GTM, AI, Marketing, Growth | prev built Growth Tribe.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Joined April 2009
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Introducing the Rebuilder 🧱
The new identity for leaders rebuilding growth in the AI era. The constant rhythm to grow by building, judging, and aligning.
You're using AI to optimise workflows. Automate the busywork. Push productivity up. It's not enough.
This isn't an AI problem. It's a new intelligence economy, and that means managing intelligence, not a hierarchy.
Your company was built on assumptions from before AI existed. What execution costs. What a team should look like. How fast you're allowed to move.
Those assumptions are already dead. You just haven't rebuilt around that yet.
Wait until the numbers prove you wrong, and there won't be a company left worth rebuilding.
This isn't a new skill you bolt onto your leadership. It's a new identity. You're not starting from a blank page, you're rebuilding the company from the foundation while it's still running, while your team still trusts the old way.
That takes a leader who can move through three modes on purpose with the right energy: build fast with AI, judge what's actually worth building, align the humans and the agents around it.
I call that leader a Rebuilder. 🧱
Scenario 5 is happening:
🛰 Techno-colonisation U.S. and Chinese tech giants quietly take over infrastructure, platforms, and data. Europe becomes a digital dependency zone, governed by foreign platforms and protocols. Real controls are in AI, LLMs, chips and energy. And capital flows bypass Europe.
The faster your team can build, the more its judgement matters.
How to get your team from building to higher judgement maturity, that turns AI adoption into impact?
🔨 Level 1: Hackathons
Open eyes. Spark building energy. Build working prototypes.
Behaviour change: People start reaching for AI to solve problems themselves, without waiting for permission or instructions.
🔁 Level 2: Buildathons
Build in iterations to test real assumptions. Seek the next real signal. Measure how many iterations you complete and what you learn in one day.
Behaviour change: Teams turn assumptions into small tests and use each result to decide what to build or change next.
⚖️ Level 3: Judgeathons
Evaluate quality and sharpen taste. Check predictions against evidence. Update your beliefs + systems and how you make decisions as a team.
Behaviour change: Teams openly question each other’s reasoning, acknowledge when they were wrong and revise decisions when the evidence changes.
My last post. Two years at @dealroomco Time for my next AI adventure.
Before I leave, some result highlights we achieved as a team. Starting with 235 opportunities in Q3, Dealroom’s best quarter ever! 🙌
Campaigns & Influence narratives:
- Leading the launch of the Global Tech Ecosystem Index 2025 & 2026: 120+ media mentions worldwide and used by European presidents.
- Promoted 123+ reports, including European Deep Tech, European Spinouts and The State of Defence Tech.
- Launched the EMEA Power Law Ranking to show how concentrated tech success really is.
Product Launches:
- Launched the new Dealroom AI native API. An incredible product! Well done team! 👏
- Launched the new Ecosystem Platform for 100+ governments/cities.
- Quarterly VC Reporting to benchmark 400+ locations each quarter.
Events & Webinars & Conferences:
- Organised the sold out AI Policy Summit with Prosus in Amsterdam, bringing together 30+ speakers and more than 250+ attendees.
- Global Tech Ecosystem Index Launch in Berlin during GITEX AI EUROPE Berlin with 50+ true ecosystem builders.
- Hosted 32 webinars and product launch keynotes
- Partner with 20+ leading tech conferences to kick off the conferences with fresh insights and meaningful panels.
AI Adoption in GTM & Marketing:
- Ran three company-wide AI hackathons to AI pill the organisation and embedded AI tools and Agents into daily workflows.
- We rebuilt the data->insight->content->distribution machine with the new Dealroom API at the heart of our website and content strategy to produce high-quality content in minutes.
- Created freedom for the team to experiment, learn and automate our GTM funnel step by step. Still testing new tools daily and learning every day! 👷♂️
I had a blast. Because I strongly believe in entrepreneurship, innovation and economic growth. Dealroom gives cities, funders and ecosystem enablers the insights to understand and strengthen their tech ecosystems to support builders and scale innovation. I’m humbled to have contributed to that mission alongside such a talented team.
Thank you, @yoramdw for the opportunity, the trust and all the learnings. You’ve built an incredible company! 🙏
And thank you, Orla Browne, Peter Foy, Boris Bavinck, Daniel, Nicole, Alon Meidan, Matthieu Demolin, Lorenzo Chiavarini, Felix Ullmer, Aoife Morrin, Peter Velsen, Roxane Grisel (Caudron), and everyone else. All 'data' rockstars! Good luck with the rebuild global platform launch! 🤖
Next? Time to build again. 👷♂️ More about this later.
Het vertrouwen….
De pitch van de @VVD (@QueenyRaj) om miljardenbedrijven naar Nederland te halen:
“Kom hiernaartoe, dan kunnen we jullie belasten en precies vertellen wat jullie wel en niet met AI mogen doen!”
Totaal absurd. Geen deepfake. We worden geregeerd door clowns.
Ask yourself, how often you change your beliefs. 🤔
Because it’s time to increase your unlearning rate. 🙃
“For the first time in history, intelligence is something humans can build. The cognitive capability to reason, analyze, synthesize, decide, and create is producible at scale and accessible on demand”. […] “frontier AI is most valuable in real-world settings, as deployment across enterprises is where economic impact is greatest and where the improvement loops from customer feedback are richest.”
- Claude S1 note.
I’d love to see more on X from founders building AI-native organisations is. how they actually run meetings with humans and AI agents. What works? what doesn't
A few questions I’m curious about:
• Are agents actively contributing, challenging assumptions and bringing evidence, or just transcribing?
