How I Ended Up at the Intersection of Healthcare and Technology

Growing up in Mexico, I was the youngest of five siblings. We had a normal middle-class life. My dad was a physician working in the public healthcare system, and my mom kept the household running for all of us. We got our first computer when my oldest brother was about to start high school. It was bought for him, but naturally, all five of us ended up fighting over it.

The Early Days

The first time I connected to the internet, it was the kind where you heard that AOL dial-up tone and the phone line went dead. No one could make or receive calls while you were online, which meant you were constantly getting yelled at to get off the computer.

I remember watching my older brothers play Age of Empires and eventually getting my turn. I got hooked on The Sims. But beyond games, I was always drawn to what the computer could do. I spent hours downloading music, finding programs, figuring out how to crack software. I taught myself how to hack my Nintendo Wii to play imported games. I did the same with my Xbox 360. I was always trying to figure out how things worked underneath, whether it was finding Wi-Fi passwords or modding consoles.

Looking back, I was already a hacker. I just didn't know that was a career.

The Calculator Kid

As I got older, I leaned hard into math and physics. I was that kid who always had a calculator on him. In high school, I gravitated toward engineering and ended up joining one of the first robotics teams in Mexico to compete in the FIRST Robotics Competition. We traveled to Arizona for our debut and won the Rookie All-Star Award. That earned us a spot at the World Championship in St. Louis, Missouri. We didn't win there, but the experience was formative. It taught me how to build things with a team under pressure, how to problem-solve on the fly, and that engineering was more than equations on paper.

Medicine or Engineering?

Throughout high school, I kept going back and forth. My dad was a doctor. All my brothers were engineers. I loved both worlds. But here's the thing: I always treated software and programming as secondary. It was my hobby, the stuff I did in my free time. Hacking consoles, building small scripts, tinkering with code. I never saw it as something I could build a career around. I framed it as a side interest, not a real profession.

So when it came time to choose, I split the difference. I decided to become a biomedical engineer.

Finding Software

It wasn't until I paused my biomedical engineering studies that I realized software wasn't just a hobby. It was a genuine skill. I decided to pursue a double major in software engineering, even though it meant extra time in school. I don't regret it. The formal education gave me structure I'd never had. A lot of what I learned, I'd already figured out on my own, but having the fundamentals laid out properly made a real difference.

Around that time, I needed to pay for university, so I started my own small digital agency. I built WordPress websites for local businesses and wrote custom scripts and extensions. It wasn't glamorous, but it brought in more money than I expected. That was the first sign that maybe this "hobby" had real value.

The Thesis That Changed Everything

Even as I was building software for clients, I kept getting pulled back to healthcare. I started thinking, almost 15 years ago now, that healthcare was on the verge of a massive shift. I believed that the next revolution wouldn't come from a new drug or surgical technique. It would come from software. I used to call it "automated healthcare." In my mind, it would be a combination of:

• Medical processes redesigned around technology
• Connected medical devices generating real-time data
• AI applied to diagnosis and prognosis before treatment even begins

I also took an elective in genetic engineering during my last semester. I was the only biomedical engineer in the room, surrounded by biology and biochemistry students. They looked at me like I was lost. But I was fascinated by what the future held. Genetic engineering, combined with computational tools, felt like it could reshape medicine entirely.

Where It All Came Together

Fast forward to today, and it's clear to me that the biggest industry AI is going to transform is healthcare. Even though I didn't become a doctor like my dad, I ended up doing the two things I care about most: building technology and applying it to healthcare.

Most of my career has been in health tech, from telemedicine startups in Mexico to ultrasound AI in Vancouver to building my own clinical AI product. But I've also worked across other industries, and that cross-pollination has been valuable. It keeps the thinking fresh.

I started working with AI before it was mainstream. Before ChatGPT. Before the hype cycle. I was partnering with data science teams on real-time imaging models and training ML pipelines on clinical data. When LLMs arrived, they changed everything. They let me move at 10x speed as a solo founder. I genuinely believe they're a superpower.

And that superpower is going to keep reshaping the industries we work in. Healthcare most of all.