A Year in Writing

Exactly one year ago I started writing out of something very practical. I was working across several projects at the same time, fully invested in them, and naturally those projects had to be presented to different audiences, clients, vendors, partners, investors. At some point I needed a way to express what I was building so that someone else could actually understand it without me sitting next to them walking through every assumption. The natural path in finance and startups is to build decks, but their limitation shows up quickly. A deck only works if someone is there explaining it. Left on its own, it gets skimmed, reduced to a few lines, and whatever required real reasoning disappears between slides. It’s not that people don’t pay attention, it’s that the format doesn’t demand it. Writing demands it. A memo assumes the reader will sit with it, follow the argument from beginning to end, and make sense of it without external context. That constraint forces ideas to be developed in full and expressed clearly enough to stand on their own.

That was incentive enough to start, so the first pieces came directly from what I was working on, because that was the material I had in front of me every day. Writing forces a level of precision that execution alone doesn’t demand. You can move a project forward while carrying ideas that are still half-formed, because reality will give you feedback quickly enough to adjust. Writing doesn’t give you that flexibility. Once something is on the page, it either holds or it doesn’t, and when it doesn’t, there is nowhere to hide. That challenge made me realize the exercise was worth continuing, and the topics expanded naturally with my work and my professional experiences throughout the year. I stopped writing only about what I was building and started writing about the underlying systems as my intellectual curiosity expanded. It also changed how I work. I stopped relying on decks in professional settings and moved to memos as the default way to communicate anything that matters, and in some cases the column itself became part of that process, when a piece captured an idea better than any presentation could.

When the Work Becomes the Material

As I kept writing I was forced to think more clearly about what I was already doing. The topics drifted as the work drifted, and over time the writing started to move away from describing projects and into the things behind them. A lot of that came initially from working on Compago and spending a great deal of time designing a fintech product around how people actually manage money in today’s world. Most financial systems assume stability. Income is supposed to be predictable, expenses are supposed to follow some order, and credit decisions are made as if those patterns hold. In reality, especially in places like Mexico, none of that is true for a large part of the population. Income is irregular, expenses move constantly, and financial decisions are made in very tight margins, compounded by low financial literacy and a weak rule of law. That gap is what fintech should be solving, but most of what is called innovation in finance is just a faster way to run the same logic. The interface gets better and better, but the underlying system doesn’t.

The next columns came from trying to make sense of these systems, because the work I was doing depended on them working. Thinking about loan agreements that can adjust over time instead of being fixed at the moment they are signed, or questioning whether credit can actually be priced correctly when the inputs themselves are unstable. These are the structural flaws that need addressing in places where lack of financing isn’t just an inconvenience but a drag on economic development itself. And at the same time, we have to actually design solutions that move things forward instead of simply repackaging existing practices.

Another set of observations started to take shape in parallel, and those had less to do with products and more to do with the movement of people and capital between Mexico and the U.S. Being back living in the United States, I realized that although growth in Mexico is still there, it now comes with more constraints, more uncertainty, and more friction. For Mexican businesspeople, expanding into the U.S. or directly acquiring businesses here is no longer just an option for scaling, it’s becoming a way to protect what they have already built. You can see it in how financial decisions are made, in how capital is being allocated, and in the kinds of opportunities people are willing to pursue.

The Language of Deals

As the year moved forward, opportunities in M&A started to come up again and I went back to dealmaking. By then I had already been writing consistently, and deals stopped feeling like isolated events. They became material. Although most dealmaking is confidential, and terms and situations remain so even after closing, every transaction provided an enormous amount to think about. Every deal behaves as a dynamic system in the mathematical sense of the word. Everything interacts, and it does so continuously. You adjust one piece and the rest respond immediately, sometimes in ways that are not obvious until you are already too far into the process.

Writing started to follow that same line. The usual way of talking about deals wasn’t enough to describe what was actually going on, so I ended up reaching for a different language, one that was closer to how these situations actually behave. Constraints, trade-offs, feasible ranges, systems that move as conditions change. Once you look at deals that way, it becomes difficult to reduce them back to simple negotiation or isolated terms. They behave like systems, and they have to be understood as such if you want to work through them without losing the thread.

