The student years produced a run of small businesses: Safe Trans, Horeca MP3, Van Abbe IT and Van Abbe CM, Theseus & Ariadne, an internet one-stop-shop, Up2date. The degree was never finished; the web won.

Van Abbe IT was the legal home of the student-era work: repairs, custom-built PCs and small networks, sold to students and the elderly alike.

The course ran alongside Van Abbe IT: the same people who came to learn also bought their first PC there.

One student drove the guest's car, the other followed to bring the driver back. A service the ride-hailing apps would reinvent two decades later. It cried a lot.

Before it, changing a line on your website meant paying a developer by the hour, which cost far more than a month of Van Abbe CM. Software sold as a monthly service, years before the term SaaS existed.

This was before touchscreens and before streaming services existed. The CDs were ripped, the MP3s transferred to a computer in the venue, and playlists built with players like Winamp. A pioneering service in an industry that would only later go digital.

For most companies in the late nineties the step onto the internet was a maze. The collective behind the One Stop Shop brought Rotterdam's internet pioneers and its design avant-garde together: Hard Werken founders Willem Kars and Rick Vermeulen on concept and design, methodologists Robert Kerssing and Peter Schoo on backend, database architecture and information routing, Mathys on business development and application build with Willem van den Ende of provider IPR on hosting, and innovator Marianne Ketting on strategy.

The prize was presented in person by entrepreneur and art collector Joop van Caldenborgh. The combination of technical infrastructure, clean logic and high-end design laid a foundation for Rotterdam's early creative digital industry, long before search engines were commonplace.

A site for, by and of students, with local student marketing teams in the big student cities and members shaping the content through clubs and message boards. Twinning put in 400,000 guilders before there was anything to show; staff and costs grew until new money was needed, and none came. Emerce later called it a forerunner of Hyves. The only archived page is the February 2001 teaser promising the site would go live in a few days.

Sending a photo from a phone to the web was slow and expensive. The idea waited for flat-fee mobile data and the iPhone. His own list dates this first version to 2004.

Emerce reported on the new Amsterdam company on 8 September 2005. Each property became its own ad with star rating, occupancy and live availability, linking straight to the right page.

Mobypicture was the first service to post photos to Twitter. The company ran from a houseboat on the Amstel.

Two years old, five people, funded from its own cash flow and adding at least two clients a month: Medion, Careerfactory, Warenhuisservice, GSM.nu, InterHome. Later clients include Reed Elsevier, Overtoom and Intermediair.

That year Mobypicture was runner-up at Vodafone Mobile Clicks and received a Red Herring award. From 2009 Mobypicture became his main focus; Toading kept running in the background.

Presented on 25 November 2009 at Het Sieraad in Amsterdam, alongside Marjolijn Kamphuis as online media woman of the year.

Built in a day for the Dutch team, the World Cup page attracted three sponsors off a single tweet. Silicon Valley Watcher, where he presented it in July, called it a next stage in website development.

The poster shows the moby logo on an HTC screen above the line 'In 42 landen online. €2 per dag.' That year he was also named Dutch Startup Founder of 2011.

Fifty festival ambassadors were given portable WiFi to keep uploading from the parties.

Mobypicture was approaching two million users.

Over the following decade it became the engine under hundreds of sites: rabosport.nl, the Rotterdam Port Fund, the artist Tinkebell, Kinder World, Movement on The Ground, V2 Records, Before The Flood.

While brands were still buying traditional ads, Biko managed and professionalised early YouTube talents, bloggers and online creatives and matched them with brands. Its best-known work was Sranan Gowtu, pairing soft-drink brand Fernandes with record label Top Notch to celebrate Surinamese musical heritage, with nine million cans carrying the artists' portraits. Clients and talents included Arie Boomsma, Kakhiel, Top Notch and Vodafone. Omar Kbiri later carried the influencer and content work on under his agency Maak.

It grew out of Peter's Pan, his long-running thinking about children, talent and technology.

Align ambitions with a partner, choose a strong launch customer, have a real local presence abroad rather than a sales trip.

Týrsday also built sites such as the Rotterdam Port Fund's, which still carries its credit in the footer.

The first company he ever raised outside money for.

His lessons, stated publicly: negotiate faster, keep the shareholder group small, show the vision earlier, leave more room to find product-market fit. He does not call it a failure.

The problem he observed: remote teams that had lost the glue of the office.

Playbook is his main focus today: gaining momentum, still early, in his own January 2026 words.

In development: to:co, Journall, Kairos, Early Birds, AirBuild and LeeLoo, a Dutch legal assistant for contracts.