Now
Last updated April 23rd, 2024 from my home in Bogotá.
What’s happening in my life right about now.
Family 💛
90% of my free time goes to my family. Monkeying around with the kids is my true full-time job 🐒, and I have a couple of very cute and demanding 2-year-old bosses demanding I work overtime!
Gaming 🎮
I’ve always been a PC gamer, but I had consoles for the occasional first-party AAA release. I recently sold my Switch and PS5 because of lack of use (I had already gone through all the titles I deemed worthy). I had been itching to go back to PC gaming, but hunkering down in my office to play is simply not possible with my 2 kids around (and not something I want to do anyways, gotta play with them while they are awake!). So I decided to buy myself a Steam Deck and have been playing diverse roguelikes while the kids sleep.
Latest time-sinkers:
Work 🧰
I’m currently a Tech Director for New Product Development in R5, a Colombian Fintech focused on products for vehicle owners. That means I manage the web, mobile development and data teams for all our new ideas that we want to test out, which is currently ~17 people including myself. I previously created and managed the Data team for the whole company as its Data Director.
My work mainly entails a ton of coding, team management, strategy + culture work together with the rest of the C-Team and collaborating on product ideas together with Ricardo and Fernando, who manage the product and business side of NPD.
Entrepreneurship 🤩
My initial idea after selling Finco was to create an impact-focused Fintech, aimed at facilitating higher education for promising but disadvantaged young people. They would have paid back with income-sharing after graduating (you can read more details in /ideas). That didn’t pan out because of the macroeconomics of the moment (luckily).
I’ve since learned that creating a large-scale, social-impact company is even riskier than founding a ‘normal’ tech startup. Since I now have responsibilities with the future of my children, I decided I must first lower my risk to a point where I’m financially comfortable with the prospect of complete failure, so that I can truly aim for the moon 🚀.
Hence, before launching my social impact venture I’ve been looking into creating a ⭐lifestyle business⭐, and not necessarily a tech-based one at that. A lifestyle business is one where you are not aiming for complete world domination, profit-maximizing, or infinite-growth metrics, but rather just to achieve a stable level of income.
This can be a niche SaaS 👩💻, a car wash 🚗, a medium-sized mall, a piece of cool hardware, or anything really. Just not something that would be interesting to a typical VC, not something that is likely to become a unicorn, and most definitely not something that requires high-complexity teams and processes. It must be simple (at least compared to a VC-backed tech startup), manageable and stable-ish.
I spend a lot of my time brainstorming possible ideas that fit this description, as well as lurking on HackerNews and IndieHackers for inspiration. You can see some in my /ideas page.