Welcome, this is the story behind the company I had to build
I grew up around the machines in my father's shop in Mexico, and years later I came to MIT to build my own. This is the short version of how the first quietly led to the second.
I was 13 when my father rolled his first computer controlled machine into the shop, a machine that carved steel on its own once you told it what to do. I stared far longer than a boy should. I make that same face today watching what AI is becoming.
Choose your hard
I ran beside my father, who has finished all 7 of the world's great marathons, and I was sure my younger legs would beat him to the line. When I crossed it, gasping, he was already there, waiting for me.
She said yes
When MIT said yes, we already had a life that worked. Maggie let go of a career she had climbed for years, near the top of the largest telecommunications company in the world, so we could chase something neither of us could promise would work. She believed before there was any proof, and I have come to think the partner you choose is the most important bet a founder ever makes.
For my first triathlon I signed up for a 70.3 Ironman, 70 miles of swimming, cycling and running back to back, and I had never swum in open water until the morning of the race. One thought carried me the whole way, please do not die out here, Maggie is waiting at the finish.
One gift of MIT is that people who built enormous things will tell you the truth to your face. Brian taught my class on scaling ventures, looked at my first company, and said he would not put a dollar behind it, because the idea and I did not belong together. It stung, and it was right. Sometimes you just listen, take the hard feedback, and correct your compass. His pointed me at a problem I had actually lived, and AgentsArmy started there.
The day we were told to run toward the hardest problems
On the day I became an MIT alum, Lisa Su, the CEO of the chipmaker AMD, told our class to run toward the hardest problems and meet them with purpose, judgment and courage. I took it as an instruction. The hardest problem I know lives in the small manufacturing shops across America, world class at their craft yet so starved for time that good orders wait and good machines sit idle. I am building AgentsArmy to give that time back, so the shops run tighter, make more, and win more of the work already coming to them.
Average is not safe, average is expensive
No founder I admire ever did it alone. This is the circle that carries me: my mother and father, Maggie, Sandra, Moni, Sebastian, the friends and mentors along the way, a lot of luck, and some grace I did not earn.
A good book hands you a life that is not yours and a pair of eyes that are not yours, which is the fastest way I know to grow the empathy that building for other people demands. Many books have marked me. This one never loosened its grip.
Willy Loman spends his life chasing a version of success he inherited rather than chose, so busy reaching for it that he cannot see the people who love him standing right in front of him. I read it now the way a founder reads a warning. His fear is the one every entrepreneur carries, that you pour your one life into a dream only to find at the end that it was borrowed. His mistake was never that he dreamed. It was that he never stopped to ask whether the dream still belonged to him, whether it was making the people he loved larger or smaller, whether it had grown in the same direction he had.
So every so often I set the company down and ask the hard question on purpose. Is this still mine, and does it make the people around me bigger. That is the whole discipline.
It still comes back to a boy on a shop floor in Mexico who could not look away.