My story
I've always liked numbers, but mostly the story behind them. During my master's in Groningen I first read Valuation by Tim Koller, and I was pretty much hooked right away. I never would have guessed I'd be working with him years later. I got to help out as a teaching assistant for Corporate Valuation, and alongside it I did a second master's, in Marketing Intelligence, to build a solid grounding in data and statistics. I graduated summa cum laude in both, and my finance thesis was even published later on. But secretly, the part I loved most was writing those theses: boiling a mountain of data down to one clear insight. That feeling has never left.
In 2016 I joined McKinsey in Amsterdam. For a little over eight years I worked where strategy and corporate finance meet, for companies all over the world. For a large part of that time I helped build the Value Intelligence Platform: an analytics platform that looks at companies from the outside, through the eyes of the capital markets. As a project leader I brought that perspective to leadership and strategy teams. And I kept seeing the same thing: executives who know their company inside out, yet are surprised by how investors see it.
I wanted to close that gap, in a structural way and without needing to hire a team of consultants. So in 2025 I founded ValueLens, where I'm co-founder and CEO. Alongside it, I deliberately keep time for the work that gives me the most energy: teaching, thinking along with executives, and every now and then just doing a good piece of analysis myself.
I live with my wife, two dogs and a cat just outside Amsterdam, in a detached house over a hundred years old that we've renovated a fair bit ourselves. It goes a lot like a strategy project: you start with a tight plan, and then reality turns out to be far more stubborn.