I
was 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.