I write about the systems I build, the businesses I run and the decisions that make me change my mind.
AI and building
"Your website is terrible," a customer told me. They were right. And fixing it changed how we decide what software we buy.
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Read essayRetail and experience
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.
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Read essayMy story
BCG, Belsport, Stanford. Why I stopped wanting to leave.
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Read essayEarlier editions and posts on this site, Substack and LinkedIn.
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.
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.
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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