Learnings

If you take a beaver out of their natural habitat, they always find a way to start building a dam. It doesn’t matter if you make them your pet or bring them to a rescue, rest assured they will start getting to work.

This is what it’s like to be a founder. I’ve been placed in seemingly every environment and no matter the backdrop, I cannot stop myself from building.

At 15, I spent three years on a self-directed research project simulating the vagus nerve in Drosophila; that won 4th award at Intel ISEF and I spent my entire senior summer trying to commercialize those findings into a neurotech. At 19, I started trading in an effort to help pay off my parents’ debt; that bot was making $60,000 a month and I shared it as a group investing app around campus. At 20, I left school to give the real workforce a shot. In that year, I interned at CZI, JPM, and FRC; those jobs convinced me that traditional finance would be replaced and a better bank (& ultimately money) could be built. At 22, I took those experiences to take a swing at my first company, Renalta, a stablecoin neobank. I then spent the next four years building a fintech, first in Argentina and then expanded into the US. This is a long synopsis to emphasize a simple point – I am lucky to have found what I am destined to do, but it has come with many trials along the way.

Diving head-first, at full force into markets had its ups and downs, but I’ve weathered the storm to become much sharper, principled, and opportunistic on the other side.

My personal rule set can be found here and my exhaustive list of learnings can be browsed here. Below, you will find a summary of the key takeaways that are most transferable to my next decade in business:

1. How to build in uncharted domains

Follow the law, but never let license approvals or grey areas kill momentum. Uncertain regulatory environments are an opportunity – see: Erebor, Bridge, and Polymarket. The winners took aggressive positions, invested in policy efforts, and were the first to win approvals in unregulated territories.

In 2024, interest-bearing stablecoin accounts were unregulated in the US. There were also mixed rulings on whether lending aggregators required money transmitter licenses. Crypto regulation is a minefield. Both fintech products that we built operated in legal grey areas with no historical precedent.

Renalta took a more conservative approach, exploring licenses and only launching in jurisdictions with clear regulatory frameworks. We were right to be careful, but I let approvals set our pace and raised too little. Momentum died while we waited for regulatory clarity. Next time, I would build the roadmap around licenses, not behind them.

2. The best marketing team is a data engineering team.

Many growth hackers, content creators, and agencies claim to offer “viral” strategies. In my experience, the best marketing is automated and data driven. You can lean on your intuition for product-building if you really understand the customer (ideally, you are a customer of your own product), but marketing requires the opposite approach.

• Unit economics are everything. The marketing team exists to optimize and scale those metrics sustainably. Each growth effort is a measured test.
• Our best performing product had hundreds of Mixpanel dashboards, conditional A/B tests, automated KYC rulings, generative UI flows, custom referral onboarding, and much much more. Decision models will only scale these efforts, ensuring that the best “marketing” teams are led entirely by data.

3. Own the narrative

Owning the narrative is paramount. I don’t believe that first to market wins, but first to narrative usually does. It helps drive recruiting, fundraising, and community building.

My younger self was shy to put my stamp on things. Not from lack of conviction, but from fear of sharing publicly on platforms that leave little room for nuance. So I watched other companies plant their flag on ideas and products I had built much earlier. That is on me. I will never again be slow to launch, timid in narrative, or hesitant to push what I believe.

4. THREE HARD RULES TO CLEAR

Rule #1 – Give out cash on first sign-up

Users need to make money on sign-up.

You either save the user money, or give them money back. Giving money is stronger than helping them save it. Payouts must be unsubsidized (trading, gambling, or sign-up incentives do not count).

Rule #2 – Users should be able to scale a business on the platform

After earning their first pay-out, these same users should “professionalize.” There will be a class of customers who love the experience so much that they are compelled to scale and build small businesses on top of the initial product. The platform should be built to support their efforts from day 1.

Example: Airbnb hosts, Uber drivers, Discord mods

Rule #3 – Novel consumer behavior

Word of mouth is the strongest growth channel. Users must feel the magic. A good litmus test for how novel the experience is: can you get this product/service anywhere else? The answer should very clearly be “No.”

Any consumer product that failed to hit PMF boiled down to not clearing all three of these rules.

5. How to repeatedly hack free distribution

Breakout consumer apps identify a temporary vulnerability in existing platforms to gain an unfair distribution advantage. ‘Virality’ does not exist, but a team with a keen eye and repeatable, fast-growing exploits does. It’s why the best operate like blackhat hackers.

• Spend little to no time studying past growth hacks; most have been exhausted or are no longer relevant to the market given how quickly trends evolve.
• Instead, the team must be trained on how to monitor and creatively exploit niche distribution channels. Each hack tends to have a four-month lifespan, but a team that is designed for repeated wins can compound that into real momentum.

Company post-mortems and builder advice read as logical.

If Di María wrote an article about passing a soccer ball, it wouldn’t seem too difficult. A pass from Di María and a pass from a novice is the difference between a header goal and the opponent’s interception. The only way to learn is to go all-in on building. There are no shortcuts. It is unglamorous, isolating, and requires constantly updating your priors.

Thankfully, by the end of it, you may become the only person in the world capable of bringing your country its first win in 36 years.