Hello, I’m Pascal

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 computer. An adorable tactical error.

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 arrived on the same afternoon and refused to separate again.

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. The internet had shown excellent judgement.

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, so I entered May1stReboot, an annual redesign contest with a real deadline and no interest in my excuses. I won. 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. I responded by hiding so hard that nobody found me in an office again. I went 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. A flawless demonstration of cause and effect.

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 ships at frightening speed. I could perfect one detail for a month. Watching him made the difference wonderfully obvious: I was polishing the silly little thing forever so I never had to put it in front of anyone.

The fix was simple and slightly embarrassing: make something for myself, put it in front of people and let reality have a turn. So my partner Eleanor and I built Horse, a browser that works with my brain instead of against it. We wanted to use it, which remains an excellent reason to build a browser.

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 built the thing, and over two years of rider conversations the pattern got embarrassingly obvious: the people who loved Horse all had ADHD. Daniel, a psychotherapist who also rides Horse, eventually said it plainly: “Horse externalizes executive functioning. That’s why it works for ADHD brains.” The computer was doing a job the brain had been expected to do alone. Computers love jobs!

In 2024 Horse made me Product Hunt’s Maker of the Year. More than a thousand riders use it every day. I am now permitted to continue building the browser, which is fortunate because I was going to do that anyway.