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How did the issue of obtaining a digital nomad visa resonate with your experience of mobility and borders?
Growing up across seven countries and attending international schools in the Netherlands, borders were never abstract to me. Every few years, new country, new paperwork, new rules. So when I moved to Brazil and started going through the Digital Nomad Visa process myself, it wasn't intimidating exactly, but it was messy in ways that felt unnecessary. I knew what good looked like from having navigated so many immigration systems, and this wasn't it. The information was scattered, the official portal was entirely in Portuguese and clearly designed for lawyers, and the rejection rate for self-filers was high for entirely preventable reasons. That gap between "this should be manageable" and "most people are getting it wrong" was really where GetBrazilVisa.com started , not as a grand business vision, but as a reaction to a problem I understood personally and felt I could fix.
You didn't come from a coding background. What made you believe you could still build this?
Honestly, the belief came after I started, not before. After leaving GAIA, I had time to actually pay attention to what was happening with AI tools - not at a surface level, but properly. I started using them every day, breaking things, figuring out what worked. Especially Claude Code blew me away with its capabilities. What I realised pretty quickly is that the bottleneck was never whether you could code - it was whether you understood the problem well enough to direct the tools intelligently. I understood immigration friction from lived experience, I understood what digital nomads needed, and I had the commercial instincts from my CEMS background to think about positioning and growth. The technical layer became something I could work with rather than around. Curiosity got me in the door, but it was the follow-through that turned it into something real.
What did you have to unlearn about technology, AI, or yourself during this process?
The biggest thing I had to unlearn was the idea that technical complexity was a moat. I'd grown up around the assumption that software was hard, that building products required years of specialized training, and that people like me - generalists with a business background - were permanently on the outside of that world. That turned out to be mostly outdated. What AI didn't change, though, was the importance of taste, judgment, and knowing your customer. The tools can build fast, but they'll build the wrong thing just as fast if you don't have clarity on what you're actually solving. About myself, I had to get more comfortable with imperfect early versions - shipping something functional and learning from it rather than waiting until everything felt polished. That's a harder unlearn than any technical one.
What would you say to a CEMS student or alum who has an idea but feels "not technical enough" to pursue it?
I'd say the technical gap is smaller than you think, and shrinking fast. What doesn't shrink is the gap between people who understand a real problem deeply and those who don't - and that's the thing CEMS actually trains you for. The network exposure, the cross-cultural fluency, the ability to work with ambiguity across different contexts - those matter enormously when you're building something new. What I'd caution against is using "I'm not technical" as a reason to wait. Use it as a constraint that shapes how you build, not as a door that stays closed. Find the tools, find collaborators where you need them, and focus your energy on the part you understand better than anyone else. The curiosity has to be genuine though - you can feel pretty quickly who's actually engaging with these tools versus who's just gesturing at them.
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Published on 09.04.2026
