Now: CMO @dealroomco | 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. 🧱
“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.cf/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.cf/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. 🧱
Where are we now in the AI wave?
Rebuilding is next.
- Rebuild business model.
- Rebuild your competitive edge
- Rebuild the organisation: ways of working
- The company itself is rebuilt around what AI made cheap/scarce
- Headless
- Optimise for revenue per employee
No.
Europe is missing the tech revolution.
Resulting in less tech investment and R&D, less growth and less economic room to manoeuvre for individuals.
That's cascading effects on social instability.
It's so funny. We gave everyone superhuman AI capabilties.
Then walked into a meeting with no agenda, no prep, outdated data, and three people defending opinions.
Tech is easy.
Changing how people work is the hard part.
Behaviour change is where the real gains are.
The new AI Moat Flywheel.
It's not just your moat.
Your moat also needs to create a compounding advantage (data, users, more volume).
And thirdly, you need to make sure you document learnings continuously with AI to achieve Recursive Learning.
The 3rd point almost no startup has nailed this yet.
We're so early in rebuilding.
Tomorrow, I’lll be speaking at All Day AI, a free, live and fully virtual conference with 120 speakers and more than 10k participants.
My talk is in the Lead track, how to manage AI Native organisations?
My keynote:
The Rebuilder: Adopting AI makes your company faster. It doesn’t make it fit for the new world.
Why the real gains come from rebuilding your business model, your moat and your organisation, not from the tools. And why that rebuild takes a new leadership identity: build for signal, improve your team’s judgement, and learn faster together. 🤔
Thank you @jobrietbergen , for the invite and @coldopn and @colinwynd for organising a full day entirely about AI learnings from practitioners.
My session: Thursday at 7:30 a.m.–8:00 a.m. ET
ADAI Stage: Stage 3
Join the conference and pick your track BUILD, LEAD, SECURE and SHIP tracks during the day.
Register is free: alldayai.com
The Periodic Table of Business Functions.
118 business functions, mapped.
You can connect or build.
Autonomy and Agents do the rest.
It's all about judgement to build + grow a company.
Rebuilding companies becomes the next wave in AI Adoption to survive and compete.
By @Idealab -> idealab.ai/elements-of-busin…
The top 30 Influential people changing and building Europe's Spinout ecosystem! 👷♂️+👩🔬+🏫.
🎤 30 of the most influential people shaping Europe's Spinout ecosystem right now! 🇪🇺
From founders and investors to university leaders, tech transfer pioneers and policymakers, these are the voices pushing the frontier forward.
And where are European spinouts heading next? 🧑🔬
On 18 November, the new European Spinouts Report 2026 launches at @SlushHQ , in collaboration with Atlantic, MITO Technology, FORWARD one and AlbionVC.
It's a deep dive into which universities produce spinout value, which sectors create the biggest outcomes, and what separates the spinouts that scale.
Get early access, link in the comments
Plus, let us know who's missing from the list!
The Top 30:
- Francesco Sciortino, Co-Founder & CEO, Proxima Fusion
- Lisa Ericsson, Head of KTH Innovation & CEO, KTH Ventures
- Karin Beukel, Chief Innovation Officer, University of Copenhagen
- Marco Hutter, Professor & Director, ETH Center for Robotics, ETH Zurich
- Frank Floessel, Head of ETH Entrepreneurship, ETH Zurich
- Ana Avaliani, Director of Enterprise, Royal Academy of Engineering
- Anu Honkalinna, Head of Spinoff Asset Management, Aalto University
- Devika Thapar, Co-Founder & COO, Wilbe
- Rafael Laguna de la Vera, Director General, SPRIND
- Paul-François Fournier, Executive Director of Innovation, Bpifrance
- Ekaterina Zaharieva, Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation, EC
- Greg De Temmerman, Director Deep Tech, Spin-Off and Ecosystems, Techleap
- Margrethe Jonkman, Chair of the Executive Board, VU Amsterdam
- Yann Menière, Chief Economist, European Patent Office
- Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, former Co-editor Global Innovation Index; Director, Creative Economy
- Lisa Smith, CEO, Midlands Mindforge
- Diarmuid O’Brien, Chief Executive, Research Ireland
- Tomas Coates Ulrichsen, Director, Policy Evidence Unit, University of Cambridge
- Jan Goetz, Co-Founder & CEO, IQM
- Daniel Metzler, Co-Founder & CEO, Isar Aerospace
- Helmut Schönenberger, Co-Founder & CEO, UnternehmerTUM
- Jamie Macfarlane, Founder & CEO, Creator Fund
- Paul Van Dun, General Manager, KU Leuven Research & Development
- Massimiliano Granieri, Board Member & Policy Lead, Netval
- Stefano Buono, Founder & CEO, newcleo
- Jens Nielsen, CEO, BioInnovation Institute
- Simon Hepworth, Interim Chief Development Officer at UKRI & President at TenU
- Paweł Bochniarz, Managing Partner, Radix Ventures
- David Barber, Director, UKRI SOFAIR Lab, UCL
- Malte Brettel, Prorector for Industry and Business Relations, RWTH Aachen
And of course, the authors of the European Spinouts Report: Lorenzo Chiavarini, Leonardo Massa, Quentin Calleja, Boy de Jonge, Dave Grimm. 🙌
Explore the top 30 profiles and their backgrounds, and get early access to the report 👉🏼
dealroom.co/top-30-people-eu…
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