Michael Castelein

Dutch-American · Data & AI · michaelcastelein.com

Data & AI consultant.
Digital nomad.
I teach teams to actually use AI.

I'm Michael — a Dutch-American consultant running ML Ventures. Half the work is data: analytics, BI, and the pipelines underneath. The other half is teaching teams to use AI inside the work they already do. I build language-learning software on the side, and I do all of it from four homes across three countries.

Get in touch What I do

Right now — Netherlands, UTC+2

A globe showing the annual route between Chaozhou, Kunming, The Netherlands, Atlanta.

Drag to spin. The arcs are the actual route.

What I do

Two halves of the same job.

One is building the data a business runs on. The other is getting the people in that business to actually use the tools sitting in front of them.

01 / The engine

Data & analytics

Analytics, BI, analytics engineering, data science and ML. This is what the agency has run on for years, with two subcontractors and no office in any of the four countries.

  • Analytics and BI — dashboards people actually open, and numbers that reconcile
  • Analytics engineering — models and pipelines that survive contact with the business
  • Data science and ML where it earns its keep, and not where it doesn’t
  • Increasingly data engineering, as the line between that and analytics keeps blurring

02 / The newer half

AI adoption & training

Most companies have already bought the AI tools and almost nobody is using them well. I run hands-on workshops with teams to fix the second half of that sentence — working in their own material, not sitting through a slide deck about the future of AI.

  • Hands-on workshops with a team, using their real work as the material
  • Where AI genuinely helps in a data or analytics workflow — and where it quietly wastes time
  • Prompting and tooling habits that outlast the session
  • Follow-through, so it becomes how the team works rather than a good afternoon

Talk about a project

Now

What's actually happening.

Updated August 2026

Building

The rest of it.

ML Ventures is my company. The consulting pays for the rest, and the rest is why the consulting is interesting.

Writing & content

Growing

Data, analytics and AI workflows on LinkedIn. Travel on Instagram, YouTube Shorts and TikTok. A following on HelloTalk that came from language content rather than anything I planned.

Language-learning software

Building

The tools I wanted while learning Mandarin and couldn’t find: SRS notecards, audio cards, adaptive readers. Built for my own studying first, which is the only reason they’re any good.

Ecommerce

Lina’s

Lina runs a Shopify store selling clip-on nails, sourced from China. I help with the parts that are spreadsheets.

China immersion houses

Long game

The long idea: places in Chaozhou and Kunming where people come to actually live in the language instead of studying it. Years out, not months.

Where

I do all of it from four homes.

The same route, in the same order, every year — Chaozhou, Kunming, the Netherlands, the United States. Chaozhou and Kunming are both China and share almost nothing: different food, climate, language, and a thousand kilometres between them.

Michael Castelein
Michael Castelein

01 / Family

Chaozhou 潮州

January – March · China · 23.7°, 116.6°

The reason the loop exists at all.

Chaozhou is my wife Lina's hometown — a Teochew-speaking city in eastern Guangdong that almost no foreigner ends up in, and where the language isn't Mandarin and mostly isn't written down. We spend the first three months of every year here.

  • A year’s worth of family traditions, compressed into one season
  • Learning Teochew slowly and badly — a language you mostly cannot study from a book
  • Regular runs up to Shenzhen and Guangzhou to meet people building things

02 / Deep work

Kunming 昆明

April – July · China · 25.0°, 102.7°

Eternal spring, nineteen hundred metres up.

Kunming is called the spring city because the weather refuses to do anything interesting — high plateau, mild all year, thin clean air. This is the longest stint and the one where the real building happens.

  • The heaviest client work and product building of the year
  • Mandarin at full immersion rather than at a desk
  • Training at altitude, which is either a real advantage or a good excuse

03 / Roots

The Netherlands

August – October · Netherlands · 52.1°, 5.3°

The Dutch half, in the good months.

Half my passport and most of my twenties. I studied here, worked here — BI at HousingAnywhere in Rotterdam, then data engineering at a consultancy — and started the agency here before it stopped needing an address.

  • Family, friends, and anything the business needs a European presence for
  • Racket sports on real teams, in a country that takes them seriously
  • October is the seam: half here, half already in the US

04 / The other passport

Atlanta

November – December · United States · 33.8°, -84.4°

Closing out the year on the American side.

The other half of the hyphen, and where the year ends: holidays, family, and the annual reset. Most of what the US means on my résumé happened earlier — an internship at Southwest and an actuarial co-op at John Hancock in Boston — but these two months are the part that repeats.

  • Holidays, and the people you only see once a year
  • The end-of-year business reset: numbers, pricing, what to kill, what to start

Before this

Aerospace to analytics.

  1. Mathematics & Aerospace Engineering, BS University
  2. Data analytics intern Southwest Airlines
  3. Actuarial co-op John Hancock, Boston
  4. Econometrics: Quantitative Finance, MS University
  5. BI analyst HousingAnywhere, Rotterdam
  6. Data engineer Consultancy, Rotterdam
  7. Founder ML Ventures
  8. AI & Data Science Lead Centered Care

Off the clock

Rackets, distance, spreadsheets.

Table tennis

I founded a table tennis association and chaired it. Still the sport I’d pick if I could only keep one.

Badminton

Former chairman of a badminton association, and still the second racket in the bag.

Running & triathlon

Working toward a first triathlon, with an Ironman somewhere further down the list.

Spreadsheets

Not a joke and not ironic. I model things that do not need modelling and I enjoy it.

Languages

  • English Native
  • Dutch Native
  • Mandarin Fluent, still climbing
  • Japanese Conversational
  • Teochew Beginner

Get in touch

Let’s have coffee

If any of this overlapped with something you’re doing — a data problem, getting AI to actually land in your team, learning Chinese, or you just liked the map — say hello.

Message me on LinkedIn

I answer from whichever timezone I’m in. It changes four times a year.