LET'S TALK ABOUT

• Building startups
• Hiring engineers and tech talent
• AI and its impact on software engineering as we know it
• AI and its impact on the software developer talent market

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My journey started in Lima, Peru, where I grew up surrounded by the vibrant, chaotic energy of a city of 10 million. Moving to the U.S. at 12 felt like stepping into another world. Everything was unfamiliar—friends, culture, language. I had to rebuild from the ground up, and that drive to create never left me.

I come from a family of builders. My mother would leave for work at 7 a.m. every day, returning home at 8 p.m. from one of the most dangerous parts of Lima, where she ran a steel mill and factory with her two brothers. My father owned and operated a home decor store—two businesses built from grit and relentless effort, long before I was even born. Watching them work, sacrifice, and build something of their own taught me what it meant to be relentless. It’s the lesson I carry with me to this day.

In my senior year of high school, a fractured skull from a soccer injury ended my varsity season before it even began. With sports off the table, I enrolled in a jewelry-making class—an art my family had been involved in back in Lima. One thing led to another, and I launched my first e-commerce jewelry brand for men before I even graduated.

At the University of San Diego, I kept building. I launched a social network for college entrepreneurs, drawing from the same instincts that pushed me to design websites in the early days of Flash, Geocities, and the original GIFs.

But the real turning point came after college when I moved back to Lima. For the first time, I saw how much untapped technical talent existed in Latin America. I started hiring developers there for my own projects. Then for friends. Then for fellow entrepreneurs. That’s how TECLA was born—a nearshore staffing company connecting U.S. tech companies with top-tier Latin American talent.

Over the past 12 years, I’ve helped U.S. companies worth over $10 billion in aggregate scale with developers from all over the Americas. Today, I’m based in Seattle but I’ve never stopped being hands-on, designing and architecting our AI-driven talent-matching platform at TECLA. I’m a founder who still codes, a business leader with roots in both the U.S. and Latin America.

I’m driven by the belief that talent is everywhere—it just needs the right platform to thrive. And that’s what I’ve spent over a decade building.