I build companies, and I write from inside them.

I started my first business at 13 without knowing that was what I was doing: I was playing electronic music under the name Bastian D. I ended up on stage alongside artists like David Guetta and Justin Bieber, but what actually stayed with me wasn't the stage. It was something much simpler, and it is still the thesis behind everything I have built since: a community that sees itself in you is worth more than any product you sell it.

That principle hasn't changed in twenty years. It changed shape. From music I moved into producing events: in 2013 I brought MTV International to Ecuador for the first time, with LUVRUN5K, Love Unity Voice — more than 10,000 runners in its first edition and four editions after that, with Huawei, Nestlé and Grupo Danec sponsoring alongside MTV. The deal with MTV Agentes de Cambio brought in a million dollars of media worldwide. It is still one of the achievements I am proudest of: it was the first time I raised sponsorship at that scale.

Events also taught me their limits. In Ecuador the legal framework doesn't work in the producer's favour, and an event is the first thing a company cuts when a crisis arrives. Marketing, by contrast, is a constant need — and it is still community: brands building audiences that come back for the content, not just the product. I moved the business in that direction, and over time it became Wingman: today the exclusive in-house agency for Grupo Danec, the client who believed in me most, and the one I decided to give everything to instead of splitting it across ten different brands.

The next community was crypto, at the end of 2020: to me, one of the most powerful economies there is, because it is entirely community-driven — it doesn't grow on advertising, it grows because the people in it believe in it. In 2022, in the middle of the crash, my portfolio lost more than 60% of its value. I didn't sell. I held the same conviction I had come in with, and in 2023, with the push AI gave the market, that portfolio recovered in full. The lesson wasn't about crypto: it was that failure, held with discipline, doesn't interrupt the path. It builds it.

Green Numbers came out of that, a fund I ran with a partner to manage private portfolios. That chapter is now winding down in an orderly close, and the digital-asset management function continues — on my own now, and at a higher level of institutional rigour — under Daleki Capital.

In 2018 I was invited to Entrepreneurs' Organization, and I couldn't get in: my annual revenue still fell short of the million dollars the membership requires. I used that rejection as a target, and in 2021 I got in for the first time. I have sustained that revenue every year in Wingman since, without exception, and today I give back to the organisation as an EO Accelerator mentor and as director of events and of GSEA, the programme that identifies the country's most outstanding young entrepreneurs.

When I started making content about crypto under my own name, in 2023, I didn't do it to sell: I did it because having a community forced me to keep researching, to understand each thing well enough to be able to explain it. That exercise, sustained over years, is what made me an expert — not a title, but the discipline of translating what I was learning for whoever chose to listen. Sebdel came out of that. Today it evolves on the same principle, applied to a different subject: from crypto to AI-native.

AI came in through the same door as everything before it: the reach of what it can do for people, and again, an entirely new community around something that is only just starting. I programmed the first platforms on this model myself — Vinew, Doctor IESS, and the whole Daleki Global system. I did it as one person, because that is exactly what AI offers anyone who genuinely engages with it: to operate like a team while being one.

I work with specialised suppliers instead of building large traditional teams, and I am not on the payroll of any of my own companies: I operate each one as its supplier, not as its employee. I think a person's responsibilities only grow over time, never shrink, and a fixed salary doesn't scale at that rate. A business of your own does, and it is something you can leave to your children. It is the same principle I learned at 13 behind a DJ booth, applied now to how I choose who I work with: independence builds more than hierarchy does.

Merchito comes from somewhere else. It's part of my father's legacy, and I build it in partnership with JADSA, my brother's company. Separately, my mother, Cristina, is co-founder of Daleki Art: her passion for conceptual art, turned into something I hope will hold up for generations.

I write about AI-native companies because I am running several, in industries that look nothing like each other: software, foreign trade, asset management, culture and manufacturing. But the pattern behind all of them is the same one I learned behind that first DJ booth at 13: the industry changes, the community is what actually gets built.

Nothing I publish here includes a figure I couldn't stand behind if someone asked me for the detail. What I do publish: how an operation is put together, what decision was made and why, what constraint shaped it, and what went wrong along the way.