My Journey as Entrepreneur
Co-founder. Product builder. Long-term entrepreneur.
For more than 17 years, I’ve been building companies alongside my brother.
Together, we’ve launched, scaled, shut down, and reinvented businesses across mobile apps, games, SaaS platforms, and advertising technology. This isn’t a story of overnight success—it’s a long-term journey shaped by persistence, failure, and constant learning.
I started my career as a Systems Engineer and naturally moved into Product Management as I began building and scaling products. My professional path began at Microsoft, where I spent three years learning how world-class products are built. But it quickly became clear that being an employee was never going to be my final destination.
The First Company: Learning the Hard Way
In 2008, we co-founded our first startup, Publizar, an online discounts platform in Venezuela. At its peak, it became one of the most visited websites in Caracas and one of the earliest large-scale digital deals platforms in the country.
Despite the traction, the business model didn’t work.
Publizar failed—but it taught us one of our most important lessons early on: growth without a sustainable business is not success. That experience became the foundation for everything that followed.
Building Products at Scale: Mobile Apps & Games
In 2012, my brother and I co-founded ICO Tech, a mobile application development company. Over the next five years, we built nearly 20 Android and iOS apps across industries such as hospitality, restaurants, education, and events. Several of these products reached Top 10 rankings in their categories in different countries.
Games soon became our next focus
In 2014, we launched Apensar App, a mobile word game that surpassed 40 million downloads worldwide. Apensar (Wordie in English) was featured among the Top 50 Google Play Games of 2015, ranked in the Top 10 most downloaded games in more than 110 countries, and received over a dozen awards.
In 2016, we partnered with Disney to create a special kids’ edition of Apensar.
In 2017, we released Letter Master on Facebook Instant Games, reaching nearly 10 million players in its first year.
The Hardest Decision: Letting Go to Move Forward
In 2018, we made one of the most difficult decisions of our entrepreneurial journey: we chose to let go of what was, at the time, our most successful game.
Rather than continuing to scale it ourselves, we sold the game’s IP to a publicly traded company in Europe.
That decision wasn’t about walking away from success—it was about recognizing where our real leverage was. We took the underlying technology that made our games go viral and redirected it toward a broader opportunity: using those same mechanics to help other products and platforms increase engagement and improve purchase conversion rates.
Letting go of a winning product allowed us to double down on what we did best, and apply it far beyond games.
That decision led to Fastcards, a mobile-first platform that enabled brands to create personalized landing pages designed to improve digital campaign conversion rates. Fastcards is being use by global brands such as L’Oréal, Unilever, Bayer, and Mattel.
Co-Founding Admazing
Still working together, my brother and I, co-founded Admazing, a mobile gaming advertising company and ad exchange. It was built to help brands connect with audiences through interactive, game-based experiences instead of disruptive ads.
Today, Admazing works with 220+ global brands, including multiple Fortune 500 companies, helping them run high-impact advertising campaigns inside mobile games worldwide.
In 2019, my brother and I were selected as Endeavor Entrepreneurs, and over the years we’ve participated in top-tier accelerator programs such as 500 Startups, Google Launchpad, and FBStart.
2022: A Personal and Professional Milestone
2022 marked a definitive turning point in our journey. Professionally, Admazing was recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America, ranking on the prestigious Inc. 5000 list. This validation of our growth and scale was the result of years of iterating in the advertising technology space.
On a personal level, after years of building companies, navigating failure, and continuously pushing forward, I was granted U.S. permanent residency under the EB-1A visa for extraordinary ability in business.
It wasn’t just an immigration milestone—it was recognition of a long-term journey built through discipline, resilience, and conviction.
The Projects That Didn’t Succeed
Not every company or product worked. In fact, many didn’t.
Those failures—often more than the wins—shaped our instincts, decision-making, and ability to see what others miss. Every shutdown, every wrong assumption, and every painful pivot directly informed the companies that eventually succeeded.
Entrepreneurship isn’t about the wins or the failures. It’s about the ability to learn, adapt, and keep building through both.