Peter van Jaarsveld

Tell me what you're actually stuck on. If I can't help, I'll say so and try to point you to someone who can. Free 30-min calls — book one even if just to get a different angle on what you're working through. I've built and sold two services businesses, and now run a 1,200-person creative ops business inside the group that acquired the second one. That means I've sat on both sides of most founder problems: scaling something you own, then operating something at scale that you don't. If most of the advice you read is written for software companies and doesn't quite fit, that gap is part of why I'm here. Scaling services from zero — including the year you don't grow. Two to 1,200 people across two companies. Getting to 30, almost dying at 30, getting to 800, plateauing for two years, climbing again. Plenty of advice is about growth; less is about the year there isn't any. I've done both, and there's a good chance we need to talk about the second. Global teams — the unsexy mechanics. Not the "we believe in distributed work" pitch. The operational layer underneath: hiring across countries, comp benchmarking when London and Bogotá and Kuala Lumpur sit in the same org, performance management when you can't read the room, culture across languages and timezones. Leading at scale without the rule-book. When you can't be awake for every decision being made on the other side of the world, you can't write the rules fast enough. You have to lead with principles. Mine distilled down to three — care like crazy, be curious, build the community — and the autonomy that creates is what makes a global business actually move at speed. Selling a business and the decade after. I've sold two — one small in 2003, one bigger in 2016. The deal mechanics are well-covered elsewhere. Less talked about is what comes after: founder-becomes-employee; identity loss, the political layer you'd been insulated from, the time you tried to step away or grow but got pulled back in. What do you do when the thing you built over years and years is now under someone else's name on the org chart. AI, without the breathless bit. I lead AI for a 1,200-person creative business. Most of the noise is about the technology; less is said about craft, taste, and sector experience — which is to say experience and humanity. The over-index on tools and under-index on what you actually know is, in my view, the most expensive mistake people are making right now. That's the conversation I can usually be most useful in.

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  Bootstrapping

  Every venture I've built started as a bootstrapped idea, slowly nurtured to something that can be operated and scaled. Protecting that core essence and insight as your idea meets the world is both incredibly difficult and also critical to creating something truly unique. Let's chat

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  Building a team

  I've built small teams, large teams and most recently a team of over 1000 people across the world. I've had to scale teams down, rebuild them and restructure them. I have experience building local teams and highly-integrated global teams and have strong thoughts on what works and what should be avoided.

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  Idea validation

  I have spent a lot of time developing frameworks to help test ideas against audience and market and understand how stressful it can be send your fledgling ideas into the world. One of the best ways to start is with a simple conversation. Let's chat.

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  Remote work

  I've built distributed teams for 15 years, both in one country and across the globe. I've scaled them, restructured them and learned that while setting up remote teams can be hard, the flywheel of benefits they create make it worth it.