Tag: Founder Compass

Make My Mess My Message · Issue 5 · Friday 10 July 2026

The puzzle only works when the pieces actually fit.

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The difference between a partnership that produces 1+1=3 and a collaboration that produces 1+1=1.5 is rarely visible on the day the paperwork is signed. It is visible earlier, in the conversations that come before, if you know what to listen for.

Over the last twenty-five years I have built partnerships that produced 1 + 1 = 3, and I have entered collaborations that produced 1 + 1 = 1.5, and sometimes worse. I want to name two that worked, then name what they shared, then name what I now check for before I sign anything.

Two that produced 1 + 1 = 3

Beijing, 2001-2003. Barco Digital Cinema and China Film Group.

Barco was a Belgian company making digital cinema projectors when nobody in China had a strategy for digital cinema. My boss and coach at the time was Sjoerd De Clerck. Others inside the company were pushing for short-term transactional deals: sell projectors, close the quarter, move on. Sjoerd gave me the space and the confidence to follow a different route. The strategic-architects route, where you build the future of an industry with the people who will run it, and let the projector sales emerge from the shared plan.

Instead of selling boxes, my colleague Phil Chen and I sat down with the Chinese government authorities responsible for cinema content and infrastructure, and we co-wrote a three-, five-, and ten-year plan for how the whole industry might change: post-production, distribution, exhibition. Barco’s role was a variable in a plan we built together, not a pre-decided answer.

The plan gave China a future to point at. It gave Barco a disproportionate role in that future. It let me prove to myself I was a strategic builder. Within a couple of years, Barco Digital Cinema had over 50% market share, bypassing the incumbent 35mm manufacturer. In 2002 we ran a test streaming the World Cup to twenty Chinese cities via Boeing’s satellite division. We eventually set up a joint venture for local assembly.

The third thing that emerged that neither Barco nor China Film Group could have built alone was a shared long-term relationship in which the future of the industry was discussed at a strategic level. Not a deal. A direction.

Sjoerd’s role is worth naming. Without the internal air cover to say no to the short-term transactional path, none of the rest would have happened. There was a partnership inside the company before there was a partnership outside it. That is a pattern I now recognize in every 1+1=3 story I have been part of.

Southern Europe, 2016 onward. Origin Acoustics EMEA.

I had known Jose Coelho, who runs Origin Acoustics International, for eight years before the conversation that produced the EMEA partnership. Six years earlier, when Jose was still at another company, we spent time together on a joint road trip activating new brands. On that trip I introduced Jose to the founder of Origin Acoustics. Neither of us knew, at that moment, that six years later Jose would be running Origin Acoustics International and would call me with an opportunity that would turn into a deep partnership that still stands today.

This is what OSBB actually looks like in practice. I gave a connection eight years before I could have known what would come of it. Six years later, Jose returned it. Marcel Mauss called this the gift-and-counter-gift cycle. On the road, in real time, it just felt like helping someone I liked.

When the OA EMEA conversation finally happened, Origin needed a lightweight way to grow in Europe. Genesis HTA had already built infrastructure Origin did not have: a fulfillment centre, a proprietary ERP system, know-how in distribution and customer success, and a large customer base ready to test whatever we launched.

Instead of writing a business plan first, Jose and I did the opposite. We opened our books to each other. We stress-tested one idea as lightly as possible. We agreed to use only assets that already existed and were proven. We started small. We iterated constantly.

What neither of us could have built alone: launching Ambisonic in premium outdoor audio, launching Blends invisible speakers, and a supply relationship with a worldwide luxury brand that neither of our companies could have carried alone. Each of those is a project we would not have taken on individually because the risk-to-return ratio would not have justified it. Together, the risk was distributed and the return was faster.

The OA EMEA conversation was not a negotiation. It was the moment two people who had trusted each other for eight years found the specific project the trust could carry.

What both shared

Reading across the two, the pattern is not about strategy documents or synergy slides. It is about four things.

Complementary, not competitive. Barco brought projector technology; China Film Group brought market access and policy authority. Origin brought product; Genesis brought infrastructure. None of these overlap. None steps on the other.