Forty Plus Columns and What They Actually Are

The journey I’ve described produced more than forty columns over the course of the year. Looking at them together, the arc is clearer than it was while living it. The first pieces I published were the most grounded in where I was standing. Writing about building four ventures at once, about a non-linear career, about what it means to build a fintech platform from scratch, these were a way of introducing myself as the person behind the work, establishing the context that would make everything that followed legible. If you are going to argue for a different way of thinking about credit infrastructure or dealmaking, it helps for the reader to understand what you have actually built and where that thinking comes from.

From there the writing moved into the territory I knew most directly. A long sequence of pieces on credit and financial access, What If We Got Lending Right, We’re Lending People Into Poverty and Calling It Progress, the SMB piece, the Compago rationale, were a sustained argument for a different financial architecture, approached from multiple angles across multiple pieces. Each one made the case that the system as designed was built for conditions that don’t reflect how most people actually manage money, and that the path forward isn’t iteration on the existing model but a genuine rethinking of the infrastructure underneath it. Teaching AI How to Lend, If We Can Anticipate Buyers We Can Also Anticipate Borrowers, and The Living Credit Contract pushed that argument further, into what a credit system designed around real financial behavior, rather than assumed stability, would actually look like.

The lens then widened to the movement of capital and people between Mexico and the United States. Latinos in U.S. Finance, Mexican Capital Is Fueling America’s Next Growth Center, Thirty Years After NAFTA Mexico Will Start Owning in America, White-Collar Nearshoring Is North America’s Next Integration, these pieces came from what I was observing directly, living in Houston at the intersection of two economies that most financial strategies still treat as separate. None of it was prediction. It was description of flows already in motion, visible to anyone paying close enough attention. Financial Markets Are the Most Democratic System We’ve Ever Built belongs to this period too, a historical argument that the transformation of capital markets from a closed system serving insiders to one accessible to ordinary people is one of the most underappreciated shifts in modern economic life, and that the tools most people already have access to are more powerful than they realize.

As the year moved toward dealmaking, the writing narrowed again but the same thread carried through. The Illusion of Precision in Valuation and The Hockey Stick Test both came from watching how confidently people treat numbers that rest on assumptions defined by art more than science. That observation opened a deeper question: if the standard tools of financial analysis rest on unstable foundations, what is the more precise language for describing how financial systems actually behave? The mathematical sequence that followed, The Lie of the Average, An Average May Not Exist in Finance, Modeling an Uncountable World, The Local Maximum Trap, The Cost of Perfect Optimization, was an attempt to build that language, piece by piece. Not deal pieces, but foundational ones: about distributions that don’t converge, about optimization problems that resist exact solutions, about the traps that appear when a system keeps improving toward the nearest peak while a better one sits out of reach. Once that vocabulary existed, applying it to transactions was the natural next step. Valuation Is Not the Deal, The Mathematics of Dealmaking, and The Mathematics of a Moving Deal are where it found its full application, treating transactions not as static agreements to be negotiated but as dynamic systems to be navigated as conditions change.

From Cacophony to Symphony and Websites and Slide Decks Are Still Boring sit slightly outside the main clusters but belong to the same underlying question. The first tries to describe a market with all the instruments and none of the score, and to argue that coherence in Mexico’s digital finance requires national objectives, not just more players. The second is the piece that explains, in the most direct terms, why my column exists at all.

Looking at the full year, the work moved from personal context to system critique to geographic observation to mathematical formalization, but the original intention never changed. Writing was a way to communicate complex work to people who weren’t in the room. It turned out to also be a way of developing the ideas themselves, of finding out what actually held once it had to stand on its own. That is the part I didn’t anticipate when I started, and the part that made it worth continuing.

I don’t expect anyone to read all of it, and I don’t take for granted the time it takes to sit through one piece. Each column is written with the assumption that it has to stand on its own and be worth the time it asks for. Some will land more than others depending on what the reader is looking for, but the standard is the same. It’s a way to work through ideas that show up in practice and to put them in a form that can be examined.