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Career
Seven stops, in order
eBay
In-house search · where the career started
What I did. I started in search at eBay, working on SEO for one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the world. Millions of listings, every category imaginable, and a search footprint to match.
What it taught me. Search at true scale. When a platform has more pages than any team can review, quality stops being a checklist and becomes a system: templates, rules, and constant choices about what deserves to be found at all. I also learned that a listing and a product are not the same thing. A listing ends; the product, the entity, persists.
How it shapes my work. That last lesson never left. I still write about how ended listings get redirected to catalog pages and what that does to a search footprint, and it is the seed of the entity graph this whole site is built on: pages are temporary, entities are not.
Airbnb
In-house search · a marketplace becoming a brand
What I did. In-house search work at Airbnb, in the years when the company was turning a marketplace of spare rooms into a global travel brand.
What it taught me. That search demand is place-shaped and intent-shaped. People do not search for a company; they search for a city, a neighborhood, a trip they are imagining. The brands that win are the ones that become the default answer to a whole category of questions, not the ones that rank for a single keyword.
How it shapes my work. My first consulting surface is called The Default Answer for a reason. It started here: visibility is not about one ranking, it is about being the name the machine, and the customer, reaches for first.
Fanatics
In-house search · American sport
What I did. Search at Fanatics, the sports commerce company, from the United States. In 2018 the SEO team I was part of won Best In-House Team at the US Search Awards, one of two US Search Awards from that period, alongside a Webby Award.
What it taught me. How fan attention actually works. Sport runs on seasons, drops and tribal loyalty, and demand arrives in spikes that punish slow organizations. I also learned what it means when other people record your work: an award engraved by an outside body is worth more than anything you can say about yourself.
How it shapes my work. Two of my ventures, Fan Signal Desk and Jersey Grail, are built directly on what Fanatics taught me about fans. And the evidence-first rule behind this site, claim nothing you cannot show, is the award lesson applied to everything.
PayPal
Global payments · trust as the product
What I did. Work at PayPal, in a company where the product is, at bottom, a promise: your money will get where it is supposed to go.
What it taught me. That being found is table stakes and being trusted is the actual conversion. In payments, visibility work lives inside regulation, risk and brand safety, and it only ships if it survives all three. Credibility is not a coat of paint on the work; it is most of the work.
How it shapes my work. It is why I judge visibility by trust signals and not by traffic alone, and why the graph on this site separates documented fact from everything else. Attention you cannot defend is a liability.
Bitdefender
VP Marketing · running the whole function
What I did. VP Marketing at Bitdefender, the cybersecurity company. For the first time the job was not one channel but the whole marketing function.
What it taught me. How a specialist becomes an operator. Security is another trust business, like payments, but the marketing problem is wider: brand, demand, product and team all at once, with a board to answer to. A channel can be optimized. A function has to be run as a system, with routines that keep working when you are not in the room.
How it shapes my work. That is where my second consulting surface comes from. Long Game OS is the operating-systems view of marketing: build the machine that compounds, not the campaign that fades.
Fancard
Advisor · a ve2 ventures company
What I did. Advisory work for Fancard, a ve2 ventures company in the fan economy, working with its CEO on strategy and visibility as the venture pushed its restart.
What it taught me. The view from the advisor's chair. A small team cannot run a big-company playbook, and advice that ignores the team's real hours and budget is fiction. Fancard was also the test bed: the place where the Long Game approach had to prove itself on a real venture, with real constraints, before I could sell it to anyone else.
How it shapes my work. It set the shape of my practice. Consulting monetizes; a venture like Fancard is where the method gets proven. I do not sell systems I have not run.
TNC Visibility
Founder · TNC Brand Strategy BV
What I do. I run TNC Visibility, my consultancy, from Wassenaar. Two surfaces: The Default Answer, for search and AI visibility, and Long Game OS, for the operating systems behind it. The aim has stayed the same across twenty years: help organizations win attention and trust, in search results and in AI answers alike.
What it is teaching me. That the method has to survive being used on its author first. This website is the current experiment: my own name, rebuilt as an entity graph, in public, with every claim tied to evidence.
How it shapes everything else. It is the compounding stop. Every earlier lesson, eBay's scale, Airbnb's default answer, Fanatics' fans, PayPal's trust, Bitdefender's systems, Fancard's proof, is in the offer. The full picture is at thenextcorner.com.