Trust before contract. In both cases, the trust was built through months of conversation before anything was signed. With Origin, the trust had been built for eight years before the specific conversation. The paperwork codified an agreement that already existed in the room.

Expectations that were spoken and calibrated. In each case, both sides asked “how does success look for you in three years?” and answered honestly. The gaps between visions were surfaced early, not left to fester.

A fourth thing that emerged. In each case, something was built that neither side had planned at the start. Barco and China Film Group did not plan the JV. Origin and I did not plan Ambisonic. The partnership created optionality neither side could have created alone.

The shadow: collaborations that never became partnerships

The failures were not partnerships that turned bad. They were never partnerships in the first place. They were collaborations that never crossed the threshold.

Two patterns recur in the ones that failed.

Trust that was not actually there. The signals were early. The first time a small commitment was quietly not honored, and the other side either did not mention it or defended it as an exception. Once you have been through this a few times, you learn to read it. Internally, we say: “If there is doubt, there is no doubt.” When trust is real, doubt does not need to be argued about.

Expectations that were widely different from the start. Sometimes we saw the gap and said yes anyway because we wanted the collaboration too much. That is called failure in delay. The tension builds two-way. The disappointment compounds silently. Eventually it breaks up in a way that looks sudden but was inevitable from month one.

The ones that hurt were not the ones I did not see coming. They were the ones I saw and rationalized. That was the mistake.

The tests we now apply

The doing test. Real partnerships reveal themselves in the rhythm of the work, not in the language of the pitch. So we now set up very short feedback loops in the first months of any partnership. Weekly, if possible. Because in the enthusiasm of the launch, everyone runs, and by the time the first quarterly review arrives, six months of divergence have accumulated silently. Better to catch it in week three.

The money-flow test. The way the money flows signals and determines who owns the customer relationship. Both sides know this even if it is not on paper. And rule number two: if the money flow gets confused, or a customer falls between the two parties, pick up the phone and help the customer. The customer does not care about your partnership architecture.

The three-year conversation. Before anything is signed, we now insist on having the “where do we want to end up in three years together” conversation. Not once. Several times. With both sides. And with two levels of people in the room: the strategic decision makers, and the people who will do the real work every day.

That last point is where most partnerships fail before they start. The decision makers have a version. The doers have a different version. If the two versions are not aligned before the contract is signed, they will diverge under pressure. And they will diverge fast.

One more thing worth naming. Partnerships are undervalued. They get less credit than the big announcements, because they compound quietly, over years, without producing a headline moment. But the value they build often ends up larger, safer, and more durable. The exciting option and the wise option are not always the same.

The one-line rule

If I could give one line to a builder thinking about their next partnership, it is this: have the three-year conversation, several times, with both the strategic level and the people doing the real work. That conversation matters more than any piece of paper or press release you will ever produce together.

And one gate underneath: if there are people in those conversations that you do not trust, do not sign. Not even with the best lawyer in the room.

The puzzle only works when the pieces actually fit.

Be water, my friend. 🌊

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Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. This issue first appeared on LinkedIn. Every issue lives here.

Make My Mess My Message · Issue 4 · Friday 3 July 2026

Thank you for believing in me without expectation.

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Dad sat on his boat every day. Not to sail: to sit.

He kept the boat on the Schelde, in one of the widest bends of the river, where commercial ships passed and tidal streams pulled the water back and forth in a slow, constant motion. The banks were green. You could not hear a single car. Classical music carried further across the water than you would ever expect.

He would go there in the evening, after dinner, with a book from his own self-curated collection and something classical playing quietly, and he would stay for hours. On weekends he could not wait. He went twice, once in the morning and once at the end of the day. Neighbors from the village would walk down the path, see him there, and stop for a chat. He would look up, listen, respond, and then return to his book. Still as water. Profound as the deepest lake.

He did this every day. All his life. He was at peace with his surroundings and his habits, in a way I did not understand as a child and did not fully understand as an adult until he passed four years ago.

Christmas 2001. Beijing.

Mom stepped off a plane alone. She had already travelled to Burma and to India. She was always the adventurer. But she had not yet come to China, and she was not going to wait to see the country I was starting to build my life in. She traveled twelve time zones to come find me because I was just starting to discover the world, and she wanted to join the discovery.

