Marien

Who he is

Marien is a network engineer, entrepreneur and builder who lives and works in rural Friesland, in the north of the Netherlands. He would rather understand how something works than pay someone else to explain it, and he has spent his life doing exactly that. IT, car mechanics, carpentry, cooking and electrical engineering are all things he taught himself.

Career

Marien earned his MCSE certification in 1998. A year later a US company hired him as a global network engineer, and he spent the following years deploying and running networks across Europe. In 2003 the company moved its operations to Asia. Marien chose not to follow, and the IT job market had meanwhile dried up almost completely.

Instead of waiting for the market to recover, he saw an opening. Rural businesses had little access to the kind of IT expertise he had built up in corporate life, so he started his own company to serve them. That company became Karyon.nl, a managed service provider that now looks after personal, small and medium-sized business sites across Friesland. He designs, builds and maintains everything from servers, wireless links and camera networks to storage, printing and websites, and he is the person clients call when something needs fixing properly.

Immermoed

Alongside Karyon, Marien runs Immermoed, a boarding kennel for dogs and cats, together with his family. A kennel has stood on the property since the early 1970s. Currently the site is being rebuilt from the ground up as a modern facility.

The expansion is a planned series of six new buildings: five kennel buildings and one central facility. Marien does a good part of the building work himself, together with an experienced carpenter.

The buildings are designed to be modern in every respect:

• Construction. They are new, well insulated, and built on thick insulated concrete floors for a comfortable, stable climate for the animals.
• Climate. Heat pumps keep the temperature steady, connected to a management system for monitoring and control.

What he thinks about

Marien reads widely and thinks hard about how the world works. He is interested in economics, history, geopolitics and the philosophy of science, and he approaches all of them with skepticism and respect for uncertainty. He applies the same mindset to the systematic trading models he builds and tests as a hobby. He also runs his own local AI setup at home, because he prefers to understand the tools he uses.

The kind of person he is

Marien combines the skills of a corporate engineer with the independence of someone who has built his own livelihood. He is practical, curious and hands-on. Clients stay with him because he is reliable, direct about what he knows and doesn't know, and invested in making their businesses run well. Away from the screen he is as likely to be fixing a vehicle, building something out of wood, cooking for the family or looking after the dogs and chickens as he is to be rewiring a network.