📍 Zoetermeer
Mentor Bio
Jeroen is the former co-founder and CEO of Gamebasics, the company behind Online Soccer Manager (OSM). He created this game in is attic room in 2001 and led Gamebasics to a succesful scale-up and exit in 2021, when it was acquired by Miniclip.
Jeroen has been the CEO of a studio for 16 years. He’s also a programmer by trade. He holds a computer science bachelor from THUAS and a master’s ICT & Business from Leiden.
Game development has been his passion from very early on. Before Gamebasics, he created several small games for the MSX computer and an RPG called Avalon for PC/DOS. These projects were non-commercial. Avalon won the ZDNet Shareware Award in the year 2000.
Current role and activities
Jeroen is GameLab Manager at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. Helping students to create games and pursue their dream of becoming a game developer. He is also chairman of the Dutch Games Association.
To stay in touch with indie game development, he has taken on a small project and founded indie studio Seven Mages to produce Penguin Panic! Fun Platformer on Steam, Android and iOS.
What you can learn from him
- How to manage, scale and organize a company of up to 50 employees
- How to manage development teams
- How to transform to a scalable and future-proof tech stack
- How to develop mobile games & browsergames
- How an M&A process works, do’s and don’ ts.
His most valuable lesson
Focus can be a powerful thing. At Gamebasics we had a period where we created several games, but were not able to scale this beyond ‘survival mode’. When we took the hard decision to kill our darlings and focus only on OSM, growth finally kicked in.