The day after she landed, I took her into the center of Beijing to show her the real China. She had come expecting the cultural point of gravity of communist Asia. What we walked into was tens of thousands of Chinese people on bicycles wearing red Santa Claus hats with green and red flashing bulbs at the tip. Bing Crosby was playing on loop in the shopping centers. Everything was Christmas kitsch cranked to eleven, playing at high volume, everywhere at once. It was like we had wandered into a bad Hollywood commercial. Mom was a little in shock. Or a little disappointed. Or both: just in the right quantities, like a perfect cocktail.

The next day I took her on the subway to Tiananmen Square. My office was inside a refurbished building in the Forbidden City. I was there for Barco, helping develop the digital cinema market with the Chinese state-run film industry and Boeing’s satellite division, streaming movies and the World Cup over satellite. As we walked under the giant portrait of Mao Zedong at the entrance to the square, I explained the project to her. Another small shock, though a quieter one this time.

She listened to all of it. Every word. She was fully present for the surreal Christmas circus, for the political weight of the square, for what I was actually building at twenty-something in the middle of a country neither of us fully understood. She did not try to interpret it. She did not steer. She just walked next to me and listened.

Mom is a force of nature. A poetic optimist, running on something that has never been quite rational, and never had to be. Her emotions travel on an amplified sinusoid. But underneath all of it lives one of her rarest gifts: she really listens. She is fully present. A mountain stream: pure, crystalline, incapable of standing still.

Two parents. One still as a lake. The other in motion like a river. And somewhere between the two of them I learned how to build things.

They never told me what to do with my life.

Not with my career. Not with my education. Not with money. Not with the shape of the days ahead of me. What they did instead, over and over, through my childhood and well into my adulthood, was ask me deep questions without judgment.

Not to guide me to a conclusion. Not to steer me toward the answer they wanted. They asked so that I would think it through myself. They asked so that I would take critical thinking seriously and combine it with being the owner of my own destiny.

I did not recognize this method as a method at the time. I only understood, gradually. Some of my close friends had been given clear direction. I had been given clear questions. Those were two different starting points.

They had also given me a name.

My father wanted to name me after one of his historic heroes: Willem de Zwijger, William the Silent, the sixteenth-century Dutch prince famous for strategic silence, suspended judgment, and refusing to react to information until he had understood the full picture. My mother settled on the shorter form: Wim. But the historical dimension came up more than once during my childhood, especially the elements of critical thinking and suspended judgment.

I carried the name for a reason. It was up to me whether I lived up to it, without pressure, but with a clear example somewhere behind me.

The name and the method were the same lesson, delivered in different registers.

Everything I have built since started there.

If I try to name what my parents actually gave me, three things stand out, and I know if I keep going deeper there would be more.

The first: the freedom to carve my own path. They set me on my way, but they never pointed at where to go. They never hinted at how to live. That silence gave space for dreams, doubts, and a lot of zigzagging. And I did a lot of that. In my twenties alone I earned three masters degrees in three unrelated fields, business and engineering, international politics and conflict resolution, and anthropology. I started a skiing company with two friends during my studies, watched it become wildly successful, and bailed at the peak because I was bored. I worked on a merger at a multinational oil company, and bailed because I was bored. I applied for the Prince Albert Fund grant and got it. I signed to go to Brazil to run a mine and an adjacent battery factory, then changed my mind three weeks later and went to Beijing instead. That is a taste of the zigzagging. Because that is what I chose, and my parents always supported my choices. Slowly, over years and continents and mistakes, I found my path. Myself. Not the version anyone else drew for me.

The second: the primacy of how you live your life. Not fame. Not money. Not what other people can see. What matters is who you see when you look in the mirror at the end of the day. My parents did not preach this: they modeled it. They developed their own moral compass through critical thinking and observation and trial and error. No blind belief. No sheepish copying. And they gave me permission to develop mine the same way.

Only now, decades later, do I recognize the frame they were quietly handing me: Gandhi’s “make your life your message.” My parents never quoted the line. I did not name it until this project. But the whole title of this newsletter, Make My Mess My Message, is a variant of that same wisdom, evolved through my own path.

This is the compass I have carried into every business I have built.

