The Renaissance of Abundance

After 16 months trying to fit myself and live the startup world for a second time, I left my last gig in March 2026. As someone who had the privilege of combining happiness and professional life progression for most of my career, I have a really strong sense when those are not well aligned.

Frust centers itself in the middle of AWS, FinOps, Cloud Operations, and AI. It’s thriving as an early-stage business. It got recently selected to the Endeavor Scale Up program. Customer churn is proudly zero. There was nothing wrong with my alignment with their mission. There was nothing wrong with the company or my partners: I was the problem.

I’m still learning what I did wrong. So far, I’m framing it like “The way you work is, sometimes, more important than the work itself”.

Being a full-time entrepreneur changed my life in 2011/2012. Since then, everything I built personally and professionally is rooted in that decision. As my career progressed, I declared a strict goal: “be a full-time entrepreneur once again before turning 40”. So I did –– and it didn’t work as I had carefully planned.

Why?

When I started realizing I was not fulfilled with my way of working, I got back to therapy and re-read several books that helped me in the past: Essentialism, The Infinite Game, Range and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century helped a ton. Then I added to the mix El arte de subir (y bajar) la montaña, suggested by a great friend and mentor just when I resigned back in 2025. Last but definitely not least, Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas helped me get even more optimistic by the professional opportunity Amazon was giving to me once again. In the process, due to a few profound personal happenings, it also incentivized reconnecting with my own faith.

With time and a healthy distance (I decided to be a full-time unemployed person for the first time ever in my career), it became clear that my strict goal of being a full-time entrepreneur before turning 40 was more about the past than the future. Probably, I wanted a time-travel experience that simply does not exist (yet).

I still love to be connected with entrepreneurs; I firmly believe it’s a great way of building a career. And I do think we are living in a new age of Abundance like no other, at least in the technology industry.

But, at this time, I will probably be more happy (and useful) serving that community from a different place. A place that is not entirely new to me…

Returning Home

Amazon profoundly impacted my professional career and, honestly, my entire life. I read One Click the first time in 2012. I dreamed of working there since 2008. My first 7 years and 7 months there were amazing for the vast majority of the time.

When I got lost/stuck professionally, I also remembered my own Amazonian journey: It was full of unexpected turns, some bad moments, and a lot of great stories. Reading Andy Jassy’s 2025 shareholder’s letter gave me a different perspective on Straight Line Was a Lie: My own professional journey was not a straight line — quite the opposite. But it kindly worked.

I thought I was getting better
But I’m back to where I started
And the straight line was a circle.
Yeah, the straight line was a lie.

I rejoined AWS in June, 1st. Or as we called it, I boomeranged back 🪃

Front Seating into the Agentic Era

Developers, therefore, bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity. Just as the creator of an artistic or literary work must consider the values it conveys, so developers are called to embed values in their projects with due seriousness: with transparency, responsibility toward affected communities, and careful attention to ensuring that what is being cultivated is a genuine good.

Amazon always pioneered with Artificial Intelligence since its very early days. AWS is at the forefront of the current GenAI momentum in the way it best serves customers: combining the broadest of choice options while maniacally focusing on security, safety, availability, and reliability.

But when I rejoined the company, it became crystal clear that the way of working has started to change. Ferociously.

I just completed my first month there. My job is almost the same as before, now more focused on AI. But the work? The work is completely different. What Amazon did in those 16 months I was outside to equip everyone with AI tools is simply unbelievable and unprecedented. As I started answering those colleagues that asked me about my first impressions of the company’s current shape after living in the exterior world for 1.5 years: “it seems like a lot of things have indeed changed. But there’s a lot more that didn’t change at all. The LPs are the same, and building the most customer-centric company on Earth is still the broader mission to pursue.”

Werner Vogels’ last re:Invent keynote was about the Renaissance Developers and an invitation to be a Polymath in this new era of knowledge/technology work. More recently, Dr. Werner shared how the two pizza teams are evolving (and getting back to where they started) in this Agentic Era. It’s really energizing being back at AWS during these times.

Thought leaders from outside Amazon are also sharing great observations and words of wisdom posts we must read/listen to.

To me, after 17 years of working, it’s more important than ever to unlearn — and “being a sponge”.

We are not what we know, but what we are willing to learn.

I just passed half of my onboarding process, and being a full-time re:Embarker at Amazon has been really interesting. As I’m trying to adopt an AI-native mindset at this scale, with all those tools, with all those amazing people to reach out on Slack, I started calling this time the Renaissance of Abundance.

And it remains Day 1.