About Me

A Child and his Disc

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1998. I was a kid, cross-legged on the big chair at the family computer, listening to the CD-ROM drive whir up like a small jet. The grown-ups had decided "computering" was bad for me, so screen time was rare. But this disc was a special one: a bubbly full-screen interface for children, designed to shield young minds from the brutal gray boxes of Windows 98. It was meant to keep me out of the system. It had the opposite effect.

Instead of launching the games, I went rooting around in hidden files and folders. I couldn't have told you what "programming" was, but I figured out I could poke at the code, swap out images, and reshape that bubbly little world into something new. Something my grandmother could use too. Design and development showed up the same afternoon, fused into one thing, and I was completely cooked.

A Teen and his Themes

By 2005 I was a teenager, spending whole weekends repainting every pixel of Windows XP on my grandmother's hand-me-down PC. Same spark, bigger canvas: full themes, icons, wallpapers, the works. I'd hike to the library for internet and post my stuff on deviantART. They started featuring my themes on the homepage as "Daily Deviations." At school I was "disruptive." On the internet I was a hero. I'll let you guess which one I trusted.

In Japan, Windows100%, a magazine for computer enthusiasts, started bundling my themes on their cover CD-ROMs. A magazine disc had set me off in the first place, and now a magazine disc was carrying my work to other kids. The universe doing a little bow.

Around 2008 I needed a personal website. To bully myself into actually finishing one, I entered May1stReboot, an annual website redesign contest. I won, and the prize was unlimited hosting on mediatemple. Suddenly I could build as many websites as I wanted, free, and I could build them for other people too.

A Nomad and his Laptop

In 2011 I packed my bags and left Holland for the first time, landing in New York for an internship at Livestream. After small-town Holland, New York was the first place that matched my energy. I made it a rule to say "yes" to everything, which led to a series of incredibly stupid adventures (the good kind). A year later I became Lead Designer at The Next Web, and that felt like landing.

Bustling offices suited me. Logos, animation studies, turning co-workers into animated centaurs. The catch: the happier I was, the more likely someone was to yell at me. So I tried to hide. In fact, I hid so hard that they never found me in an office again by going remote in 2013.

I hopped countries and built brands and websites for YC startups out of laptop-friendly cafés. In Japan I poured my love of languages into KanjiNerd, my first solo-built app. In 2017 I launched Johto Mono (a pixel font) and Sejong's Cup (a cheeky drinking game) on Product Hunt. I spent a lot of time making things I thought were beautiful and zero time making things that made money. Within a year I ran out of money. Stunning, really. Top-notch product strategy.

A Man and his Horse

Back to freelancing, I settled in South Korea. In 2018 I crossed paths with Pieter Levels (@levelsio), founder of NomadList. Pieter could ship a product in a month. I could perfect a detail in a month. He called it "ego." Close enough, but my version was: keep polishing the silly little thing forever and you never have to put it in front of anyone.

The fix was simple and slightly embarrassing: make things for myself, first, and trust that other people like me might benefit. So my partner Eleanor and I built Horse, a browser that works with my brain instead of against it. Mostly because we wanted to use it.

A Maker and his Browser

Horse Browser is the same craft I first stumbled into on that children's disc, scaled way up. It's the browser for special little boys and girls like me who want to get their special little life together. It wasn't supposed to be "the ADHD browser." We just built the thing, and over two years of user conversations the pattern got embarrassingly obvious: the people who loved Horse all had ADHD. Daniel, a psychotherapist who also happens to use Horse, eventually said one sentence in plain terms: "Horse externalizes executive functioning, that's why it works for ADHD brains." That sentence cracked it open. I went and read the Barkley shelf myself.

In 2024 it won Product Hunt's Maker of the Year. Over a thousand riders use it daily. And I'm only getting started. You are welcome to try your fun little things instead.