Alan Arguello

Personal Investment Memo

A candid look at my professional self-assessment: strengths and weaknesses.

If anything you read on this page makes you think I'm crazy or a red flag, great; we just saved each other some time.

Inspired by how investors write an investment memo before committing capital. This page offers a candid look at my professional self-assessment: strengths and weaknesses.

This is meant for contexts where we might work together, whether my role is founder, operator, or something else.

A few clarifications:

  1. This is a snapshot as of January 01, 2026. Opinions should evolve; what's written here doesn't lock in the future.
  2. Psychology suggests a fully objective self-analysis is impossible; there's always bias, and how we see ourselves differs from how others see us. I'm sure other people will have different perspectives about me. If needed, I'm happy to introduce you to people I’ve worked with so they can share their perspective.

Strengths

  1. I have seen what greatness looks like. I’ve had the chance to work with entrepreneurs far ahead of me in years and achievements.

    Not to do name dropping, but as reference, I have worked with or learned from:

    • Cofounder: Alexander Torrenegra (bootstrapped 2x, 1x exit to PE, investor)
    • Manager: Guillermo Sequeira and Pamela Valdes (YC Founders, Thiel Fellow)
    • Manager: Andres Bilbao (cofounder of Rappi, $5.2b, angel investor)
    • Mentor: Rodrigo Maroja (cofounder of Daki, $1.3b)
  2. Very strong generalist. Until 2020 I knew nothing about tech world or programming, and until 2022 I didn't truly understand what it meant to build a company.

    I’ve had to learn new domains quickly and become comfortable being a beginner. As much as this may sound like a brag, I didn’t fully realize it until I analyzed it.

    • When I worked as SWE - told I was good at it.
    • When I had to create content - told I had good taste.
    • When I had to organize events - told I'm a good host.
    • Etc.

    I'm against "boxing yourself" into a single role. Founders don't usually have that luxury.

  3. Discipline. Training since I was 16 taught me the value of discipline. You can achieve most goals if you do the necessary work every day and stay conscious of the trade-offs. Excellence is built through consistent, unsexy actions.
  4. Community building. I have hosted about 35 events since 2022.

    I've been told I'm a very good host for events, and it has allowed me to attract people in a very organic way.

  5. High sense of urgency. When I commit, I put in the hours to make things happen. Even when I feel I'm not moving fast enough, that internal pressure drives me forward, and I consistently hear from others that my execution speed is exceptional.
  6. Writing. Writing is how I slow down, challenge my own thinking, and communicate clearly at work. People have called this a superpower: it sharpens my reasoning and keeps my communication crisp. It's also been an advantage in content marketing for LinkedIn and my companies, helping build organic audiences.
  7. Truth seeker. Ever since I listened to Jeff Bezos talk about truth-telling in this clip, I often remind myself:

    "Truth is uncomfortable, but unless you embrace it, you're lying to yourself and hindering your progress."

    I don't know how many times I've rewatched it.

  8. PHD: Poor, Hungry, Determined. I don't center my story on this because it can veer into victimhood, but context matters. I was born and raised in Uruapan, Michoacán, one of Mexico's most dangerous cities, and my family/school background was far from prestigious.

    A major motivation is showing my parents there are other paths, and that it's possible to aim higher than we once imagined.

Weaknesses

  1. Shiny-object syndrome. My journey can also look like "too many shifts," which some people flag as a risk. I get it; I've heard it directly. My professional drive often comes from seeking harder problems and working with people I admire. From the outside, that can read as volatility over the long term.
  2. Working smart vs. just working hard. Startups require both, but I believe working smart matters more. My urgency and discipline can become a double-edged sword: when I'm unsure which path has the highest ROI, I sometimes try to force outcomes with brute effort. This shows up most in sales: if leads are scarce, I may grind longer doing the same things with more intensity. As the saying goes, repeating the same actions and expecting different results is not a strategy.
  3. Prioritization. I can mask this weakness because I work a lot, which makes it harder for others to notice. In fast day-to-day execution, I sometimes over-invest time and money in tasks that perhaps shouldn't be done at all. Even when I catch it on reflection, the feeling of false productivity can pull me back into the same loop.
  4. Good manager; not yet a great leader. Managing and leading are different. My motivation often skews toward the intellectual challenge, so it can be harder for me to play the classic "inspire through the long-term vision" role. Strong oral storytelling is crucial if you want to be CEO; it's an area I continue to develop.
  5. No tolerance for anything I perceive as mediocre. On a personal level, I try to be too selective with myself, and if (subjectively) I think that a person I'm working with is not self-demanding, I categorize them as mediocre, creating a negative bias.

    This is not always good, since my perception does not reflect general reality, and it can make me miss the qualities that another person has beyond my reality filter.

  6. Difficulty having non-technical co-founders without a track record. Unless the other person has already accomplished something before, I don't take them very seriously, even less so for a co-founder partnership.

    In general, I prefer to either start things on my own or follow the vision of an entrepreneur with much more experience than me, whose opinion I respect.

  7. Desire for recognition on certain circles. I don't think wanting recognition is bad, but it is a guilty pleasure of many people in the entrepreneurial ecosystem where we sometimes over-invest time, including myself.

    Undoubtedly, building a personal brand brings benefits and can be helpful, but the reality is that nothings brings greater benefits to building a business than: talking to your customers, solving their problems, and capturing part of the value generated.

Unfair Advantages

  1. High risk appetite. By keeping my cost of living low, having no dependents, and living in LatAm, I can work for very lean amounts and still get by, letting me take bigger risks.
  2. Hiring. Being a generalist has helped me attract strong talent because I can speak their language, especially for technical roles. I've been able to bring in engineers and researchers for different projects.
  3. Network. Especially across Latin America, I have access to people and talent.

    If I don't, I create access through community building.

My Real Motivations in Life

  1. Give back to my parents. They didn't have the context to teach me a lot of things, but they have supported me over and over again, even if they don't understand at all what I'm doing.
  2. Show my family that we can do way more. I'd guess I should talk more about this with a psychologist instead of on a website, but there's something that really naturally pushes me to learn and try to do more, which is showing my parents and sisters that we are capable of more, that there's just so many things in life and that we also deserve many of the things life has to offer. But for that, you must be willing to invest in yourself a lot and know this will have trade-offs.
  3. Intellectual curiosity. The higher the bar, the more I internally get anxious, scared, and with self-doubt, but the more this anxiety pushes me to give more and grow faster. Normally, nothing is as bad as our brain wants us to think.

At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind,