From Curaçao to the world.
From a kid programming at age eleven in Curaçao, to architecting enterprise platforms in the Netherlands, to founding seven ventures running today. This is the long-form story.
Everything starts in Curaçao.
In a family where conversations always went somewhere. Some nights it was people. Some nights it was ideas. Some nights it was whatever was happening in the bigger world, far beyond the Caribbean, and somehow it always found its way back to the table.
A mother working at IBM brought home stories about computers and code while most of the world was still working out what a computer was even for. A father worked as a Social Worker, later becoming Trusted Advisor to the Minister of Health and Social Affairs of Curaçao, which meant the other half of every conversation was about people and society and what actually happens outside a spreadsheet. Technology and people, sitting at the same table every night. This mix shaped everything coming after it, long before anyone involved could have explained what shaping even means.
A grandfather who grows up poor in Charo.
He grew up poor in Charo, one of the rougher neighborhoods on the island, and fought his way out of it the hard way. Studied law. Went to the Netherlands to study further, because staying still was never actually an option for him. Came back to Curaçao and became one of the first three judges ever born on the island, at a time when this was close to unthinkable.
After retirement he did not slow down either. He directed the Curaçao Port Authorities and pushed, personally, for what became the Curaçao Mega Pier, the same pier welcoming cruise ships onto the island today. A kade now carries his name. The same restlessness, the same refusal to sit still once something needs building, runs directly through this work.
The programming starts at eleven.
Most kids at eleven are still figuring out what they like. Building digital things had already become as natural as breathing, and it never stopped. LEGO came first, then online architectures, then entire tech businesses, but it was always the same instinct wearing a different outfit: take pieces, understand how they connect, build something actually working.
LEGO remains the favourite way to spend free time today, which sounds like a joke until you notice it is not one. The instinct never changed. Only the pieces got bigger.
The city is part of the family story.
Rotterdam was already woven into the family story long before the Computer Science studies brought the journey there directly. Business Software Engineering was the specialization chosen, deliberately, over anything more generic, because the goal was never just to write code. It was to understand the businesses the code was supposed to serve.
The commercial work started in 2002. Azure came into the picture in 2011. Architect status followed in 2014. Each step built directly on the one before it, which is the same pattern every venture in this portfolio still follows today.
Two decades inside the most serious institutions in the Netherlands.
Banks. Pension funds. Insurers. Government ministries. Aviation infrastructure. Every deploy at this scale keeps a bank moving money and a pension fund paying someone’s retirement on time, and this reality shapes an engineer differently than a startup ever could.
Two decades of eight-figure platforms later, the architectures from those years are still running today, still carrying real responsibility. This is the actual definition of proof: not a claim on a page, but a system nobody has had to replace.
2018: Curaçao Tech Meetups is born.
It started with one speaker and 220 attendees in 2018, which was really just a bet the island wanted this and nobody had asked yet. It grew from there into Curaçao’s Leading Tech and AI Conference, because the bet turned out to be right.
In 2021, WALTERIONS opened its doors as the consultancy carrying the architecture discipline from the enterprise years into new work. From there the portfolio compounded quickly: MAGISTA.ai, DIZIZID, TICKETS.CW, EVENTFLAIRS, BLYNSE.ai, KadushiBot, AVIONIONS. Seven ventures, each one built on the foundations the last one proved out.
Life runs between Curaçao and Rotterdam.
Life runs between two places on purpose, not by circumstance. Close enough to the Dutch enterprise scene to stay sharp against the highest standard available, and connected enough to the Caribbean reality to build bridges almost nobody else is positioned to build, because almost nobody else lives fully in both worlds at once.
Underneath all of it sits one simple belief, unmoved in more than 20+ years: technology changes lives, and Curaçao deserves its seat at the global tech table. Every venture in this portfolio is, in one way or another, an argument for this belief.