I grew up around the machines in my father's shop in Mexico, and today I am an engineer building a company at MIT called AgentsArmy. This is the story of how one quietly led to the other
That look
I was thirteen the year my father rolled the first computer controlled machine into his shop, and I stood there and stared at it for a long time, the way you stare at something you know is about to change your life. I catch myself making the exact same face today when I watch what AI is becoming.
Choose your hard
Mile 24, Boston Marathon, 2024
I ran it beside my father, who has finished all seven of the great marathons of the world, and I was sure that the younger, stronger legs would carry me to the line well ahead of him. When I finally crossed it, gasping, I looked around to see how long I would have to wait for him, and found that he was already there, waiting for me.
She said yes
Maggie
Maggie was a vice president at one of the biggest phone companies in the world, and the day I was admitted to MIT she walked away from all of it without a second thought so that we could chase the uncertain thing together. We married and we came to the adventure, and I am a lucky man, because everything I will ever build has her somewhere inside it.
Cozumel, 2024, my first triathlon
For my very first triathlon I chose a half Ironman, seventy miles of swimming, cycling and running, even though I had never once swum in open water until the morning of the race. The only thought that carried me the whole way was a simple one, please do not die, because Maggie is waiting for you at the finish.
My entrepreneurship funeral
My first company at MIT died in a single quiet conversation, when Brian Halligan looked at me and told me that I was a nice guy but he would not put a single dollar behind me, because the idea and I simply did not belong to each other. It stung for weeks, and it was also the kindest and most useful thing anyone had ever said to me, because it sent me looking for the real reason I was doing any of this, and AgentsArmy was born out of that search.
Average is not safe, average is expensive
The circle
You have already met the boy who started all of this, and he is the reason any of it exists at all. No founder I admire has ever done it alone, and this is the circle that carries me, my mother and father, Maggie, Sandra, Moni, Sebastian, the friends and mentors along the way, a great deal of luck, and a little divine intervention.
Willy Loman spent his whole life chasing a borrowed dream, a version of success that was never really his, and it made him miss the people who loved him while they were still right in front of him. Linda's line has never left me: attention must be paid.
I read it as a founder the way you would read a warning label, because the work is not only to chase the dream but to keep asking whether the dream is still mine, whether it still makes the people I love bigger instead of smaller, and whether it has grown in the same direction I have grown.
This is also why literature matters to me as much as any spreadsheet, because a good book lets you live a life that is not yours and see the world through eyes that are not yours, which is the cheapest and fastest empathy I have ever found, and which happens to be the whole job of building something for other people.