Bio

Born in 1988 in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, Wietse touched a computer for the first time at age nine. While all kids in school were still writing their essays by hand, Wietse's father helped him to write his essay using Word on Windows 3.11. At age ten Wietse would finish work at school as soon as possible, spending remaining time at the school attic repairing old computers. Soon the school lunch breaks were spent at the attic as well, learning everything about MS-DOS, OS/2, BAT scripts, electronics, soldering and BASIC programming.

In 2002, at age fourteen, Wietse programmed his first database driven (Oracle) web application for one of the biggest Dutch supermarket chains. Without the ability to send an invoice, Wietse got paid in retail vouchers 😇. Two years later at age sixteen, Wietse founded his first company, Internet Publications, providing a content management system, hosting and custom (web based) software development.

In 2006 Wietse attended the University of Amsterdam (Information Science). Unable to suppress the urge to become an entrepreneur, he deregistered at the University of Amsterdam after one month to focus on his existing company. Internet Publications became iPublications, a private limited liability company. The first two part time employees were hired, one of which is still actively employed by iPublications.

iPublications successfully specialized in software development to integrate electronic resource planning software with external systems, serving medium to large sized companies and multinationals with their specific interfacing, business logic and web interface needs. After years of growing pains and learning, iPublications (bootstrapped) started to generate a steady 15-25% revenue a year since 2013 (with an average of ten to fifteen people on the payroll).

Halfway 2014 Wietse started to think about more efficient ways to deliver projects on time and within budget. By standarizing infrastructure, code blocks and using project templates, 80% less project specific code was required. As a result, the tools and platform that had been developed internally became the groundwork for a new bootstrapped startup. In 2016 nodum.io (a Rapid Development / Application Platform as a Service) was launched, allowing iPublications to focus more on consultancy and service contracts while third parties could use the nodum.io platform for a montlhy subscription. The resulting recurring revenue stream allowed Wietse to take a step back from daily operations.

While iPublications still serves an active customer base of 100+ SMB/large sized companies, Wietse stumbled upon the XRP ledger. Excited by the efficiency, accessibility and on-ledger functionality. With new-found enthusiasm he started to develop and publish open source code, samples and tools for the XRP community and other developers and companies. He will focus on writing and publishing open source libraries and consumer applications on the XRP ledger full time by 2019 as founder of XRPL Labs.

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Misc.