Alwin Hoogerdijk
CEO / Founder
Hi there, I am Alwin, CEO of Collectorz.com. I was born in 1968, on October 4. I
live in Amsterdam together with my wife Sytske and two cats Bowser and Yoshi (I'm a
Nintendo fan :-) ). We live quite near the Collectorz.com office, so I usually use
my mountainbike to go to work (going by car takes three times as long, you gotta
love Amsterdam traffic).
In my spare time I like to go to the gym and work out, for me an important way to
relax and stay in shape. In the weekends I try to get out and drive my car (I love
fast and beautiful cars). The rest of my spare time is spent playing video games (on
Wii, Xbox 360 or PS3) and watching DVDs (mainly TV Series).
But of course I spend quite some time on Collectorz.com stuff outside of office
hours too. It all started as a hobby and it still is. At the moment, I love playing
around with marketing stuff, tuning our website and Google Ads, looking at website
stats, etc...
My Collection
After the above, you won't be surprised to hear that I own quite a lot of video games. I have owned about every console and handheld since the NES and have a sizeable collection of games for all of em. I am a real collector too, I often buy games just to have them in my collection, I am a sucker for special editions too (yes, including the Halo 3 helmet).I also own a nice collection of DVDs. A lot of movies, but lately I have only been getting boxes with complete seasons of TV Series. Some of my favorite series: Sopranos, Carnivale, The Wire, The Office, Battlestar Galactica, 24, Lost, etc... And of course there's my CD collection, about 800 CDs at the moment. In fact, my CD collection is what started Collectorz.com. Back in 1996 I owned about 300 CDs and wanted to catalog em in some kind of database. Being a programmer I of course started to creating something myself, also as a nice project to try the new Delphi development tool. After a few months I had something that worked (at least for me), so I decided to release it as shareware, under the name "Keep it Compact" or "KiC".
At Collectorz.com
This hobby project Keep it Compact turned out to be quite popular, so in 2000 me and Mark-Jan Harte quit our day jobs and started the company Collectorz.com. KiC became Music Collector and we created new programs for DVDs, books, comics, etc... Through the years, I have been doing a good part of the programming of the Windows programs, the website and our backend systems (customer database and online media databases). Next to that I have optimized our search engine marketing.However, now the company has grown larger and our team has several smart developers, I am spending less time on programming. At the moment, my focus is on day to day project management, marketing and strategy, especially since Mark-Jan left the company in september 2007. I do like to keep on top of all tech stuff though.