Essays, playbooks, and measured findings on building with AI, running agencies, and how work actually gets done - plus personal stories and the opinions I will defend. Much of it published here first, and all of it open.
My previous co-founder and I started our digital agency in 2009 because we worked well together. Nobody told me that running an agency is a sequence of different jobs wearing the same title, rotating every few years, each one asking a different version of you to show up. The partnership was built on the shape of the first job. The job kept changing. We did not.
In 2015 I was running the exact version of the agency everyone now predicts the death of. Thirty people, a pyramid, margin living in the gap between what a junior cost and what a junior billed. Predictions about the industry are usually written so they can never be wrong. These five are written the other way: dated, specific, and made to be graded in 2029. Hold me to them.
My agency had thirty people, and every chair had a person in it. My current company has one person and more chairs than the agency ever did. AI fills the hands of every seat: it writes, codes, forecasts, drafts. What it does not hold is the head of the chair, the question each seat exists to ask. That part still has to live somewhere, and there is only one somewhere left.
There was a wall in our Amsterdam office covered in framed certificates, and a shelf with the serious hardware: a Cannes Lion, a Webby, a D&AD Pencil. When I mention them to clients today they are always positively surprised. That surprise is worth examining, because it means the awards impress everyone and brought us almost no one.
We set out to build one place where you could find local experiences in Yucatán and book them without friction. Then we started talking to the businesses, and the idea we had written down stopped matching the thing that needed to exist. Yucatán Deals went live today. This is what changed between the first version and this one.
A friend told me: either you go, or you stop talking about it to me. A few months later my family and I were in Mérida. That is the story I usually tell, and it is true, but it is the easy version. It ends on the decision. The actual story is what came after, and that part is much longer and much less neat than I used to be willing to admit.
You don't need the perfect project to say yes. I've said no to high-paying work that felt wrong, and yes to zero-budget projects that turned into something great. The difference is a simple rule: great people, interesting work, good money - at least two out of three must be true.
I write regularly on LinkedIn about what I'm building and learning: agency growth, AI development, product judgment, and the messy reality behind making things work.
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