• How do you separate useful builds from AI slop? What evidence shows that what you’re building is creating value?
• How do you make decisions? Which can agents make, and which need human judgement?
• How do you know whether your judgement is improving? Do you compare earlier predictions with actual outcomes (calibrated judgement)?
• How do you build a shared reality between humans and agents: common goals, current context and clarity on what’s been decided?
Anybody have seen real examples? I’d love to learn. 🤓
In the new AI world, leaders need so many new mental models to make judgement decisions, set direction, develop clear strategies and evaluate their effectiveness.
It’s incredible how many mental models are now outdated.
I’d love to see more leaders openly share which they’ve discarded and which they use for specific judgements.
The singularity!
The most mind blowing stat we've seen so far is this:
"As of June 30, 2026, we had raised an aggregate of $141.1 billion of capital and had cash and cash equivalents of $112.4 billion and short-term investments of $19.3 billion."
That means to date, they have burned 9.7b, they are growing at a rapid pace, and are profitable on an operating income basis as of the June quarter! This is likely the most efficient scaling of a business in the history of capitalism.
xitter.gq/AnthropicAI/status/211…
Rules are rewritten.
Companies need to rebuild.
And new mental models need to be created for this singularity AI disruption that is coming.
Wild times!
My quick takeaways on the Anthropic S-1:
1. This is a historical moment
2. $6.6M in revenue per employee!! Hard to even comprehend how good that is but Anthropic is AI native as it gets so makes sense.
3. I always thought OpenAI would drop their S-1 first
4. Customers spend about 9x more after a year. Net Revenue Retention is approximately 900% as of Sep 30, 2026. Good SaaS companies brag about 120%.
5. Cowork is growing faster than Claude Code did. Goes to show you the demand for consumer products. Duo will probably rip.
6. 3 years ago this company did $41M in revenue. In the first six months of 2026, it did $16.3 billion. I don't think anyone has a mental model for that curve yet, I sure don’t.
7. Nearly half of revenue comes through cloud marketplaces. About 48% comes from customers buying through them. Big companies buy where their budget already lives, and the lesson for founders selling to enterprises is to get listed where your buyers already spend.
8. Their run rate formula is published: the last 28 days of usage times 13, plus subscriptions times 12, which i guess is the new ARR math for founders?
9. It looks like They're merging Cowork into Claude dot au which tells you the chat box era is ending and the "go do the work for me" era is here.
10. Thousands of Anthropic employees are about to become liquid at once, so expect the biggest wave of new AI startups and angel checks San Francisco has ever seen. Reminds me when Facebook went public but this is way bigger.
Let’s go!
11. Buried in the filing, Anthropic says the gap between what Claude can do and how widely it's used is one of its biggest growth opportunities, so the company itself is telling you the models are ahead of the market and someone has to close that gap for dentists, landlords, and plumbers.
12. Whatever happens, exciting times to be building in AI.
If you want to AI pill your team, to speed up AI adoption and increase rapid experimentation to rebuild your company: new business model + rebuild your moat/competitive advantage + rebuild your organisation ways of working.
You team needs 9 things:
01 AI Manifesto ✍️
It’s time for an AI manifesto not a policy presentation. We’re rebuilding no transformation.
02 AI Hackathons 👷
Level up people AI capabilities. Let them witness, build and learn, don’t tell.
03 Find Catalysts 🧑💻
Find catalysts, not champions. Builder mindset (2 in 50). Reward and keep them.
04 Reallocate Hiring 🛑
Stop with hiring. Use backfills for AI tools, upskilling, hackathons, and tokens.
05 AI Fitness Levels 🎚️
Don’t demand provable ROI on augmentation immediately. Go for AI fitness levels.
06 Unlimited Tokens & Tools 🛠️
Everybody unlimited TOkens and access to all AI tools. Enable and remove barriers.
07 Psychological Safety 🧸
Psychological safety for teams to try, fail, experiment, and place bets.
08 Experimentation Culture 🧪
Build a structured experimentation process and culture across the organization.
09 Remove Barriers 🚧
Speed up! Break down organizational barriers that slow your team down.
Helping people/organizations with behavioral change is the real game.
it's absolutely amazing that technology capabilities are now evolving on a timescale of weeks while legacy stuff like institutions (banks), labor markets, & social norms take years, if not decades to adapt, if even that.
you know this is true when every week there is a new product that you can feel has enormous potential to disrupt meaningful parts of society / culture in a very very short period of time.
it's unclear to me that we will ever reach an equilibrium here where things will feel calm until maybe a full singularity is in place.
It has a new name and new leadership identity:
xitter.gq/sabben/status/20946708…
Introducing the Rebuilder 🧱
The new identity for leaders rebuilding growth in the AI era. The constant rhythm to grow by building, judging, and aligning.
You're using AI to optimise workflows. Automate the busywork. Push productivity up. It's not enough.
This isn't an AI problem. It's a new intelligence economy, and that means managing intelligence, not a hierarchy.
Your company was built on assumptions from before AI existed. What execution costs. What a team should look like. How fast you're allowed to move.
Those assumptions are already dead. You just haven't rebuilt around that yet.
Wait until the numbers prove you wrong, and there won't be a company left worth rebuilding.
This isn't a new skill you bolt onto your leadership. It's a new identity. You're not starting from a blank page, you're rebuilding the company from the foundation while it's still running, while your team still trusts the old way.
That takes a leader who can move through three modes on purpose with the right energy: build fast with AI, judge what's actually worth building, align the humans and the agents around it.
I call that leader a Rebuilder. 🧱
