Practical insights on AI strategy, growth and leadership

Practical insights on AI strategy, growth, commercial scaling and leadership from Stephan Engelen — 25+ years of building and advising technology companies.

• Not Every Business Challenge Is the Right One to Take On · 2026-10-26

  What experience has taught me about leadership, transformation and the willingness to change.

• Scaling Beyond the Founder · 2026-10-12

  When the Organisation Must Become Smarter Than Its Founder

• AI’s Prisoner’s Dilemma · 2026-10-01

  AI adoption creates a prisoner’s dilemma for leaders: move fast enough to remain competitive without gradually removing the safeguards you may later wish you had kept.

• Raising Capital Too Early: When Funding Comes Before Evidence · 2026-09-17

  Why raising capital before you have real evidence can turn a financing round into an expensive way of discovering that your original assumptions were wrong.

• Becoming a Product Company Is Not About the Product · 2026-09-01

  For project-based technology companies, becoming a product company is less about the product than about changing how the organisation thinks and behaves.

• When Experience Becomes a Constraint · 2026-08-18

  Experience in leadership teaches you patterns, judgement tells you when those patterns no longer apply. Why pattern recognition can quietly mislead leaders.

• Changing Before You Have To · 2026-07-14

  Change leadership means questioning today's success before the market forces you to, how tech leaders recognise a changing game in time.

• The Customer You Think You Know · 2026-07-06

  Successful technology companies rarely lose their way overnight. More often, the decline begins with a series of perfectly rational decisions taken on the basis of an increasingly outdated understanding of the customer.

• AI Is Not a Software Revolution, It Is an Infrastructure Revolution · 2026-03-27

  AI is not just another software wave. It is much closer to what electricity once was: a foundational shift that only creates real impact when the underlying infrastructure evolves with it.

• The Leadership Failure That Quietly Kills Scale-Ups · 2026-03-24

  Most companies do not fail because they lack intelligence or capital. They fail when trust at the leadership level disappears — and execution slowly suffocates.

• The Difference Between a Coach, a Consultant and a Strategic Advisor · 2026-03-24

  The advisory market has never been more crowded. But from the perspective of a CEO or founder, coaches, consultants and strategic advisors serve very different purposes. Understanding the difference matters.

• Why Most AI Projects Fail Before They Start · 2026-03-18

  AI initiatives rarely fail because of technology. They fail at the decision stage. A pragmatic look at what leadership teams get wrong — and what the disciplined ones do differently.

• Go-to-Market Strategy for B2B Tech: Lessons from the Field · 2026-02-28

  Bringing new technology to market requires more than a good product. It demands strategic clarity on positioning, timing, and commercial execution.

• The Board Advisor Gap: Why Technology Boards Need Operational Perspective · 2026-02-15

  Too many technology boards lack advisors who have actually operated inside the environments they govern. That gap has consequences.

• SaaS Growth Metrics That Actually Matter · 2026-02-01

  Not all metrics are created equal. Here's how to focus on the numbers that drive real decisions, not vanity dashboards.