The third came from watching what I did not want to become. My father worked in a business he did not choose, for reasons that belonged to a previous generation, until he was in his late fifties. Then he closed it. He started a new career. And he was very happy. That closing was one of the quietest lessons of my life. I decided early that I would never do work I did not love or was not good at. I also grew up under the constant, unspoken cloud of financial anxiety: my parents had never learned the language of money, while working extremely hard, and the tension of not-quite-enough lived in the walls of the house. I decided early that I would never build a business that would put my family in that place. Cash flow discipline was not something I read about later. It was in the walls.

I have zigged and zagged more than most. I did not follow a career path anyone would have designed on paper. I moved countries. I changed industries. I closed things. I started things. I ran into walls and had to rebuild.

Through all of it, my parents believed in me. Really believed. Without expectation. Not in the outcome, not in the destination, not in the shape of the success, just in the fact that I would carve my own path and develop my own compass and eventually find my way. That belief was not conditional on results. It was the ground I was allowed to stand on.

That belief is the gift.

That is the thing I now understand, four years after Dad passed and with Mom still sailing with me when she comes over to Spain, was the beginning of everything.

If I could stand in front of both of them right now, both alive, both listening, and thank them for one thing about how they shaped me as a builder, I would say this:

Thank you for believing in me without expectation.

That is the gift. And I hope to pass it on to the people around me who matter: the team members finding their own compass, the builders who show up in this community with their own questions and their own zigzags, the young people I am fortunate to be friends with as they carve their own paths. This is what the whole OSBB philosophy is trying to name: the wealth that begins when someone believes in you before you have anything to show for it.

The Four Currencies of Wealth, Capital, Wisdom, Opportunity, Network, start with the Network you were born into. But the deeper currency underneath all four is the one my parents handed me quietly across decades: being believed in without expectation.

If you were given this as a child, honor it by extending it to someone. If you were not, extend it anyway. That is where OSBB begins, not in the wealth you received, but in the belief you offer to someone whose path is still uncertain.

That is where wealth begins.

Be water, my friend. 🌊

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Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. This issue first appeared on LinkedIn. Every issue lives here.

Make My Mess My Message · Issue 3 · Friday 26 June 2026

Read to be reorganized, not reassured.

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Why the hero-CEO library left me stranded, and the messy books that brought me back.

Fifteen years ago, in the middle of starting Genesis HTA, I was reading my way out of the mess.

The books on my desk were the ones everyone in the corporate world told me to read. Jim Collins’s Good to Great. Jack Welch’s autobiography, handed to me earlier at Barco by management, framed as required reading for anyone serious about a future leadership role. Around them, a stack of similar titles full of the same advice: pick a big hairy audacious goal, hire only A-class players, build a flywheel, lean in.

I read them slowly. I underlined. I took notes. I tried to follow the playbooks.

Genesis HTA in those early years did not look like any of those books. The startup phase was messy. The pivots were constant. The product-market fit kept moving. The plan I had written down kept being wrong.

So I would go back to the books at night. In the darkest moments, when the cash flow was thin, when a partner had let me down, when I had a customer meeting in the morning and no clear story, I would open one of those books and look for the answer.

I found absolutely nothing.

What I found, instead, was an expectation. An expectation that if I did what these CEOs did, everything would unfold the way it unfolded for them. And the unspoken inverse: that if things were not unfolding that way for me, the problem must be me.

The reader becomes the failure. The book becomes the witness.

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It took me years to see what was actually wrong with those books.

They were not bad. They were not lying. They were doing something subtler and stranger than that. They were hero stories written by the hero of the story itself.

Someone becomes successful in a specific time, in a specific market, with a specific combination of luck and circumstance. Then they write a book about what success is supposed to look like, using their own arc as the template. They reverse-engineer their memory of what it took to get there. They remove the false starts, the dumb luck, the people who carried them at moments they barely remember. They build a clean story.

And that clean story becomes the playbook other people are supposed to follow.

The business shelf is full of these. They are not management literature. They are entertaining Marvel-like stories. The author is the protagonist. The market is the antagonist. The methodology is the superpower. And the reader is supposed to believe that the same superpower will work for them.

It almost never does. Not because the heroes are dishonest. Because the heroes are looking backwards.

