CEO at Yáneken, a Chilean multi-brand retail group (160+ stores, 10+ brands — Bold, Drops, Hoka, Belsport — 1,500 people), third generation. I build and deploy production AI on the real operation: store operations, pricing, customer decisioning and forecasting. Founder of Andrea. More of an introvert than I probably look — writing comes easier than talking. Here I publish what I'm thinking while operating, building, and observing.
A living page. Updated every couple of weeks with what I'm actually doing, reading, and thinking.
Yáneken's internal workshop — IRIS validating stores over WhatsApp across 160+ stores, Draper chasing every lead until it converts, and Project Cerebro putting the whole market on the pricing table. What we used to buy as SaaS, we now build.
Yáneken — designing the 2026 operating plan: how we keep growing inorganically while consolidating the omnichannel operation and shaving another point off cost-to-serve.
El Tío Bold/Drops — the site's series: my side of the stories, paired with what I post on LinkedIn. Writing Nº 002 now: how Bold began, and why betting on sneaker culture in Chile made sense before the market was obvious.
Two whitepapers at Menlo & Oak. One on why citation replaced ranking in AI search, and what a retail operator can actually do about it. The other on marketplace unit economics: if ACOS exceeds contribution margin, you are paying for the privilege of selling. Both full text, no signup.
Work in Progress — Michael Eisner. The memoir of the CEO who rebuilt Disney through the '80s and '90s. Fresh off the Jamie Dimon biography: trading banking for the experience business, told from the inside.
Acquired — the Costco episode. Four hours. Ten times more useful than any MBA on retail strategy. I re-listen every time I'm about to make a big pricing decision.
Coming back to triathlon base after a couple of months off for travel. Aiming for Ironman 70.3 Pucón in January.
Bold Vespucio is our most profitable store. Drops grew 2x in sales when we put real design behind it. The data proves it over and over.
Five of the largest retailers on the planet failed here. Not for lack of resources — for underestimating the person who lives inside the market. The real advantage isn't scale — it's context.
Third generation. My grandfather Pedro Rishmague opened the first store in 1985 on Paseo Ahumada. I didn't come to destroy what was built — I came to take it to another scale.
The answer is in the customer and in the data — never in intuition. Experimentation wins.
Not consultants. Not evangelists. Operators who have managed a P&L and deployed AI inside a real company.
From Santiago. It all comes back to one question: how do we build world-class businesses from Chile?
I co-founded Menlo & Oak with Andrea De Vivo to take operator-grade advisory work outside Yáneken. That's where the offering, the team, and the way to work with me live.
Facades, activations, kiosks, windows — and the content that carries them beyond the mall. Designed and executed in-house. This is what that conviction looks like when it ships: the new Bold at Mallplaza Los Dominicos, the Drops flagship, and the formats around them.
Third-generation family retail, run from Santiago — every store an argument that world-class retail can be built from Chile.
I replicated a SaaS in five days and the lesson ran the other way: the weak link is never the tool's horsepower — it's how many people on the team can actually operate it. So a growing share of our critical software is built in-house, with AI, on the channels the team already uses. Three pieces in production:
A store manager sends a photo or voice note on WhatsApp; AI validates the visual merchandising in seconds, routes the issue to the right team, and answers reviews across 196 Google listings. Every store gets a health score.
View the projectCommercial AI agents deployed inside Yáneken: they answer instantly, follow up on WhatsApp until conversion, and the team steers the operation from an in-house console. The category others sell as SaaS, running as an internal capability.
View the projectCompetitive pricing intelligence: official prices, competitors, and data quality for three business units — eyewear, Belsport, and Bold — on a single risk table.
View the projectThe same thesis as always: data beats assumptions, and the best way to anticipate the future is to build it. What used to take weeks now takes hours. Outside Yáneken, this work is called Menlo & Oak.
Raw ideas, unpolished. Notes I'm working through, projects I'm exploring. Some become letters. Others stay here. Synced from my Obsidian vault.
No sé si lo de OpenAI y Hugging Face fue un incidente real o una campaña con presupuesto. Y que la duda sea razonable es, en sí mismo, el dato.
El pasillo está cambiando. El alcohol lleva años perdiendo terreno con los más jóvenes, y lo que crece es exactamente lo contrario: bebidas funcionales, suplementos, proteína en todo, magnesio para dormir. Es la primera vez que "consumo" y "salud" empujan en la misma dirección, y se nota en el lineal antes que en los p
Cada semana hay más mensajes compitiendo por la misma atención, y menos atención disponible. El costo de ser genérico nunca fue tan alto: en un feed infinito, lo parecido es invisible.
Retail has spent years becoming faster, colder, and more automated.
One operator's question, one answer grounded in data and real deployment. Bilingual — here, on LinkedIn, and on Substack.
The first Bold we opened in Los Dominicos failed. On Saturday we open there again — this time having read what the mall had turned into: the Korean wave, the Callejón Asiático, and why I'd rather compete on differentiation than on price.
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Chile's central bank put trend growth at 1.9% a year, with total factor productivity contributing just 0.35 points. Argyris, Romer and weak links: why the return isn't in automating what already works, but in finding the task that holds back all the others.
ReadThe weak link was never the tool's horsepower — it was how many people on a lean team could actually run it. We changed the question, relaunched thelabstore.cl, and in two weeks e-commerce went from 15% to 35% of the sales mix. What took weeks now takes hours.
ReadWith Oakley we brought our wholesale clients together to talk, try product, and look at what's coming — and launched our new B2B portal. Digital transformation isn't about adding technology; it's about removing friction and giving our partners their time back.
