About
A builder who learned the whole business — sales, capital, and the technology itself.
I build companies from the ground up and turn frontier technology into revenue. My path has been deliberately broad: I have carried a sales number, built and led a large team, run a company single-handedly, and — when I had to — taught myself to write the software. That range is the point. It lets me sit with a board, a customer, and an engineer in the same afternoon and be useful to all three.
I grew up between Germany and the United States — secondary school at the Georg-Büchner-Gymnasium in Darmstadt, then high school and a degree in Psychology at Tennessee State University in Nashville — and I have built my career in the Netherlands. That mix left me comfortable moving between cultures and markets, which has mattered in every role since.
I started in media relations at TomTom for the German-speaking markets, then spent a decade at Globility Connect, where I joined as a junior account manager and built the company's export division from nothing into its largest and most productive unit — forty-five people, and the majority of company sales. Along the way I founded UNAS, a video platform for charity and aid workers. When the outsourced build failed to deliver, I taught myself to code and finished it — the moment I became a technical founder.
In 2018 I went out on my own with Tekle B.V., an enterprise-IT firm supplying data-center and office hardware. Run entirely solo, it reached €19 million in annual turnover and became the largest Microsoft Surface partner in the Benelux. In 2020 I could see where display technology was heading, so I wound the business down and reinvested everything to found Tekle Holographics.
What I'm doing now
At Tekle Holographics I am founder, CEO and chairman of the board. We develop glasses-free holographic displays for defense, security and data-visualization markets. I chair the board, built the company's governance and cap table, structured its financing, and am now leading a restructuring to carry the technology into its next phase — named inventor, along the way, on four patent applications.
How I work
Restraint, ownership, and a bias to build.
Own the outcome
I take full responsibility for the number and the plan behind it — the way a founder does, whether or not the title says founder.
Understand it end to end
Commercial, financial and technical fluency in one person, so decisions are made with the whole picture in view.
Build through change
Turnarounds, restructurings and hard pivots are part of the record, not a footnote. I keep boards and teams aligned through them.
Say it plainly
Specific beats clever. I would rather be precise and credible than loud — with a board, an investor, or a customer.
Education and languages
Education
BSc, Psychology — Tennessee State University, Nashville (USA) · 2003 – 2007
High School Diploma — Hillsboro High School, Nashville (USA) · 2003
Secondary schooling — Georg-Büchner-Gymnasium, Darmstadt (Germany)
Languages
English (native) Dutch (native) German (native) Tigrinya (fluent) French (basic) Mandarin Chinese (learning)
Based
Hilversum, Netherlands. Open across the Netherlands and Europe — on-site, hybrid or remote — with frequent international travel and a network spanning Europe, the Gulf, the United States and China.
Open to senior executive, board, and advisory roles.