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The books that actually helped came later, and they helped because they refused to do what those other books did.

Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog. They arrived later, during the cash-flow chapters and the partnership reckonings: the period when my own ignorance, my own bad partnerships, my own untested assumptions about category and value proposition all came due at the same time.

I was looking for answers in those books too. They did not give me any.

What they gave me was a messy journey. A series of moments where the operator-narrator did not know what to do, where every option was bad, where the choice was made on incomplete information and turned out to be partially right and partially wrong. The conclusion of each chapter was not a clean lesson. It was the next chapter.

That was the gift. Those books told me, by their structure, not by their advice, that the problems I was having were normal. That the way through was asking better questions, adapting to whatever the day demanded, building grit, and surrounding myself with people who told me the truth and helped me ask the tough questions instead of cookie-cutter advice.

Success, those books showed, is the outcome of doing the right things over and over. Not a single genius move that could be packaged and sold as a playbook.

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Around the same time I had to learn something else the hero books had not prepared me for.

Early on, I thought “peacetime” or “wartime” was a personal choice. I thought a calm, harmonious, sustainable company was something I could decide to run. I wanted to be that founder. I wanted the building to feel like a slow, considered ecosystem of trust.

The crises taught me otherwise. War or peace is not a choice. It is a context. Sometimes you sow. Sometimes you pull the weed. The first job of a company is not to flourish: it is to survive to see a next day.

Being a wartime operator is sometimes the only way to back out of a situation of your own making. You cannot always surf your way out of a messy giant shorebreak. Sometimes the only move is to fight the water until it lets you go.

The hero books had no chapter on this.

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Today my relationship with books is different.

I divide them into two groups. Both matter. Neither one alone is enough.

The first group is constraint-driven. Whenever I am stuck on a specific bottleneck, in the business, in a relationship, in a personal habit, I name the constraint clearly. Then I find the one or two books that are universally regarded as the best on that specific constraint. Usually they are older than ten years. The age is the filter.

What this does is not what you might expect. While I read, I rarely apply anything from the book directly. What the book does is stop me. It forces me to define the constraint better than I had defined it before. By the time I finish, I have usually found the answer myself, and the book has acted as the discipline that slowed me down enough to find it.

The second group is broader. Three to five “greats” a year. Books that have proven themselves across decades. The Stoics. Carol Dweck on growth mindset. Daniel Kahneman on how the mind works. Marcel Mauss on the gift cycle. These are the books that build a foundation, that sharpen the critical mind, that make the Renaissance approach possible. The same way that ski, sail, surf, kite, foil, wing all teach me different things about water and balance, broadening teaches you depth.

The rule that holds both groups together is one word: curate.

I do not read the book of the year. There are ten thousand books I should read and never will. The choice of what to read is the most important reading decision I make. Curation before reading is the discipline.

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Which brings me to the closed mind, and to Zappa.

I have read books with a closed mind. I did it for years at Total and then at Barco. Top management handed me reading lists framed as preparation for the next career step. Jack Welch was the classic example. I was hungry, ambitious, eager to belong, and they fed me the books that made me think the way they wanted me to think. They numbed my critical thinking by putting my ambition on doping.

I went along. For years.

The books that broke that conditioning were not the ones I was given. They were the ones that crossed my path and forced me to confront my own mind. Dweck on the growth mindset. Kahneman on how the mind actually works. And earlier, much earlier, when I was still in school, Marcel Mauss, through an anthropology professor who dedicated weeks of class to one essay and made me see what I had been looking at the whole time.

Frank Zappa got the principle into one line:

“A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open.”

The closed mind reads books as confirmation. The open mind reads books and lets them reorganize what it knew.

Same act of reading. Completely different result.

Read to be reorganized, not reassured. Choose what gets into your head like your life depends on it, because it does.

Be water, my friend. 🌊

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Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. This issue first appeared on LinkedIn. Every issue lives here.

Make My Mess My Message · Issue 2 · Friday 19 June 2026

Most standard software you buy is a solution looking for a problem.

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Why the software your team hates is the problem you didn’t see.

In the early 2000s I had two seats at the same company. One was on the team deciding what software the sales divisions would use. The other was running one of those divisions.

