My story

I’m from Caracas, Venezuela. My parents brought my sister and me to Florida so we would learn English, and the experiment became permanent. That meant leaving the rest of our family behind, and it meant growing up in a country where none of us knew the language, the culture, or how any of the systems worked. None of it was easy.

My dad ran his own business back home, so the itch was inherited. What I’ve learned since is that this country pays the people willing to take the risk.

Coconut Creek first, then Kissimmee, in Disney World’s backyard. I became a U.S. citizen in October 2009 and enlisted in the Army Reserve the following month. I earned my MOS in 2011 and served six years as a human intelligence collector, with stops in Monterey, Brownsville, Puerto Rico, and Lisbon.

Two years at Valencia College, back when it was still a community college, then a transfer to the University of South Florida. Go Bulls. First in my family to finish college in the US. I graduated Fall 2013 and spent 2014 working with the Army.

Ten cities so far. I track them in a spreadsheet, which tells you something about me either way.

In 2015 I joined the lending team at Citi Private Bank in Miami, covering Latin America. Our clients were ultra high net worth families, which in that seat meant $25 million and up in net worth.

Lending there did two jobs. The first was diagnostic. To underwrite a family you have to see everything, so a loan request was really an invitation to understand the whole balance sheet. What they owned, what it produced, how it was held, and whether any of it could service debt. Show us the business and show us you can pay us back.

The second was manufacturing liquidity out of illiquid assets, so a client could borrow instead of sell.

An art collection is the cleanest example. A painting produces nothing. It hangs on a wall, costs money to insure and store, and returns zero until the day it sells. Borrow against the collection and the proceeds go to work in something that pays, while the art stays exactly where it is.

The aircraft version closes the loop. Borrow against the value of the plane, put the proceeds into a bond portfolio, and let the portfolio income cover both the debt service and the cost of operating the aircraft. The asset starts paying for itself.

Shares run on the same logic with a tax angle. Sell them and you trigger the gain. Borrow against them and you don’t, so you get the liquidity and keep the position.

Seeing that many balance sheets up close taught me something I’ve been building on ever since. Almost none of these families got there on a salary. They owned and operated businesses. Once they made it, the money moved into real estate, private equity, hedge funds, structured products, and other alternatives. And almost nothing got sold if it didn’t have to be.

A little over two years later I got into Citi’s Global Engagement Management Associate Program: two rotations across geographies and businesses, real jobs, two to three years. Until 2017 it recruited exclusively from top MBA programs. That was the year they opened it up internally for the first time.

Cost of an MBA

a couple hundred thousand dollars, plus two years

Cost of this

an application

I came out of it the youngest person in the cohort and the first ever from the private bank. Career game changer, and I got to keep the tuition.

I left Miami in the summer of 2017 and spent the rest of the year in New York, sitting through Citi’s corporate and investment banking training. Then two rotations, three seats, and the same European multinationals the whole way through.

Zurich, product side. Treasury and trade solutions (TTS), selling to large multinationals. Companies like Roche, Novartis, and Nestlé.

TTS is one of Citi’s crown jewels. It moves money for multinationals across more countries than any other bank can reach, and that network is not something a competitor can go buy.

The name of the game is working capital. Pay your vendors later, collect from your customers sooner, hold inventory for as little time as possible. Then make sure the cash sits in the right accounts in the right countries and that the plumbing underneath all of it stays intact. Unglamorous work, and at that scale a few days of DSO is real money.

Zurich, relationship side. Corporate banking, diversified industrials team. Same companies, different chair.

Here the balance sheet is a door. Lending on its own is thin business, so you extend credit to earn the right to sell everything else. Treasury and trade, commercial cards, FX, rates, commodities, equity and debt capital markets, M&A advisory. My job was supporting the senior bankers as they worked out what else we could sell, and how we could earn the first call.

London, product side, 2019 to 2021. FX risk advisory for European CFOs and treasurers.

The first thing that clicked is that currency risk is mostly interest rate risk in disguise. The price to lock in an exchange rate a year out isn’t a bet on where the currency is headed. It is the gap between what the two countries pay on their money. Understand rates and you understand most of FX.

The second is that risk management is a set of tradeoffs, not a solution. Hedging 100% of an exposure does not remove 100% of the risk, and it is never free. Correlation runs both ways, so a basket of currencies usually carries natural offsets you would destroy by hedging each one on its own. And it is often worth paying for choice: locking in a rate removes the risk and the upside together, while paying a small fee for the right to walk away costs more up front and leaves you the good outcome. The work was finding where protection was worth what it cost.

It was also the most fun I’ve had at work. Nothing beats watching the PnL move the second a trade closes. A trading floor has a noise and a rhythm to it I haven’t found anywhere else, and I worked next to some of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

Three seats, and here’s what they taught me. The product specialist sells one thing and has to know it cold. The relationship banker lends money to earn the right to sell everything else. Same client, same building, completely different incentives. Knowing which one is sitting across from you changes the whole conversation.

Then, through a series of events, I landed at Citi Community Capital in 2021, Citi’s affordable housing finance team and the number one affordable housing lender in the country every year since 2010. In about eighteen months I looked at more than 150 transactions totaling over $3 billion in debt.

Nobody had to sell me on the industry after that.

Five roles, three countries, one employer. I don’t know how you’d replicate that on purpose.

Then I left, with nothing lined up.

One of the scariest things I have done and one of the most useful. I learned what it is worth to have a manager who defends you in rooms you are not in, by not having one. I learned to ask for what I wanted instead of waiting to be offered it. And I learned that walking away from something that has stopped making sense is a decision rather than a failure.

After the break I spent a stretch at a boutique capital markets brokerage. It turned into my graduate program in where money comes from before it shows up at a closing.

