CEO

CEO

Founder Stefan Witkamp is handing over the company he and Emile Nijssen spent more than a decade building. For the first time, neither founder sits at the center of the organization. The strategy, the product direction, and the dialogue with LG pass to their successor.

The business is healthy: there’s significant YoY revenue growth and a positive core operating income, allowing Homey to grow to ever more users while the company pays its own bills. LG cherishes this independence, and expects Homey to keep funding its own ambitions while scaling its contribution to LG’s global smart home strategy. That forces sharp choices, and the new CEO faces three.

The first is product. Homey launches one or two products or major refreshes a year, most recently Homey Portal. While some product launches can be derived from the current line-up, others require a more elaborate product vision for the smart home and home energy management market, and for Homey OS as a platform in its own right. The CEO owns that vision and the roadmap priorities that follow from it, guiding a proven development and design team who own execution, separating incremental improvement from real opportunity and deciding where Homey deliberately does not compete. That roadmap is not set apart from LG: Homey's speed lets it run proofs of concept and test new bets ahead of LG's larger moves, well before LG's bigger organization can, so the ideas that work are ready for LG to scale. Growing the app ecosystem and developer community is part of that product agenda, not a side activity.

The second choice is LG. Homey's CCO, CFO, Head of Operations, Head of Development, Head of Design and Head of Marketing are proven leaders who have run their domains for two to seven years, and the CEO leans on that depth to execute. But the CEO still sets Homey's vision, owns the roadmap, and is the final decision-maker on it - shaping that roadmap together with LG, so it reflects both Athom's own market reality and LG's direction, not one at the expense of the other. What only the CEO can do is own the relationship with LG: weekly working-level alignment with LG's teams, regular reporting on business plans and strategy, and a roadmap built to serve LG's AI Home and global smart home ambitions - the way Amazon's Ring aligns its roadmap with Alexa. The relationship with the Board of Directors, which LG chairs, needs the same discipline. Homey keeps its product and commercial judgment; the CEO exercises that judgment inside LG's direction, and turns LG's scale into growth for both sides.

The third is business model. Homey and LG share one ambition: to evolve Homey into a global platform company, with an open and neutral smart home ecosystem around the Homey experience, serving both consumers and businesses. The consumer hardware business is the engine and stays the priority, while software, platform capabilities, and B2B propositions grow into a scalable second leg: energy companies, home battery manufacturers, and healthcare providers already explore the first of these. The CEO decides which routes to pursue, in what order, and at what pace. That happens in active dialogue with LG’s relevant business units — testing new ground in energy and business models that LG itself can later scale or apply elsewhere, not a path Homey charts alone. The energy transition and AI point the same way: toward a home that orchestrates energy and responds to intention, running on the open technology Homey has spent twelve years building.

It takes a leader who combines the judgment of an experienced executive with the energy and curiosity of an entrepreneur. That leader is product-driven and commercially minded, has led product direction in a technology company before, is comfortable discussing user experience, roadmap trade-offs and P&L alike, and is credible with engineers, commercial leaders, and corporate stakeholders. Someone who needs no large organization to create impact, stays close to the product, the people, and the decisions that matter. This leader moves across cultures and organizational boundaries without becoming corporate along the way.

For all of this, the CEO leans on a capable management team who carry their own domains: the CCO, CFO, Head of Operations,  Head of Development, Head of Design and Head of Marketing are all with the company for at least two – and up to seven – years, and bring both their current and former expertise to their roles. The captain of that team unites the domains behind one shared course, challenges the team to think bigger, cuts through the noise, and builds on the expertise already in place. The CEO reports to the Board of Directors and LG Electronics. This is a full-time position, based at the office in Enschede for three to four days a week, with one to two days remote.

Homey is entering a defining new chapter. The founders are stepping back, and LG brings the scale and reach to take the platform much further. The ambition is a global platform company built on open technology. A strong brand, expanded customer base, and a market consolidating around a handful of smart home platforms like Homey give the new CEO a running start. The assignment is to preserve what made Homey successful while shaping what it becomes next. This is more than a succession. It is the opportunity to build the next version of Homey.