We bought a new CRM platform. I read the deck. Easier quotes. Better pipeline analysis. Disciplined follow-up. Professional sales management.

Twelve months later, my sales team called Friday afternoons “CRM afternoons.”

That was when they sat at their desks populating fields, updating win percentages on deals they hadn’t won, answering automated triggers generated by a logic that did not match how a real sales cycle actually works. The system was eating the day that should have been spent in front of customers.

I asked them what we could do better as a division. Product, marketing, engineering, service, anything.

They came back with one answer. Unanimous.

Get rid of the CRM.

Not the idea. This one.

That was the Collective Brain at work. The people closest to the work, given access and asked the right question, knew what the rest of us never saw. The system had been sold to the C-suite. It was being used by the people in the field: the ones who had to bear the flag and go win business. It was actively making them worse at the job.

That is when the realization landed. It was not only that the software was wrong. It was that the way it had been sold and built was wrong.

What good salespeople want to do is sell. That includes writing quotations: quotations are sales, not paperwork.

Software should make that work easier and faster. It should enable the people who use it.

When it does the opposite, when it eats the time the team needed to spend selling, you have not bought a CRM. You have bought the perfect sales prevention tool. Something has gone wrong well before the software was bought.

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Most standard software you buy is a solution looking for a problem.

The vendor writes the answer first. Then their marketers find the questions the answer can be sold against. Then their salespeople find buyers, usually in the C-suite, where the people who will never have to operate the software are the people with the budget. Then their consultants implement, which is a word the industry uses to mean: translate your reality into our template.

By the time the system reaches the people who have to use it on a Friday afternoon, the experience has been pre-decided by everyone except them.

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The fix is one move.

Start with the experience. Work your way back to the technology.

The experience is the customer in their actual moment. What they are trying to do. What is frustrating them. What would make them feel served. Map that first. Stay with it.

Then ask: what is the smallest, simplest, most intuitive system that delivers that experience?

That is the answer. The technology is whatever stays out of the way of the experience you mapped. Not whatever the vendor’s deck said it could do. Not whatever consultants said you would need. Not whatever flatters your title in the procurement decision.

I did not invent this principle. I just keep noticing it works.

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When we built another business years later, we made this the operating discipline from day one.

Two people joined to run it. Both had spent their careers buying from companies like the one we were now building. They knew, from their own lived experience on the other side of the table, exactly what mattered.

Three words.

Speed. Simplicity. Stock.

Speed: responding fast, faster than the customer expects, faster than anyone else.

Simplicity: easy to work with, simple logical workflows, no friction in the daily transaction.

Stock: having the product available when it was needed.

That was the whole experience, mapped by people who had lived it.

Everything else got built backwards from those three words. The technology stack. The team structure. The hiring criteria. The metrics. Every weekly meeting had to demonstrate movement on one of the three S’s, or the meeting was wasted.

We built systems. We did not buy them. The difference is everything.

It worked.

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We still run this. Every six months we get together for our Work Together Week off-site. Everyone on the team gets HomeWork.

Two questions. Think about the business broader than your current job: a whitepaper, a framework, anything that pulls them above their daily lane. And: what can or should we do better.

The quiet ones often turn out to have the longer view, the better priorities, and the analysis that goes to root cause instead of stopping at symptom.

Everything goes into the Collective Brain. The Brain keeps building.

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If you want to start with the experience this Monday morning, here is the starter version.

Pick the one thing that frustrates you most in your business right now.

Interview five people about it this week. All internal or customers. No consultants.

Ask each one what they would change and what the ideal outcome looks like.

List every answer before you change anything.

That is the whole technique.

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This week was four versions of one move.

Monday: read the relationship the contract is built on, not just the clauses.

Tuesday: build the camel that outlasts the cycle, not the unicorn that does not.

Wednesday: see the explicit learner who teaches, not just the learner who absorbs.

Friday: build from the experience the people in the field already understand, not the vendor’s deck.

The pattern stays the same in every domain.

Read what is underneath.

Most operators read the surface. The operator who survives reads what is underneath.

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Start with the experience.

Be water, my friend. 🌊

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Make My Mess My Message is a book written in public, one Friday at a time. This issue first appeared on LinkedIn. Every issue lives here.