If you don’t have a lot of time, there’s half a tweet’s worth here.
When I tell my story, people often don’t believe me. In fact, I sometimes don’t it believe myself. Born in Brazil, raised in Belgium, Switzerland and the United States, military service in Holland and Surinam, university in Switzerland. When Renée and I married, we subsequently raised our children there, in Holland, in France and in Mexico. To top it all off, we currently live in South Africa.
Travel is one of my biggest passions. As of August 2011, I’ve lived in 12 countries, worked in 27, and traveled to 45. I once swore I would visit a new country for every year of my life, so I’ve still got a lot of traveling ahead of me. Despite being a child of the developed Western world, my heart and soul reside in Mexico and South Africa.
Mark Twain once famously said: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness“. I truly believe that we are all more alike than we are different. History, religion, race, gender, nationality, language and all those other things that divide us in our daily lives are trivial details compared to the ties that bind us.
Predictably, my career has also been all over the place. Working for others. In IT, Finance, Sales and in Marketing. Working for myself, mostly in early-stage technology companies but since we moved to South Africa, also with entrepreneurs from the townships of Cape Town. I love start-ups. My interest in entrepreneurship got me involved full-time with a crazy project in Cape Town, which then got me involved in teaching, which is something I said I would never do. I love it. How did that happen?
For the details of my career, you can click on my career bio. If you really need to know more, you can request a CV or just ask me.
Wise people save the best for last. In 1975, I married Renée Korteweg. She is a renowned astronomer and Head of Astronomy at the University of Cape Town. We have three children, Christiaan, Tiemo (†) and Marisa.
