My Story:
Built Between Two Worlds
I arrived in the United States at four years old. My mother had bought a round-trip ticket and never intended to use the return half. Three boys, a borrowed dining room, flea market winter clothes — and a quiet certainty that the ceiling on what was possible had just gotten much, much higher.
I grew up between two countries and two languages — never fully belonging to either, carrying both everywhere. What I eventually understood is that this was not a disadvantage. It was an advanced curriculum in holding two things at once: the world as it is, and the world as it could be.
"The dreamer in you did not appear out of nowhere. There is a bloodline. There is a legacy."
— Dreamer
My family of dreamers shaped me before I had words for it. A grandfather who founded theater schools, ballet academies, and music institutions in Colombia. A mother who built a life for three boys out of a suitcase and an unshakeable clarity about what was possible. An uncle who believed before there was anything to believe in. These were the Abuelos Soñadores — the dreaming ancestors — and their reaching made my reaching possible.
The Tuna Era
Right out of high school, my twin brother Jimmy and I started a company with more nerve than money and a 10-by-10 windowless office we loved every square inch of. The alarm went off at 11:45pm for newspaper routes. Tuesdays meant 29-cent hamburgers at McDonald's. Dinner was cans of tuna — always available, always enough.
That stretch — the grinding, unglamorous, no-one-photographs-this stretch — became the foundation of everything that followed. Not because struggle is inherently productive, but because inside it, without knowing it, we were becoming the people the dream needed us to be.
We built Inventek — an inventory management POS system for dollar stores — and drove a trailer from Florida to Las Vegas for a trade show before anyone knew our name, because volume required going to the customers, not waiting for them. We went where we did not belong until we belonged there.
When COVID arrived and the floor gave way, I did what I had always done in the silence between one chapter and the next — I listened. And in that silence I finally heard something I had been too busy to hear: that I had something to say. That the life I had lived was a book. That I was supposed to write it.
"I am not a celebrity. I do not have a dramatic rock-bottom moment. What I have is something more common — and more useful."
— Dreamer, Introduction
I built a desk in the living room. Started earlier every morning. Ran later every night. Wrote before the world woke up, trying to put into words the things I wished someone had told me years ago. The result was two books — and more on the way.