The job is taking a deal and matching it to the right capital source. Depending on how much hair is on the deal, that can mean going to fifty shops or more. Some pass. Some like the deal but not the sponsor. For others the market is a nonstarter.

The debt fund has to put money out this quarter, so they will do it, but their product runs higher leverage and costs more. Higher octane. The bank likes the deal and wants the sponsor’s deposits in return, which is a nonstarter for a sponsor who is not moving their operating accounts.

Every deal pencils in Excel. That is what Excel is for. You find out what you have when you start poking holes in it, and that is usually where you learn whether the sponsor has their act together.

What it comes down to is narrower than people expect. Has the sponsor done this asset type, at this size, in this market? How much of their own money is in it? Most of the rest is negotiable.

Equity is the hard part. Everyone wants it and almost nobody can get it. Institutional equity is not interested below a ten or twenty million dollar check, and working backwards from that, you need a sixty million dollar deal or better before an institution will pick up the phone. Below that, the sponsor is stuck passing a hat around at the country club.

Then a shop says yes, the terms are close enough, and it closes. That is the job, and it makes the other forty-nine calls worth it.

Two things I heard constantly around the office. A bird in hand beats two in the bush. And pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Both are about not getting cute. The term sheet in front of you is worth more than the better one you are still chasing, and the last twenty five basis points is how people lose deals.

Every dollar has a source, a cost, and a mandate. Once you know that, you stop asking whether something is a good deal and start asking whose deal it is.

At some point the obvious move was to stop putting together other people’s deals and start putting together my own.

I knew how deals pencil.
What I did not know is how hard it is to put one together.

Zoning and entitlements. Where the water goes when it rains, and whether you hold it on site or release it slowly. Grading, which is really a question about dirt: how much you haul in, how much you haul off, and what that costs. Whether water and sewer reach the property line at all, and if they do not, who pays to bring them. Then a market study, an appraisal, environmental, geotech, and a survey, any one of which can change the deal.

Everyone else in the deal has a defined scope and a fee. The lender underwrites, the syndicator invests, the contractor builds, counsel closes. The developer is the only one holding all of it at once, and the only one signing guarantees. As a lender I decided whether a deal worked. As a developer I am the one who has to make it exist. Those turn out to be very different jobs.

Affordable housing is a strange business on top of that. You do not raise equity the normal way. You apply to a state agency for tax credits, and the credits get sold to an investor who wants the tax benefit rather than the return. That money comes in installments as you hit milestones, so the schedule you build is also the schedule you get paid on.

And you learn to talk around what you do. You sit down with a city to describe what you want to build and you use every phrase available except affordable housing. Attainable housing. Essential housing. Workforce housing. Take your pick. They all mean the same thing, and they all exist to get around a fear that you are about to bring “those people” into the neighborhood.

Then the building opens and it fills up, which is the part nobody argues with. The demand was there the whole time. It just needed somewhere to go.

That is AMD Development. I work with Richard and Noel to build and preserve affordable and workforce housing, Texas and New Mexico for now, elsewhere when the deal makes sense. We build with low income housing tax credits, tax-exempt bonds, private placements, and agency and HUD-insured debt.

The other thing I am building is a media platform for the industry.

Affordable housing runs on relationships and a couple of legacy trade publications. Jobs circulate by word of mouth and get lost on LinkedIn. Deal news shows up in somebody’s feed, or in the local paper for the city your project happens to sit in. Someone on the other side of the country is never going to see the work you are doing.

Nobody built a place for the people doing the work, so I did. LIHTC Leaders is my version of what a platform for affordable housing looks like. It helps talent find the hard-to-fill jobs that have affordable housing in the description. It distributes company and project news through LinkedIn and the site. It reaches people directly with a weekly newsletter. And it aims to become the default source for deal information across the industry.

There has been no shortage of doubt about it. People have asked whether the industry needs one. Some think the idea is a waste of time. Others defend what already exists the way you would defend a bad take. Fine. Crowded rooms still have space for something great.

I write the posts, make the sales calls, and ship the code. A few years ago that would have taken a team and a lot more money. Today it takes one person willing to be bad at things for a while, and an AI that will answer the same question twenty times.

I’ve always been the intrapreneur at work, asking the same questions. How can we do more? How can we make it better? How can we make it more efficient? I have brought some version of those to every job I have had.

At Citi it meant enterprise blockchain conversations in Zurich when crypto was the topic du jour, and in London it meant two FX risk tools that shipped on the trading platform and turned a 30 to 45 minute analysis into seconds. I also co-authored three pieces for the desk’s quarterly outlook, which turned out to be the part I liked most.

A few years ago I read Naval Ravikant’s Twitter thread on how to get rich without getting lucky. That is where the ownership idea got its language for me: code and content as modern forms of leverage. The funny part is that I had already been doing both for years, just on someone else’s payroll.

Now I own the output. LIHTC Leaders is one industry’s worth of specific knowledge distributed with code and content, and I built it alone. AMD is the same knowledge pointed at hard assets. Slower, more expensive, and at the end there is a building.

I live in Austin, where I am a proud husband and father. That part I would not trade for any of the rest of it. I like lifting heavy things, I run to clear my head, and in the winter you can catch me on the slopes.

Right now I am building tools for the affordable housing industry and working out where AI earns its place in the rest of what I do. When I am not building, I am working my way through business content in every format, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, and long conversations with owners and operators. Anything that explains how the world works.

I do not know how far all of this goes. That is most of why I am doing it.

If you read this far, we probably have something to talk about.

Reach out if you want to chat about multifamily deals, LIHTC Leaders, building things with AI, or anything else worth a conversation.