About

I grew up in Essen and now study International Business in Maastricht. Somewhere between those two things I worked out what I actually enjoy: getting people into a room who wouldn’t otherwise meet, and building something with them.

That became MAIN, the Maastricht AI & Tech Network, which I co-founded and now lead. We started it on a simple observation: AI is going to reshape every field, and yet students in law, medicine and business were never talking about it with each other. So we opened a door. It’s now a community of 300+ students, run by a team of 26.

Most of my attention right now goes to the MAIN Summit: two days in November where we want to bring 300 to 500 students from across Europe to Maastricht for a hackathon, keynotes, and a lot of unplanned conversation. We’re still looking for speakers and partners who want to be part of it.

The harder question sits underneath that one, and it’s quieter: how do you lead 26 people without becoming a hierarchy, and how do you build something that outlives the people who started it? I’d like to come back in five years and find MAIN still here, bigger than we managed.

I don’t know exactly, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.

What pulls me: small teams, early-stage things, being close to people who are better than me at what I want to learn. I’d like to get more technical than a business degree makes you. I’d rather understand a thing than manage it from a distance. And I still consume far more than I create, which is a large part of why I started writing here.