Experience
Here I share my experience, both in the format of my life lessons and the style. I would like to share my humble experience if you know how it's going to be useful. Contact me.
THREE LESSONS I LEARNED
I promise to make my story short and useful. I founded a design agency and turned it into businesses: Icons8 and Generated Photos. That was the short part.
Here is the useful part: by reading through the three lessons below, you will resolve most of the challenges of a young person, executive, like I was. I wish I had this text at the time.
Read a book, any book
I was 20 and knew nothing about management when my boss made me manage a team of 12 developers. Why did he do that? Because my salary was the highest. I wasn't even a developer, I could write code, but it wasn't a competitive skill. Agile didn't exist; Scrum wasn't popular, and the dominating practices were too hard to grasp.
I remember walking into a bookstore in Singapore with my boss and he bought several books whose titles I didn't understand. I asked him which book would help me to manage my team and he said "none yet."
So, point of view: a 20 year designer surrounded and not listened by a bunch of older and smarter guys (one of whom was an academic physicist of 55 years). I had to invent IT management from scratch.
What did I do? I managed horribly. I remember one dev postponing the deadline after deadline with no progress. My solution: to pass the task to another dev. I remember them both being confused and not understanding why I did that. I didn't understand either, but I had to do something.
Read at least one book, at least Peter Drucker. I didn't do it at the time, and I regret it.
Manage my own money
I started understanding what I do when I started paying the salaries out of my pocket. I hired an account manager when I was 24. Remote work wasn't a thing, so we sat at the office in my apartment.
Somehow I didn't realize she's sitting on a stool until she ruined her back. I've bought the chair she chose the next day, and it costed me her monthly salary, but it was an easy spend for me, because I was spending my own money. I didn't have the budget constraints, I didn't have to navigate the bureaucracy, I didn't have the company norms to stick to. I just bought the chair.
When you spend your own money, management is much easier.
Pick the low-hanging fruit
When we decided to make stock photography, we did it on a scale. The idea of the time was to shoot the photos and compose them into realistic-looking collages. That was Generative AI before Generative AI. That was MidJourney without proper tech. Of course, it failed. We've left, and it left us 70,000 photos. To make them matching, we were shooting them with the same light setup, same camera height, and professional makeup and hairstyle. In other words, we had an impressive dataset for Generative AI.
When NVIDIA released StyleGAN, we made the photos better than NVIDIA did. It used the dataset from Flickr with diverse, poorly lit, unprofessionally shot photos. Our generated photos were an instant hit, landing international press and the chain of venture capital, with Forbes calling.
Use whatever you have at hand to get your next product. In other words, build products on the shoulders of previous work.
WORK HISTORY
I'm a tech founder leading a team of 150 and serving 4M users.
My Areas of Expertise
My core experience is building AI products from zero, with no venture capital, and monetize them early. My three tools are:
Customer Development
Books that formed me:
UX Design, my profession
Books that formed me:
Paywalls
Learning it all hard way
PRODUCTS WE'VE LAUNCHED
Synthetic data
Custom datasets for enterprise clients
Largest graphics supplier to Canva
Industry partnership providing design assets
GenYOU
Personalized AI selfies
Face Generator
Technology behind our synthetic data
Human Generator
Full-body humans
Ouch Generator
Generates AI images that don't look Midjourney
Icons
Industry standard for icons, now with AI generator
ACHIEVEMENTS
4M+ Users Globally
Serving millions of designers and developers worldwide with AI-generated content and design tools
150+ Team Members
Leading a distributed team of professionals across multiple time zones and countries
Bootstrap Success
Built profitable AI companies without venture capital, focusing on early monetization and sustainable growth
International Speaker
Regular keynote speaker at AI conferences, sharing insights on building successful AI products
Synthetic Media Pioneer
Early innovator in AI-generated human faces and synthetic dataset creation for enterprise clients
Linkware Inventor (2012)
I invented the linkware model: Use for a link → SEO boost. Pay those who value a link more than $15 that the license costs. My inspiration was the requirement to credit photographers, but without a link requirement at the time.
Global Perspective
Operating from Argentina while building products used worldwide, bringing unique international insights
Globally
creative tech
price
Canva
GOVERNMENT & REGULATORY
Government & Regulatory
I consult governments on AI regulation, creative tools, intellectual property, and ethics. The agencies I've worked with:
European Commission
AI regulation and policy consultation for the European Union
U.S. Department of Justice
Antitrust and competition matters related to creative tech
UK Competition and Markets Authority
Antitrust and competition matters related to creative tech