This is my story — from a family kitchenware shop on the Belgian-Dutch border to BOB, an AI operating system you actually own. It runs on one idea I learned at twelve: don't judge a book by its cover.
It started with a shortcut
Every summer the wedding registries piled up at my parents' kitchenware shop — two handwritten copies of each, a hundred of them in season, two hours apiece by hand.
At twelve, I decided there had to be a better way. I got a ZX Spectrum, taught it the kitchen words, and wired it to a daisy-wheel printer so it could still print onto the same carbon forms. Two hours became fifteen minutes. Zero typos. That was the day "work smarter, not harder" stopped being a phrase and became a method — find the painful manual task, automate it, count the time saved. It's the exact pattern BOB runs today.
The world years
In 1993 I left for the world — Reuters in Brussels, then Stamford, Connecticut; then SWIFT, moving money between the world's banks; then Deloitte, in London and Grenoble.
Financial data, large teams, global projects. I'd made myself one promise when I started: evaluate after ten years.
Coming home to build it properly
By 2004 the ten years were up — and the internet had just become real for retail. My parents needed me. So I went home to run Keukenlust and built it properly.
E-commerce in 2005, one of the first Belgian retailers selling internationally online. Full omnichannel by 2008 — same prices online and in store, live stock on the web — before "omnichannel" was a consulting buzzword. I shipped designer espresso cups all the way to Japan.
Seventy years, painted onto a wall
In 2018 the shop closed after seventy years. The town didn't just say goodbye — they painted it onto a wall. Twelve days. Three hundred and twenty spray cans.
Fourteen years of running a real business, with real money on the line and my parents watching. It's the part of the story most enterprise consultants never have.
When AI arrived, I was ready
In 2025 AI arrived properly. I'd quietly kept a second brain for twenty-five years — before the term existed — so I already had the structure, the habit, and the framework in place when most people were starting from scratch.
Built from a hospital bed
That August I joined a two-week AI cohort. After the first week I broke my hip — and attended the rest from a hospital bed, laptop on the tray, still talking with a new collaborator named Gita.
The work mattered enough not to stop.
BOB — something you own
I built the system I needed to run my own business without losing my mind. When a plugin's paths were hardcoded, I made everything configurable — then the layout, the dashboard, the widgets.
The result wasn't a fork of someone else's CRM. It was an AI operating system with a no-code face: not a SaaS, but something you actually own. As far as I knew, that combination didn't exist anywhere else.
The lesson, on four legs
Today I walk two dogs across an old airfield by the Dutch border. Yvett, the Dogue de Bordeaux, who looks fierce and is gentle. Roxy, the American Bully, who looks tough and is pure joy.
Don't judge a book by its cover
Both breeds look like they'd frighten you. Both are loyal and kind. So is the system I built — it looks like a lot from the outside, and underneath, it just works.