🎙️ The Day I Stopped Waiting and Started Building

What happens when a founder stops outsourcing, stops waiting on engineers — and decides to build the future themselves?

In this episode of The Generalists, we sit down with Gijs Verheijke — founder of Ox Street (acquired by Carousell), angel investor, former Rocket Internet operator, and now Director of CX, Trust & AI at Carousell — to unpack a career defined by reinvention, experimentation, and building.

From private equity in Europe to launching startups in Bangladesh and Myanmar, from scaling Ox Street into Southeast Asia’s leading sneaker marketplace to selling it to Carousell, Gijs has lived multiple entrepreneurial lives. But his latest transformation might be the most important yet: teaching himself to code with AI, shipping a full product solo, and discovering how far one person can now go with the right tools.

We explore what it really takes to build and sell a company, why regional marketplaces are so hard to scale, and how the next wave of founders will use AI to operate multiple businesses, automate workflows, and build products without giant teams or massive funding. This is a conversation about creativity, control, and the future of building — directly from someone who’s doing it.

📖 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
How Gijs went from private equity to frontier-market founder in Bangladesh and Myanmar
The inside story of building Ox Street and selling it to Carousell
How AI is transforming customer experience, trust, and safety at scale
What vibe coding, tools like Cursor, and AI copilots mean for solo founders
How Gijs built Magicdoor.ai, a ChatGPT competitor, entirely by himself
Why learning to code with AI is the most empowering skill of the decade
The “indie tycoon” model: running multiple products and revenue streams solo
The limits of AI — and where human creativity still wins
What founders often misunderstand about building, scaling, and selling a startup

👥 Hosts
Michael Smith Jr.:   / smittysgp  
Raz Kotler:   / razko282  

👤 Guest
Gijs Verheijke:   / gverheijke  

🔔 If you care about the future of building — from frontier startups to AI-powered products — hit subscribe and turn on notifications to never miss an episode!👉👉👉 Subscribe Now:    / @thegeneralistspodcast  

🔗 Resources & Links Mentioned
🚀 Companies, Tools & Platforms
Carousell: https://www.carousell.com/Ox Street (Acquired by Carousell): - https://vulcanpost.com/760469/oak-str...
Magicdoor.ai: https://magicdoor.ai/
Cursor: https://cursor.sh/
Bubble: https://bubble.io/
ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/
Gemini: https://deepmind.google/technologies/...
BigQuery: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery
Rocket Internet: https://www.rocket-internet.com/

📚 Books & Substacks
The Creative Act: A Way of Being – Rick Rubin: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Act-W...
Experimental History – Adam Mastroianni (Substack): https://www.experimental-history.com

🎸 Music References
Appetite for Destruction – Guns N’ Roses: https://open.spotify.com/album/3I9Z1n...
Electric – The Cult: https://open.spotify.com/album/1tk5Uz...

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#AI #CursorAI #ChatGPT #NoCode #StartupFounder #AIStartup #AIDevelopment #LearnToCode #MagicdoorAI #TechInnovation #ArtificialIntelligence #TheGeneralistsPodcast