Updates Q2 2026

In our last update, we talked about my new role as CTO and editor in OTN and our progress in the incubation process. I also ended up working on yet another project, one more specifically in the marketing industry.

Now that one was unexpected.

During the process of reaching out to buyers for my estate liquidation, I reconnected with an old client, in fact, one of my very first ones. I started working for him in Colombia back when I was just starting my freelancing while finishing college.

He migrated to the US, and I continued working for him on his new projects there. It was practically my bridge into the US market as a freelancer back then. The good news is that the proper work made the company grow so much that it really needed an agency, so that was the bad news, too.

Now, almost 15 years later, he proposed a “joint venture” to me to help rebuild an abandoned idea and bring it to the present. This time, the task was transforming an antiquated marketing agency into a digital one.

It was a nice experience building something I was supposed to have built a long time ago, but since I never took the agency route and preferred to work as consultant, I never really got much into it. It was a nice chance to operate in the position I dreamed of in college: director of a marketing company.

I wasn’t planning on getting back (or  deeper) into marketing, really; most of the time I was instead building stuff: automation,bridges, plugins, MA tools, etc. I learned a lot about it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about what I should be building in AG.

So I went back into that while finishing my duties with this marketing project, it was never meant to be part of AG, we have a guy in-house for that 😉

And what happened with the incubation?

Parallel to this, there was a point during our incubation with IV when the next stage came with a simple requirement: focus on one product.

That constraint turned out to be useful.

And combined with our recent experience as a CTO, running a digital newspaper, and leading an agency made for the critical mass needed to start fusing things.

The distance from the project gave us a much clearer view of what was actually needed to be built, for a time of fast and fundamental changes across many industries. 

So the real focus is not going to be just one product. We already have it, the wallet.

It is one technology: AI. It was going to be a part of arcadia eventually, I just didn’t knew where back then.

By now it is clear what’s the biggest problem with it, the human labor market. After all, everything I’ve done lately implies a heavy use of AI tooling to replace the teams I should have had in those positions.

I mean, I’m used to being a one-man-army, but without the force-multiplier of AI, it was never meant to be a scalable proposition. The artisan approach is fine for me, but not compatible with AG, or anything that scales, or several of those in parallel. But we did just that, thanks to AI, and no artisans were harmed in the process.

It’s not like I only discovered AI last year anyway (according to Apple iBooks I was writing books with AI back in 2012 😉) but I have also been tinkering with local models and infra since around 2022, worked for a while in model training, and have been following the technical and startup aspects of it closely.

We continue in the incubation process, this last module is “Fundraising” so everything we are doing now is meant to let us focus only on that.

So, are we doing a Pivot?

Nope. The important thing to note here is that the products and ideas around Arcadia have not suddenly disappeared. What changed was the global context in which we are building them.

That is also why calling this a pivot never felt quite right.

“Future of Work” was not a new idea we discovered along the way. It was the premise behind the project we originally presented to Y Combinator. It’s included implicitly in our whitepaper.

What changed is the world around that idea. It’s not the Future of Work now, it’s the now.

AI has transformed what people can do, how work can be organized, how expertise can be captured, and what kinds of tools a small team, or even a single person, can build. The needs are different. The opportunities are different. And, importantly, the technology is different.

So we are going back to the original question, but not to the original answer.

This is not about wrapping an AI model around an old concept and calling it a new company. It is about taking the ideas we started with, matured and validated as they are, and reframing them for the world that exists now.

So that’s what has happened with the incubator; it gently pushed us to neatly integrate into one idea, and that process was influenced by my other recent experiences, rekindling the ideas that started all this.

Going full circle can’t be a pivot. Even if it turns out to be a different beast, it’s just probably the beast that was meant to be from the beginning.

No teasers?

Well, it’s already pretty long but yes, local entrepreneurship fest the “GoFest” is coming soon and, looks like we are invited to apply again. So we are in a sprint creating new demos and updating everything for this new iteration of AG.

More to come, as always.