One of the habits I've always tried to maintain is my ability to write. Five years of daily journaling - custom prompts to invoke thought, entries that no one will ever read. It's the one discipline that stuck through everything else falling apart and coming back together.
This is my first blog post. So it felt right to dig deeper - not into what I'm building, but into why I'm wired this way.
All my life I've been surrounded by people who treated risk like oxygen.
My father left school in the third grade. My grandfather couldn't afford to be in school at all. When my parents moved to the US, my dad worked his way from landscaping to carpentry to owning his own business. On my mom's side, her family made a living selling huaraches in Jiquilpan - a small town in Mexico where I was born.
Risk. Business. Sales. Literally in my blood.
I moved to the US at four. I still remember sprinting to the TV at 7pm to watch Batman: The Brave and the Bold on Cartoon Network. Everything about the character hooked me - at that age I couldn't articulate what. The movies, the action figures, the bed cover, the Halloween costumes, the birthday cakes. All Batman.
Looking back, it's obvious. A character with no powers who holds his own through strategic planning and wit. That idea lodged itself somewhere deep.
By fifth grade, Tony Stark entered the picture. The MCU had me - I remember losing my mind when Tom Holland's Spider-Man showed up in the Civil War trailer. Iron Man shared something with Batman: the risk, the aggression toward goals, the determination. Sometimes flawed, sometimes reckless, but always strategic.
I asked for a laptop in sixth grade for Christmas. Started teaching myself to code. Endless tutorials. I'd ask my mom to take me to RadioShack to pick up soldering irons, DC motors, connectors - built a fan out of a plastic water bottle, an arc reactor lit up by finger lasers from Dollar Tree, popsicle stick guns held together with hot glue and rubber bands.
HTML first. Then Python - tkinter GUIs. My first app was Hello World on the Notes app of my Lenovo Yoga 710. Then a calculator. Then an app that gave my mom random food suggestions because I kept catching her thinking out loud about what to cook. Nice.
Let's get physical. I bought a MakeBlock mBot Ranger and assembled it on my own. Joined a kickboxing club by the corner of my house. I remember walking in the first night and being told to flip a tire I was sure I couldn't flip. The instructor told me to. So I did.
I was at the top of every class in middle school. High honor roll. Near-perfect A+ across the board. I'd watch endless tech videos - iPhone specs, programming tutorials, now coding in Sublime Text. My path was planned: MIT. Iron Man went there, after all. Mechanical engineering.
I'd tell teachers that, and they'd hold me to a higher standard. I liked that.
In Mrs. Griffo's sixth grade class, she'd shout a multiplication equation and two students would race to answer. Whoever got it first moved on. When it was my turn, I lapped the entire class. I was doing algebra, geometry, and trigonometry on Khan Academy while my classmates were still on fractions. I even memorized the first 30 digits of pi and would ask people to Google it while I recited. How performative.
meditate.
In eleventh grade, I pivoted to software engineering. Quarantine hit. People were landing six-figure offers at FAANG companies with just some LeetCode and bootcamp certifications. The path looked clear.
meditate.
Then I heard the announcement: an AI that could write paragraphs. ChatGPT. I was one of the first 0.5% of users - so early that after you typed a prompt, nothing happened until you refreshed the page. Before they introduced a paid plan. Before GPT-3.5 even existed.
Generative AI. Hooked instantly.
Let's make money.
I started Copy Cristian - a freelance copywriting business targeting fitness influencers who needed their website copy rewritten. That was the ICP. I learned frameworks: PASTOR, PAS, AIDA, DCA. Learned how to build a CRM to store leads, how to use Hunter.io and Apollo to find people's emails and phone numbers. I was sixteen.
Read the books: Rich Dad Poor Dad, The 4-Hour Work Week, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
My first paying client ended up being a woman on Upwork who needed ad scripts for her cannabis business on TikTok. Not the fitness influencer ICP I had in mind, but $50 earned while I was visiting Mexico. I did it. First real profit.
Started watching Iman Gadzhi, Alex Hormozi, everyone in the business space. Everyone's making money and I'm afraid to take more risk?
I wanted to drop out of school.
meditate.
Here's something I think people don't pay enough attention to: if those are the characters and creators I grew up watching - Batman at five, Iron Man at ten, Hormozi at sixteen - then of course my default settings would be wired toward risk, aggression, and building. An iPad in first grade. My media shaped me as much as my environment did.
I had no passion for a job in high school. But I was certain of one thing: I wanted money.
Back from Mexico in 2023. Dreading college. Copywriting couldn't scale. Upwork was volatile. My planned major kept shifting - software engineering was saturated, so I pivoted to cybersecurity as a niche vertical. Tried trading on demo accounts. Failed.
meditate.
Reading at 5am. Gym workouts. Studying. Watching business, credit, stocks, and trading videos all day made me feel like I was making progress. I was stuck in an endless loop of self-improvement disguised as productivity.
I delegated the boring work. Passed my AP Programming class in twelfth grade using GPT's analysis mode. In my psychology class at community college, I had Claude write me a ten-page paper on the topic. Never read it. Printed it. Handed it to the professor. A+.
"How do you write so well?" he asked.
"I used to do copywriting."
I focused my real attention on studying for my ISC2 and CompTIA certifications. Why don't people delegate?
meditate.
