---
title: "About | Corrado Verhoeven"
description: "I'm a generalist. I go deep, just not in one direction."
image: "https://cver.me/img/avatar.jpg"
source: "https://cver.me/about"
author: "Corrado Verhoeven"
---

# I'm a generalist. I go deep, just not in one direction.

In high school I was the guy who could make things with computers. I built an app, people actually used it, and I liked the whole loop: understand a problem, design a flow, build, ship.

Computer engineering was the obvious next step. On paper it was perfect. In real life it was theory, exams, and not enough real problems. I dropped out. It wasn't a clever pivot. It was a dark patch, and it taught me that I don't work well when the goal is passing the exam instead of solving something real.

I shifted into economics and international management, then business. Erasmus in the Netherlands, a year at Berkeley. Berkeley was the first place I saw people treating ideas like experiments: try something, ship it, change your mind.

After that I went into management consulting at a large bank. It was the respectable option, with a good salary, big projects, and a close look at payments and at how large organisations actually move. It also meant twelve-hour days and a lot of energy spent on process that didn't fix the work underneath. I wasn't there to genuinely fix the system. I left.

## Now

Small companies have the same problems the bank had, with fewer zeros, and unlike a bank they can actually change. That's where I work now. I sit with the owner and map how orders, invoices, or tenders move through the company. Then I automate whatever doesn't need a person.

If a role is built around one narrow specialty, I'm probably not the right fit. I do my best work when a problem crosses product, operations, and engineering, and someone needs to understand how the whole thing connects.

The part I enjoy most is working out what a client actually needs, which is rarely the thing they first ask for. Automation only works if there's a platform the rest of their tools can plug into, and that gets tricky when half of those tools are closed enterprise systems. So I spend a lot of time finding the right balance, and I try to choose things that will still make sense when the company has grown. The concrete projects are on the [work page](/work).

Along the way I'm trying to automate myself too, an old functional analyst turning into a software architect. If any of this sounds like your company, [write me](mailto:corrado.verhoeven@gmail.com).