The Story
Five chapters, start to finish.
The Phones
My career started in a call center. Ziggo first, then AppleCare. The rules were simple and unforgiving: solve it fast enough that the queue doesn't back up, but never rush someone who's genuinely upset.
What that taught me: the fix matters less than whether people felt you were on their side while you fixed it.
The Build
Then a startup called WeConnect, where I became product owner of a customer data platform. Sprint planning on Monday, client demo on Friday, and me as the only commercial person in the building besides the founders.
Working daily with eight to ten developers teaches you to translate: business need in, buildable spec out, and honest answers in both directions. I never lost that habit. A decade later I still build, these days with AI, evenings and weekends. See Still Building for the proof.
The Partnership
At Criteo I spent five years carrying enterprise accounts myself. The ones I'm proud of aren't the biggest. They're the ones that stopped feeling like client and vendor.
We wrote joint business plans, real ones, where both sides put commitments on paper and went hunting for win-wins over years rather than quarters. We ran experiments together that could have failed publicly. We showed up at each other's events. I knew their internal politics, their roadmap, the names of people three floors away from my contact.
That's the difference between an account and a partnership. One renews because switching is annoying. The other renews because you're part of how they win.
The Handover
Then came the part I didn't expect to love. I stopped running the best accounts myself and started building the people who would.
First a team of 6, pulled together from people scattered across the org. Later, after a reorg, a merged organization that peaked at 18 people and 10 nationalities, spread across 5 European offices, fully remote before that was normal. The range inside that team ran from people I'd hired months earlier to veterans who had been at the company longer than I had. Twice I was handed scope far beyond my own, including EMEA-wide: 37 people, $200M+.
The best part of the job turned out to be watching someone on my team close a deal I couldn't have closed myself.
Now
In March 2026, my ten years at Criteo came to an end, in the same month our daughter was born. I took the months since deliberately: family first, and now choosing the next role with the same care I'd give a key account.