I wanted money. I didn't care if it came from writing cannabis ad scripts or staring at candlestick wicks on a screen all day. I wanted financial freedom.
One night, I was overwhelmed - the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be collapsed into a knot in my throat. A tear came up. 3:29am. More new AI tools. More business models. More people my age posting wins online.
Why was everyone figuring this out at eighteen and I couldn't?
meditate.
I felt like shit having my parents pay for community college because I hadn't figured out how to make $10K yet at eighteen. My plan failed. Everyone told me the journey takes longer than you think when you're young. I didn't listen. But would I stop?
No. I refused.
I needed income. More importantly, I needed skills that would be useful when I eventually owned my own company. Along the way I picked up cold emailing, marketing, pitch frameworks.
Listened to an Alex Hormozi podcast about formal education versus online education. School was boring. The professors were showing slides from 2009. Half the class was vaping. I was wasting my time.
Let's leave school. Let's get a job.
Home Depot - overnight freight associate. Then a commission-only door-to-door sales role in roofing. Then selling windows. Learned how to pitch, handle objections, read body language on a doorstep.
I was sleeping three hours a day. 8am to 6pm knocking doors. 7pm to 2am unloading freight trucks. No recovery for the 5am gym sessions. Driving an hour to my D2D territory. 98 degrees, walking all day, or it's raining - only a brief pause at lunch since our iPads were location-tracked by the manager.
Then my car crashed.
I could only keep that pace for three months.
One day during lunch, scrolling, I heard a TikToker talk about tech sales. Interesting. Booked a call from his bio link. "Too little experience."
Another door knocked - literally. A guy at a door said he worked in tech sales as an AE. "I don't know what that is," I told him. "Terrible timing - I just dropped out of school to make money." He watched how I handled rejections that day. "You should look into it. You don't need a degree."
Interesting. But at nineteen? No degree? No tech experience?
I consumed every YouTube video and podcast I could find. Bought another course on a credit card. Leap of faith.
I got my first interview scheduled while I was still knocking doors - I was literally jumping around in the middle of my territory when I saw the email. Prospects peeking through their blinds wondering what was wrong with me.
Endless podcasts on repeat during my walks through neighborhoods: what to say during a tech sales interview. I quit D2D. All in.
Missed the first one. Second round on the next. Then two more interviews. Two offers. One from a company I loved in the cybersecurity space.
I did it.
Quit Home Depot. Went from overnight freight in February to cybersecurity SDR in New York City by fall. The biggest life change I'd been through. I slept well for the first time in months. Had enough money to fix my car. Could help my parents pay rent. Could take my girlfriend out to eat without dimming my phone screen to check my balance at the table.
Tech sales changed everything.
Being a BDR taught me how companies actually operate from the inside - how revenue engines work, how sales teams are structured, how GTM motions run, how pipeline gets built and lost. I learned what a real sales cycle looks like. How marketing hands off to sales. How a single rep's territory can make or break a quarter. The mechanics of B2B that you can't learn from a course or a podcast.
Varonis showed me what enterprise sales discipline looks like. Swap gave me the founding GTM experience - building the playbook from scratch, not inheriting one. DataSnipper put me in the middle of a high-growth team where I could see every crack in the system up close. Every one of those roles gave me something. I met great people.
But something was pulling at me the entire time. I wanted to build ventures alongside the work, and being a BDR commuting into the city left no room for that. The job started giving me the same feeling school did - useful for a season, but not the destination.
So I started paying attention differently. I stopped just doing the work and started studying the work. I wrote down every problem I faced as a BDR - every broken workflow, every tool gap, every moment I was toggling between six tabs to figure out who to call next, every time I thought "why doesn't this exist?"
The list got long. Fast.
Territory assignments that made no sense. Signal overload with no prioritization. New reps taking three to four months before they could operate independently. Managers flying blind on what their team was actually doing day to day. AE handoffs that lost context every single time. The entire BDR tech stack was duct tape - six or seven disconnected tools that didn't talk to each other, held together by spreadsheets and hope.
Then came the idea.
What started as an AI agency concept became Syntri AI the moment I joined DataSnipper and saw all of these problems up close. Not from a whiteboard. Not from a case study. From sitting in the seat, doing the job, feeling the pain every single day.
That's the thing no one talks about - the best products don't come from market research. They come from frustration. From being the user who gets ignored.
"The best way to become the person you want to become is to put yourself in the situation where you have no option but to do so."
The models are getting really good at code. I never lost my AI edge - X has the best real-time updates on this. I've been building with AI tools since before most people knew they existed. Started planning Syntri in October. Building it in November. By February, I had a platform that does what six tools couldn't do together.
I'm twenty years old. No degree. No co-founder. No VC backing yet. Building the first agentic BDR tool - built by a BDR. Every feature informed by real problems I lived through. Every design decision made by someone who actually sat in that chair and made those calls.
People ask me what drives me. I think it's simpler than it sounds.
I grew up watching my dad build a business with a third-grade education. I grew up watching characters with no superpowers outthink everyone in the room. I grew up in a house where risk wasn't something you calculated - it was something you just did because the alternative was standing still.
I'm really excited to keep playing this game. Learning, taking risks, failing, winning hard. Working fourteen hours on something I'm passionate about. Celebrating with the people I love. Helping my parents the way they helped me. Building something that matters.
At twenty, that's what I'd define as a good life.
Curious to see where things end up.