free
No posts for some time, but for a good reason. A lot has changed in the last few months.
Since 2000 I’ve been working at Shapers, a company that I co-founded with four other guys. One of them had left in 2003 to become a stunt man. Well, to make a long story short, we decided to split up and go separate ways. There are several reasons but I won’t get into details here. The important thing is that there were no fights or anything, we all felt that splitting up was just the natural thing to do in view of the circumstances.
Now two of my former colleagues have already found themselves some good jobs that they appear to enjoy very much. Stefan has gone and joined Freedomlab (which is something totally different). Jan Willem is now ‘technical lead’ at TribalDDB. Niels is going to continue Shapers but on another scale, the core business will now be educational software.
As for me: I just went on vacation to forget about everything :-). And now that I’m fully rested, I’m going back to freelancing… for one. Half of my time I will still be working for Shapers, but as a freelancer. I’ve decided to make a really slow start. Everybody keeps saying that I’ll be up to my neck in work in no time so I’m going to bide my time while I can. I’ve already got a studio I can work at, right in the middle of Amsterdam (freelancing at home is too lonesome). I’m going to share the studio with Claudia Ruiz and Mariken van Lammeren, and if I look through the window I can spy on Jan (and Stefan won’t be too far away either).
Since Sjeiti is a bit too weird a name for a freelancer I’ve gone and created ronvalstar.nl. So check it out if you can read Dutch.
Ron