I've never picked a side.

Founder, then consultant. Then founder again. Then an operator running product for someone else's company. Then McKinsey. People sometimes ask which one I really am — the builder or the adviser — and the honest answer is that I've never found the question interesting.

In every one of those roles the job was the same: take something ambiguous and get it built and into the market. At McKinsey that meant leading a team of twenty to launch a mobile app for 600,000 users in sixteen weeks. In my own companies it meant doing it with a fraction of the people and none of the safety net.

What I've actually done

Before all of it, I co-founded TigerLab — insurance software for incumbent carriers, roughly what Shopify is for retailers. I left after the first year because I couldn't see the traction. The traction came later; the company is doing well today, and I'm still on its advisory board.

Then I co-founded Toptranslation, raised venture capital, grew revenue tenfold in the first year, and exited at an eight-figure valuation. We embedded natural-language processing into the product back when that was an unusual thing for a small company to attempt.

As Chief Product Officer at Involve Asia, I took revenue from $6M to over $20M in eighteen months across five markets — shipping machine learning into production along the way, including a fraud detection system that saved more than a million dollars a year.

I led a crypto exchange's expansion into four Southeast Asian markets, building the team and the partnerships from nothing.

And most recently I spent three years at McKinsey as an Expert Engagement Manager and the firm's expert on digital assets, advising banks and conglomerates on transformation.

The one that didn't work

I co-founded MamaWosh, an app-based laundry delivery service. We raised two rounds, built a team of fifty, and grew the customer base twentyfold in a year. Customers loved it. After ride-hailing and food delivery, we were convinced laundry was the next on-demand vertical, on our way to unicorn status.

Two problems we never solved. Food is delivered in one trip; laundry takes two — collection and return — which left the operating margin permanently thin. And both throughput and quality depended on cleaning capacity, so every increase in volume required more capex. Growth made the economics worse, not better.

I mention it because the numbers that look good in a deck and the numbers that keep a company alive are not always the same ones — and learning that the hard way is a large part of why I now care more about what actually ships than about what gets presented.

What I do now

McKinsey will tell you exactly what to do, and they will usually be right. What almost nobody does is then go and build it. That's the part I've always been interested in — so that's what I do.

I work with founder-led companies between €10M and €100M in Europe and Southeast Asia. I go into the business, find the work that's worth automating, and build the AI agents that do it — then stay until they're live, monitored, and your team trusts them. I run my own practice on these tools daily, which means I'm recommending things I actually use rather than things I've read about.

I don't work with large corporates. No procurement committees, no six-month studies. If that's your situation, I'm the wrong person, and I'll say so on the call.

The rest

I'm a Vietnam-born German, based in Bangkok, working in English, German and Vietnamese. I studied computer science and information systems, which means I can still read the code my teams write — a habit that has saved me more than once.

Outside software, I've co-founded three restaurants and sold two of them. It's a useful counterweight to a career in tech — most businesses run on margins, rosters and what happened yesterday, not on roadmaps.

Outside work: triathlon, calisthenics, cooking, and trying to keep up with two daughters.