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How I built a system that does to marketing what engineering already did to factories. A 100,000-person synthetic society, a creative auditor, focus groups with real group physics, Bayesian attribution. One creative jumped from 42 to 72 in a single iteration. Eight brands in production.
ReadAsk Claude to pay your electric bill. It'll write a beautiful plan — and move zero pesos. The problem isn't the model: it's the layer underneath. The missing piece for AI agents to pay something in LatAm, and why no global provider has it. The AgentPay manifesto.
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If you're between 25 and 40 in Chile, you're going to live in a country where half the population doesn't work, taxes double to sustain it, and your pension doesn't exist because nobody's left to fund it. The lowest fertility rate in our history — lower than Japan, lower than South Korea. Why the demographic crisis is an argument for AI agent payment infrastructure.
ReadWhile everyone cuts the human layer, real pricing power gets built with presence. In retail, warmth is the most underestimated premium — and the hardest to operationalize.
ReadThe real AI risk isn't that it doesn't work — it's that it works too well at creating things that look ready but are ticking time bombs underneath. How I built Yáneken's AI governance committee.
ReadLast Thursday I was at Think with Google Chile. I left with one fixed idea: Meridian — Google's open-source MMM — is now available to anyone, and that changes everything. Why a CEO should be shipping code.
ReadAt Yáneken we held 5 beliefs that seemed obvious. Until the data told us we were wrong. The myths that cost us — and what we learned when we started measuring instead of assuming.
ReadAs a kid I'd go with my mom to the office. In December, while my classmates were on vacation, I worked Christmas support. Third generation. Retail isn't my career — it's my native language. The newsletter launch post.
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I grew up inside a family business. My grandfather Pedro Rishmague opened the first store in 1985 on Paseo Ahumada in downtown Santiago. Three generations later I'm CEO at Yáneken — Chile's #2 multi-brand retail group: 160+ stores, 10+ brands, 1,500 people. We're competing to make the Chilean retail experience rival the best in the world.
Before becoming CEO I spent four years as CRO (2018–2022). I led the projects that professionalized Artículos Deportivos Belsport: changed the ERP, stood up ecommerce, built planning and marketing departments from scratch, set up real corporate governance. In 2020, after the first major acquisition, Yáneken was born. We grew EBITDA by 300% and launched store formats recognized as references across Latin America.
I hold an Industrial Engineering degree from PUC and an MBA from Stanford GSB, where I graduated as an Arjay Miller Scholar (top 10%). That combination — engineering, business, and real operations — is the foundation of how I think about retail, AI, and data.
Today, beyond running Yáneken, I'm building Andrea (the simulation marketing was missing) and AgentPay (payment rails for AI agents in LatAm), and advising companies through AI transformation from Menlo & Oak.
Figures as of August 2026.
Leading strategic vision and P&L for the full portfolio. Efficiency program + inorganic growth + AI integration across operations.
Top 10% of the class. Certificate in Public Management & Social Innovation. Electives in AI, design thinking, and organizational design.
Grew EBITDA by 300%. Led the projects that professionalized the company: ERP, ecommerce, planning, marketing, corporate governance. In 2020, after the first major acquisition, Yáneken was born. Launched 4 store formats recognized as references across Latin America.
Created Bold from zero — naming, logo, store design, launch. Today Bold Vespucio is the group's most profitable store.
Top 7% of the class. Winner of the Bain Case Competition 2016 — first Chilean team to win in 10 years. Thesis with LATAM Airlines on operational robustness.
Without triathlon I wouldn't have the discipline for everything else. The bike is where my ideas sort themselves out and where I make the hardest decisions of the year. Disney is the obsession that keeps reminding me experience matters — every time I go back I understand something new about building a place people want to return to. My wife Andrea, my mom, my triathlon friends, my Stanford classmates — they're the network without which none of the other things mean anything. The stuff below isn't a distraction. It's the source of how I operate, decide, and write.
Goodreads live. Audible in my ears. Podcasts in rotation. What's shaping how I think this month — from business and operating to neuroscience, longevity, and endurance.
See everything on Goodreads
Historias profundas de las empresas que construyeron el mundo. Cuatro horas por episodio. Sin atajos.
Las mejores conversaciones largas sobre IA y economía. Cada entrevista preparada como tesis doctoral.
Las historias de origen de los founders que dieron forma a la industria moderna.
Las mejores historias y consejos de los founders chilenos. Fui invitado en el episodio de Bold.
Economía, mercados y dinero, en chileno y al grano. Producido por La Tercera.
Inversiones y mercados explicados en español, con perspectiva LatAm.
Análisis político chileno con la profundidad histórica que el debate público no tiene.
Conversaciones reales sobre negociación: lo que funciona, lo que no, y por qué la mayoría lo está haciendo mal.
Conversaciones largas con founders y operadores LatAm con ambición global. Curado por hi.vc, los inversionistas detrás de Cornershop.
Conversaciones largas con líderes chilenos sobre lo que de verdad mueve sus decisiones.
Neurociencia aplicada al sueño, foco, ejercicio y rendimiento. Protocolos basados en evidencia.
Longevidad, salud metabólica y entrenamiento. El podcast que acompaña a Outlive en mi librero.
Conversaciones con atletas de resistencia, fundadores y outliers. Resonancia personal: Ironman.
I talk with operators, founders, family-business heirs, and teams trying to raise the bar in their industry.
For everything else — I answer myself.
Operator posts: retail, AI, and what we're building.
The Retail Brief — the full essays, in your inbox.
The personal side: sneakers, stores, Santiago.
AI and retail transformation for other companies — my team at Menlo & Oak.
If talking is easier than writing.
