Iwas born in Guatemala City on a Friday in
March 1984 — the oldest of three. Before my first birthday, my parents
had picked up the small life we’d started and moved it across the Pacific
to Hawaii. The house in those photographs is full of warm light and people
I’m too young to remember.
My father was from Conegliano, the prosecco country an hour north of
Venice. He was an entrepreneur, and he carried the Veneto with him in
everything he cooked and almost everything he said. My mother is a Guatemalan
lawyer, with the precision the role implies. Together they made a household
that moved often and read constantly.
Between Oahu and adolescence the family moved through Los Angeles, San
Francisco, and back to Guatemala City. Later, on my own, I added the Italian
half of the story — Certaldo first, then Bologna,
Ferrara, and finally Milan. Eight addresses, three countries,
three time zones, a steady soundtrack of code-switching between Italian,
Spanish, and English. I like it that way.
I studied business administration. The actual dream, briefly, was to fly for
Pan Am — the airline disappeared before I was
old enough to apply, so I went into technology, the other field where you spend
your life thinking about routes, constraints, and the cost of getting from A to
B at scale.
By temperament I’m an introvert. In the work, that translates: I listen
more than I talk, prepare more than I improvise, and take a question home
overnight rather than give a half-formed answer on the spot. The customers I do
my best work with eventually realize I’ve been quietly tracking everything
they said three meetings ago. At the center of all of it is the family —
the fixed point around which everything else gets arranged. I’m an uncle,
a father, and a husband.
Off the clock, two threads have been with me longest. Music —
classical when I’m thinking, jazz when I’m listening, reggae when I
want to stop doing either. Range matters more to me than genre. And
bikes — motocross and enduro through my teens, the kind of
riding that teaches you to commit to a line and trust your weight.