My Origin Story

The Early Signal

For as long as I can remember, people at school asked me how to do things. Math problems, physics exercises, anything that required figuring something out. I got good at reading the difference between someone who genuinely wanted to understand and someone who just wanted the answer to copy.

My default response became: "I can teach you how to do it, but I will not tell you the answer." That was my first filter. A simple sentence that separated the curious from the transactional. The ones who stayed were the ones I wanted to teach.

The Football Player

In high school I started charging money for math and physics tutoring. I ran a regularization program for students who had failed those subjects. I liked the work, but some of the students didn't care at all. They just wanted to pass. That frustrated me.

Then there was this one student. On the outside, he was the tough guy. Always with the football team, always causing trouble. The kind of person most teachers had already written off.

After many lessons, he got vulnerable with me. He told me he felt stupid—but that with me, for the first time, he didn't. He opened up about his family. His parents were going through a divorce. He was carrying all of that weight while trying to survive school.

He ended up enjoying math. I don't think he pursued engineering or anything like that, but he stopped drowning in it. Something shifted.

That was the moment that changed everything for me. Not because the teaching was special. It was the realization behind it: how many people out there fear math because of bad experiences with teachers or parents, not because of math itself? How many people could love it if someone just gave them the chance?

That thought wouldn't let go of me.

Kichihua

That conviction led me to co-found Kichihua, an NGO focused on giving kids access to quality education. Private classes, one-on-one, with students who wanted to learn, not because they were failing, but because they were curious. For a while, it was everything I wanted to do.

But I had a tension I couldn't resolve: I believed knowledge should be free. I was reluctant to charge people for teaching. I ran Kichihua at a loss for three years. I was putting in more money and energy than I was getting back. Noble, idealistic and completely unsustainable.

At some point we pivoted to training teachers instead of teaching students directly. The logic made sense: scale the impact by training the people who reach hundreds of kids. We built a community of over a thousand teachers.

That pivot killed our drive. We removed ourselves from the exact moment that gave us energy—the direct connection with a learner, the five different ways of explaining the same concept until it clicks, the look on someone's face when they realize they're able to solve the problem. You can't delegate that. You can't scale that by training someone else to do it.

The Tension I Still Carry

I still don't fully know how to reconcile these two things: my belief that knowledge should be accessible to anyone who wants it, and the reality that I have a family, a son, and a life that requires financial sustainability.

What I've started to understand is that what I offer isn't knowledge. Knowledge is free, it's in textbooks, on YouTube, in Khan Academy. What that football player got from me wasn't information. It was someone who saw through his armor, who adapted the explanation five different ways, who created a space where he could be vulnerable and feel intelligent. That's not a commodity. That's a relationship. And relationships have never been free: they cost time, energy, and presence. Should I charge for that?

What I Know Now

I don't care about the age of my students. I've taught kids, teenagers and adults. What I care about is that they chose to be there. I want people who are motivated to learn—not because they failed a subject but because something is interesting and they want to go deeper. That self-selection changes everything. It allows me to push harder, go further, and have real conversations.

I like small groups. I like building the curriculum. But what I love—what actually sustains me—is the moment someone practices what I taught them, uses it to create something they couldn't create before, and gets excited about it. That transfer from understanding to doing to feeling capable. That's the thing.

I'm not a traditional teacher. I don't want a traditional school. What I want is something more like a workshop, a dojo—a place where a small group of self-selected people come to work on hard, interesting problems with someone who will explain it different ways until it clicks, and then help them build something real with it.

I've been a developer for over five years and worked in AI for three. I've led teams, co-founded an NGO, worked at startups and corporations. I've tried building apps, planning businesses, drafting strategies. Some of it was valuable. But the thread that runs through all of it—the thing that keeps coming back no matter what I'm doing—is teaching.