Facundo Franco.

I was born in Montevideo in 2001 and grew up in Punta del Este, where my family moved when I was very young.

I was fortunate to have a good childhood. I went to private school, learned English from an early age, and spent a lot of time playing and competing in tennis.

We also traveled frequently, particularly to the United States. I got to experience places like New York, California, and Miami while I was still young. Looking back, that exposure had a much bigger impact on me than I understood at the time. Seeing different places, cultures, and ways of living expanded my idea of what was possible beyond Uruguay.

I wasn't an especially consistent student. Some years I did well, others I didn't. But I was always drawn to particular subjects, especially history and geography. I was much more interested in understanding the world than in being good at school for its own sake.

After high school, I planned to move to Buenos Aires with a friend and study business at the University of Palermo. I wanted the degree, but more than anything, I wanted to leave home and experience life somewhere new.

I moved into the apartment.

Three days later, the pandemic hit.

My parents called and told me to come home. I remember getting off the ferry in Colonia and seeing their faces. They could tell how frustrated I was. I had been waiting for that independence, and suddenly I was back in my childhood bedroom taking university classes through a screen.

It didn't last long.

I struggled with online university and left after the first semester.

But I wasn't interested in doing nothing. I was taking courses on my own, reading constantly, and becoming increasingly interested in business and entrepreneurship.

That became the beginning of a very different education.

I tried e-commerce. I imported products into Uruguay and sold them locally. I worked on businesses with friends, explored services, tried to patent ideas, and experimented with more things than I can probably remember.

Most of them went nowhere.

But that period taught me something university hadn't: I liked building things, testing ideas, and figuring out how businesses actually worked.

Eventually, I moved to Montevideo and got the opportunity to work inside an e-commerce business selling through Mercado Libre.

It became my first real experience operating a business consistently. Monday through Saturday, full days, and plenty of work that followed me beyond normal hours.

I was responsible for pricing, publishing and maintaining a large catalog of products, writing listings, managing sales, dealing with customer complaints, and protecting the account's reputation on Mercado Libre.

That reputation mattered. A late shipment, a cancellation, or a bad customer experience wasn't an abstract metric. Enough mistakes affected the account's standing, visibility, and ultimately its ability to sell.

The physical operation mattered just as much. I worked on keeping the warehouse organized and improving how products moved from inventory to dispatch so we could get orders out quickly.

The owner gave me a lot of freedom to figure things out and experiment with ways to improve the business. With a large catalog and constant sales activity, there was always something that needed attention.

I spent around two years doing it.

It was demanding, but I loved it. For the first time, I was seeing how all the pieces of a business connected: pricing, merchandising, customers, operations, logistics, and execution.

It taught me more about running a business than anything I had done before.

Eventually, I decided to leave Montevideo and return home to Punta del Este.

That transition wasn't particularly glamorous.

During the following summer, I worked nights as a cashier at a friend's pub. Most shifts started around 8 PM and finished around 6 in the morning.

When the season ended, I found myself back at home trying to figure out what came next.

An idea I'd written down months earlier was still sitting in my Notes.

I decided to give it a shot.