I believe the world can be better.

I started building software companies in the nineties and never really stopped. Axinom, which I co-founded in 2001, I led for twenty-three years across aerospace, media, and entertainment. Alongside it I led INETA in Europe, a developer community that grew past two million members, and the work kept crossing into policy, from the European Commission to the UN Internet Governance Forum. Along the way it took me to seventy countries on four continents.

My life has never been short of unexpected turns: challenges arriving from directions I did not anticipate, plans unfolding differently than intended. For a long time I tried to avoid the cracks. I have stopped.

The Japanese call the art of repairing broken things with gold Kintsugi. The repaired object is not hidden or thrown away; the seams of gold are part of its history, and the piece is more beautiful for having been broken. After thirty years of building, breaking, and learning, I have found this to be equally true of people.

The cracks don't diminish. They become gold.

These days I advise leadership teams on AI strategy through my firm, Business in Tech, lead strategy at run.events, where we build the software behind events of every size, from executive retreats to conferences with 150,000 participants, and work on sovereign European digital infrastructure as a Distinguished Fellow at reTECH Europe. I invest where biotechnology, AI, and preventive medicine converge.

And with Thomas Bothe, a former CEO turned coach who calls himself a “Transformation Space Janitor” and a man I disagree with more often than I agree, I wrote What Breaking Opens, a book about leading through fracture rather than around it. We have learned to disagree beautifully. The book ends with a question neither of us can fully answer.