Let’s be real here for once.
I’ve been thinking a lot about privilege lately. Not the clean kind that’s easy to name. The messy kind that lives in the gaps. The kind where you grow up with access to a world most people don’t get near, but without the money to actually live in it.
That’s where I come from.
Two passports, one complicated childhood
I was born in Hamburg, Germany. My father is Mexican. My mother is German. I have two passports, two languages, two very different family histories running through me.
Both sides come from entrepreneurial backgrounds. For a long time, both families were doing well. Not yachts-and-private-jets well, but comfortable. Secure. The kind of comfort that opens doors and whispers, you’ll be fine.
And then, through a mix of bad financial decisions and the slow erosion of money over recent decades, a lot of that stability disappeared.
So I grew up in a strange paradox: surrounded by privilege, but without the actual financial backing to match it. Languages, travel, education, networks, the unspoken confidence that the world is navigable. But no cushion. No safety net. No "just ask your parents" money.
Not quite from here, not quite from there
Being in between isn’t only about money. It’s also about belonging.
In Germany, I’m the Mexican one. In Mexico, I’m the German one. I speak both languages, but I’m never 100% either. I get the references, mostly. I know the food, the music, the basic social codes. But there’s always a layer I miss. A joke that lands differently. A way of moving through the world that I can imitate but not fully inherit.
My parents’ relationship had its own culture wars. Two people from two continents, raising two kids in a third country, trying to figure out which rules apply. Money, discipline, ambition, emotions, what success even means. Nothing was ever fully one thing. Everything was negotiation.
That shaped me more than I realized. I learned early that reality is not single. That you can look at the same situation from two completely different angles and both can be true. That nobody is fully right, and nobody is fully wrong, and most people are just defending the world they grew up in.
It also made me feel lonely in a way that’s hard to explain. Not dramatic lonely. Just... never fully at home anywhere. Always translating. Always bridging. Always a little bit outside.
The view from the back seat
Some of my earliest memories are from Mexico.
My father drove my brother and me through the poor parts of the country. Not as tourists. As Mexicans. He wanted us to see it. To feel it. To understand that this was part of our story too.
I was a kid who didn’t really speak Spanish yet, looking out the window at a reality I couldn’t fully process. But the emotion landed early. This is wrong. I want to change it.
That impulse is still the red thread. It’s why I studied finance. Why I thought about politics. Why I ended up choosing business as the most scalable lever I could reach. The method changed. The direction stayed the same.
Always the poorest person in the room
For most of my life, I’ve been surrounded by people who had more.
More money. More safety nets. More options that didn’t require betting everything on a risky idea. I went to schools and universities where a lot of my peers came from real wealth. I could keep up culturally. I knew how to sit in those rooms, how to speak those languages. But the financial cushion wasn’t there.
My parents paid my rent. I’m grateful for that. But I paid my own university tuition and my own living expenses. I always had to work. Not because someone forced me, but because that was the deal. If I wanted to study, travel, or have any freedom, I had to earn it.
By the time I was 18, I had saved around €5,000 from working at my dad’s bar for four years. That money gave me something priceless: the freedom to travel the world. I bought my own flights, paid for my own hostels, covered my own mistakes. It was my money, and that made the experiences mine too.
So yes, I was privileged. I had a roof over my head and a passport that opened doors. But I also knew exactly what things cost and how many shifts it took to afford them.
And at the same time, I’ve always had people in mind whom I wanted to help. Family members. Friends. People in Mexico. People I haven’t met yet. That tension creates a particular kind of pressure: you feel like you should already be doing more, because objectively you have more than they do.
You feel guilty for struggling when you know someone else has it worse. You feel guilty for wanting more when you already have so much. You feel guilty for even framing your situation as hard.
Maybe that guilt is fair. Maybe it’s just privilege doing what privilege does best: making you uncomfortable with itself.
The consulting trap
That pressure almost pushed me into the safe path.
I did internships at places like Boston Consulting Group and Kühne & Nagel. I had a return offer from BCG. The responsible choice was right there: steady income, career ladder, the kind of job that makes relatives nod approvingly at dinner.
Here’s the joke: I studied finance. I have a Master’s in Finance and a CEMS MIM. I can build DCF models, read cap tables, and explain term sheets. I did it partly on a merit scholarship because I had to.
And none of that made the family money come back. None of it removed the pressure to choose safe income over risky impact.
Finance gave me a language for money, but not the cushion to be careless with it. For a while, I seriously considered the consulting route. It would have solved the money stress. It would have let me support people faster. It would have been the adult thing to do.
But at some point I had to be honest with myself: I only live once. If I didn’t take the risky path now, while I’m young enough to recover and stubborn enough to keep going and maybe delulu enough to believe I can build something meaningful, I probably never would.
So I chose the entrepreneurial path. The one where the downside is real, but at least it feels like mine.
Maybe I’m delulu
I want to be careful here, because I know how this sounds.
There are people who grow up with nothing. No passports, no networks, no safety net of any kind. People for whom “should I do consulting or start a company?” isn’t even a question, because neither door is open.
By many measures, I am wildly privileged. I know that.
But privilege isn’t always binary. You can have access without resources. You can have cultural capital without cash. You can be well-connected and still one bad month away from real anxiety. You can be the poorest person in a wealthy room and still be one of the wealthiest people in the world.
All of those things can be true at once. That’s what makes it weird.
Maybe I am super delulu for framing my circumstances as under-privileged. That’s fair. I’m open to being challenged on it. But I also think the honest conversation is worth having, even if it’s messy.
What I’m actually building
The reason this matters isn’t just personal. It shapes what I choose to work on.
I’ve been lucky enough to build things: SCAILE, Rocketlist, Floom, UltraRelevant. Some have worked better than others. Some are still early. But the thread underneath is the same thing I felt looking out the car window as a kid.
I want to build systems that give more people a real shot.
Right now, a lot of my energy goes into AI infrastructure and tools that make knowledge work more accessible. I’ve said publicly that my goal is to improve the lives of one billion people by 10%. That sounds insane when I say it out loud. But it’s also the only filter that makes the work feel big enough.
I read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers earlier this year, and it hit me harder than I expected. The Chris Langan story, a man with an IQ higher than Einstein who never made it to college because no one around him knew how to navigate the system, is a brutal reminder of how much success depends on environment.
Then there’s Bill Gates, who had 10,000 hours with computers by age 23 because his school gave him access to a mainframe terminal at 13.
That’s privilege. That’s the kind of invisible advantage that looks like merit if you don’t look closely. And I’ve had a lot of those advantages. The least I can do is try to create more of them for other people.
What I wish we shared more honestly
I wish we had a culture of sharing these things more openly.
Not in a performative way. Not as a badge or a shield. Just: here is where I came from, here is what I had and didn’t have, here is how it shaped the choices I made.
Because when we only talk about privilege in absolutes, we miss the people in the middle. The ones who look fine from the outside but are scrambling on the inside. The ones who feel guilty for struggling because they know someone else has it worse. The ones who are building from a combination of inherited advantage and inherited instability.
If that’s you, I see you. And I’d rather we talk about it than pretend the categories are clean.
Your turn
This isn’t a manifesto. It’s more of an opening.
If you have a similar story, growing up between worlds, between classes, between the safety net and the free fall, I’d genuinely love to hear it.
And if you think I’m wrong about how I’m framing my own experience, tell me that too. I mean it when I say: feel invited to share your story or challenge mine.
Let’s be real here for once.