The short version
Bogotá, then Boston, then here.
I moved for the work and landed in the middle of the loudest technology cycle in a generation, and from here you watch it at close range. A model that was the state of the art in March is a footnote by June. The whole industry reorganises around it in less time than it takes most companies to get the meeting about it on a calendar.
The interesting part of my week is the distance between that and everyone else. Enterprise buyers, SaaS companies and the Latin American businesses I work with do not run at that speed, and they should not have to. But somebody has to stand in the middle and translate, and I decided the honest way to do it was to point the thing at my own job first. So I rebuilt how I run marketing and outbound before anyone asked me to.
A master's at Hult with classmates from more than a hundred and fifty countries, which sounds like a brochure line until you have to sell an idea to a room where nobody shares your assumptions. That is what Boston actually taught me: a strategy that only works in one culture is not a strategy. I specialized in business analytics because I wanted the other half, the part that tells you whether the story is true.
Covid closed the city the year I was supposed to be starting out. I had a camera, and a belt company called Macondo Belts became the first contract I ever negotiated. I have negotiated a great many since — renewals, expansions, agreements that run for years — and that first one taught me what every one of them has confirmed since: the number is almost never what the conversation is actually about.
A friend from school and I turned it into a studio, and product shots became strategy for more than forty brands in industries that had nothing to do with each other. Then I moved to the other side of the table, at Comerssia and Iridian, where the question stopped being how the picture looks and started being whether it sells. The argument for why I switched is in the essay.
I finished school and read business administration at Universidad de los Andes. Most of my class was preparing for the interview: the bank, the consulting firm, the graduate programme. I was more interested in what you learn by starting something and finding out, so that is what I did, while I was still sitting exams.
Bogotá is a good city to learn that in. Eight million people, an economy that improvises for a living, and nobody standing at a door deciding whether to let you through it.
