About
I've spent fifteen years translating technology into business outcomes. First at Booking.com, where I grew a team from 3 to 50 and went from literal translator to the extended leadership team in science and analytics. Then at Danone, where I built digital product management before it was a function — cleaning up 7,000 untracked websites and turning it into board-level policy.
That's the headline. Here's the real story.
1995 – 1999 · Bulgaria
Organizing large expos, running client campaigns. Fast execution, client-facing, hustle culture. My first real professional experience — in a country still figuring out what a market economy looked like.
3 years · Israel
The most compressed pressure cooker of humanity. Real situations, real consequences, real teams. Formative in ways that don't fit on a LinkedIn profile.
~6 years · Netherlands & Europe
Started making sandwiches in a café. Worked up to Michelin-starred kitchens with world-class chefs — French, Dutch, German, Swiss. Extreme pressure, elite team dynamics, absolute dedication. Think Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, not MasterChef.
2003 – 2008 · Amsterdam
My own company with my brother Alex. Bulgaria wasn't in the EU — we couldn't legally work as employees. So we found creative ways to operate. Entrepreneurial from necessity, not from a business school.
~10 years · Amsterdam
From actual translator — bottom of the company — to the extended leadership team in science and analytics. Zero to one. Grew a team from 3 to 50. The place where I learned what scale looks like and what it costs.
~5 years · Amsterdam
Director of Digital Product Management. Built the function before it existed. Cleaned up 7,000 untracked websites, turned digital governance into COMEX-level policy. The place where I learned what institutional change requires.
Most coaches have one career. I have six — kitchens, military, entrepreneurship, agencies, and the corporate leadership chapters. Every one of them taught me something about pressure, teams, and what happens to people when the ground shifts.
The philosopher Günther Anders — born Stern, like half my own surname — wrote in 1956 that humans don't fear technology because it threatens them. They fear it because it humiliates them. He called it Promethean shame. I've watched that exact feeling play out in hundreds of meeting rooms over fifteen years.
WerkAnders exists because I believe the hardest part of AI transformation isn't the technology. It's the moment a senior professional watches a machine do in ten seconds what took them a career to master — and doesn't know what to feel.
That moment needs a human on the other side. Not a framework. Not a course. A conversation.