The journey that
made me.

I grew up between two cultures, Filipino and Dutch, always mixing them. That mix is where my creativity comes from. As a kid I won a few drawing awards, not because I could draw well, but because the ideas poured out of me.

I started making music young. Guitar, then piano, then producing, learning how the violin and the drums work, writing everything from orchestral pieces to raw techno. Producing music on a computer is what opened the door to software for me. There is even a video of me as a child saying I wanted to do something with computers. That is exactly what I do now.

During COVID, in 2020, it happened again. A second haemorrhage. I chose to recover at home, and redid the whole trajectory from the start.

More than five hospitals. More than seventy visits. Two brain surgeries, endovascular coiling, and radiation to remove the last weak spot in the vessel. Endless checkups and controls, because no medication worked cleanly. It was hard. I kept going back to school through it, bit by bit, not to build anything, but to recover, to keep challenging myself, and to keep fighting to become the best version of myself I can be.

I came home still feeling off balance, this time professionally. So I took on a master's in Digital Business and Innovation at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. It was tough, but what carried me through was not other people. It was my own mentality, the mindset I gained from my adventures abroad, from climbing the mountains, and from everything I survived in recovery. Somewhere in there I realised my mind had become genuinely strong, able to move through any adversity, because nothing is worse than what I have already been through.

Alongside it I worked: building AI at We Know People, leading digital transformation at Servicepaspoort, and as partner and Head of Technology at Radical Recruitment.