary to have a functional system instead of a dysfunctional system.
Bravery is a rare commodity right now.
AI adoption by waves.
1. Which tools do we buy?
2. Which workflows get faster?
3. What is our business still worth? Can we rebuild with real value and competitive moat?
We're entering wave 3.
AI adoption for automation is no longer enough.
Rebuilding your company is the only way:
1. Rebuild your business model, there around 12 business models to compete/stay competitive in the new AI world.
2. Rebuild your organisation and ways of working: change behaviour, smaller teams, AI agents with decision power, optimise for high revenue per employee.
Data brokers are now buying up SaaS data sets for anywhere from $100K to $2M
SaaS are struggling now and some extra money to fill the gap by declining revenues is nice
That data is then re-sold to AI training companies and AI frontier labs for the exact purpose of integrating whatever that SaaS did into the AI frontier lab's app
Pretty obvious to see where this is going
Q3 2026 data is available!
In Europe big Q3 growth in Germany 🇩🇪 and Sweden! 🇸🇪
Explore over 400 countries, cities and regions: 👇
NEW REPORTS: Global VC reached $184B in Q3 2026, up 45% on the same quarter last year. The combined value of VC-backed companies now stands at $52.7T.
Q3 quarterly reports are out. The global picture:
🇺🇸 The US raised $108B, more than the next nine countries combined
💰 $1B+ rounds made up 40% of all capital
🤖 AI companies at ever layer accounted for 80% of funding raised
🚀 Space was the third-biggest sector at $20.3B, led by Blue Origin's $10B round
🔔 Biggest exits: ChangXin Memory listed at $79.6B and SpaceX | xAI acquired Cursor for $60B
Explore over 400 countries, cities and regions:
dealroom.co/quarterly-report…
Where are we now in the AI wave?
- first chat
- Copilots
- Vibe coding
- Agentic engineering
- Next... rebuilding entire company? Both reinvent business model and organisation ways of working to survive?
We clearly have entered another phase with the AI adoption and building.
"No more vibe coding"
"Software is dead"
"Moats almost don't exist for software"
And IRL business have the leverage if they rebuild themselves to automate and use AI.
I don't know how we call this next phase, but it's going fast!
We're clearly inside the singularity 🫨
it’s clear we need to retire the term vibe coding because the models now produce better architecture & way more coherent code than an average software engineer.
perhaps even better than top software engineers too because unlike a human, ai has a much much larger context window.
this ain’t vibe coding at all. it’s precision engineering.
AI Leadership & Teams & Speed:
Speed comes from decisions that don't come back.
Shared reality builds trust. And trust lets decisions move to where the knowledge sits to execute.
It’s not the latest AI tool that makes you grow or be competitive, it’s the ability to adapt as a team constantly: by building for signals, improving team’s judgement by placing better bets, and learning faster together.
That will result in growth and competitiveness.
AI leadership to stay ahead in the AI world
You:
⚡ High agency. Judge, build, disagree.
🚪 Let go of two-way doors. Own the one-way doors.
Your team:
🤖 Build the system, so people and agents can decide without you. Speed!
🎯 Write your prediction down before you build. Check it against what happened. Update how you judgement.
🏎️ Speed of execution × speed of learning.
🎲 Fewer small tests. Bigger bets.
🧱 Tear down old systems, beliefs and habits. Rebuild AI-native.
Control less. Improve your judgement. Learn faster.
AI Leadership:
Hard skills are getting easier and softer.
Soft skills are getting harder.
Knowing when to let go of controle + taking controle when its necessary, from your internal compass becomes a core skill for leaders to master.
Why? To increase speed of decision making + learning as leader + your team to build together.
"nobody asked for this" -> how a reward system defends itself. Gatekeepers protect the past + controle.
AI will keep doing work nobody asked for.
The question is how fast your team adopts it, learns from it, and keeps building and rebuilding on top of AI.
That only happens if the reward system changes.
Stop rewarding being right, owning the idea, and protecting your lane or pride.
Start rewarding learning speed, testing fast, and changing your mind on evidence.
It's all about building + rebuilding the future. 👷♂️
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