Leaving Microsoft

Today is my last day at Microsoft! 🤷‍♂️ Tomorrow I restart my career as an entrepreneur to challenge myself on a whole new level. What will remain is my passion to work with developers and build great software that people like to use. In the past 5 years I've advised others, mainly software vendors, how to do this with Microsoft technology. I've always aspired to start my own software company and now the time has come for me to do this!

A lot of people asked me what it is like to work at Microsoft. The answer is hard to summarize in a few words but let me give it a try. I joined Microsoft a year after Satya Nadella became the new CEO. The Microsoft I know has a great leader that executes a mission and a culture that I've always proudly tried to represent. It is hard to imaging what a tremendous growth Microsoft has made in these years. For me, empowering customers, with a new technology every week, has been a challenge that I've enjoyed every single day. I feel grateful that I got to work with so many super smart and talented people from all over the world. This broadened my horizons and all these diverse perspectives shaped me into who I am today.

Starting tomorrow, I restart my professional life: not being 'that Microsoft-guy' anymore. So what will I be doing? Together with former Microsoft colleague Jeroen Quakernaat I'm going to start a software business, focusing on 'Computer Vision'. Finding and inventing a product/market is part of the adventure in the months to come. We truly believe that with our background we can create innovate breakthroughs with AI, ML and Deep learning. So if you can imagine something we could do with camera footage, reach out to me and let's invent something cool together!

Then there was Covid19, impacting all of us. It's definitely a plot twist that I did not see coming when I resigned 2 months ago. Some of the ideas we were working on (eg. in restaurants and meeting rooms) we've put on hold. But I also strongly believe that there are plenty of opportunities in times like this, now it's up to us to find them. Having time to focus my creativity, passion and talent on inventing these new software solutions , shows a bright future ahead of me, I believe!

Thank you to all the customers/partners that I got to work with, I hope you enjoyed the collaboration as much as I did. Thank you to all the developers that learned together with me to overcome all the technical challenges. Thank you to all the colleagues that have inspired me, helped me out, showed personal interest and had fun with me on all our travels. I'm sure we will stay in contact but in any case, I take a lot of good memories with me to the next chapter in my professional life. May we meet again!