Bigger Problems, Bigger Impact

All my life, the people closest to me told me to play it safe. My mother was working class and my father was an immigrant, and they taught me to work as hard as I could toward the most prestigious goal in sight: the best school, the best firm, the best title. It was good advice for the world they knew.

The problem with prestige is that it looks backward: it mostly measures what impressed people in the past. Paul Graham points the other way in Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas ↗: the biggest ideas look too big to take on, and that is exactly what makes them worth pursuing. I wanted to build the future and solve problems I cared about, not ones other people had already ranked.

Every time it was working, I left

1. Cleary Gottlieb. I made it to one of the most prestigious law firms in the world, exactly where I was supposed to be. Then I left.
2. Mexico City, 2000. I went to work for Ricardo Salinas, one of Mexico’s richest men, who years later became the largest investor in Bitreserve, now Uphold. For 13 years I built startups for Grupo Salinas, including Todito Cash ↗, Mexico’s first digital peso platform. I co-founded Todito with Guillermo Salinas Pliego and conceived Todito Cash.
3. Uphold, 2013. I left Mexico City to build on my own, with no net: Bitreserve, later Uphold, co-founded with JP Thieriot.
4. Airtm. Once Uphold was established and growing, I left to focus on Airtm, the peer dollar network we had launched on Uphold’s API.
5. QvaPay. Once Airtm was thriving on its own, I left to focus on QvaPay and Cuba.

Each time, I left once the thing was established, funded, and running without me. Not the safest move. The one with the bigger impact.

Cuba has millions of talented people who were told to wait for permission. QvaPay is built for the ones who stopped waiting. It is the biggest horizon I have found yet: 9.4 million people, next door to the largest economy on earth, with money flows that could grow to the size of the Dominican Republic’s and beyond.