What triggered your interest in education innovation and education entrepreneurship? How did your education at Stanford help you in your journey?
In my last two years of college, I was involved with two education organizations: Sponsors for Educational Opportunities (SEO), a US-based, non-profit diversity recruiter that helped me land my first job, and ESCALA Educación, a Colombian-based, higher education financing startup.
Both organizations helped me realize how inequality hinders people’s access to quality education opportunities and a quality first job. At the same time, they allowed me to experience first-hand how education entrepreneurship can be a platform to create and distribute those opportunities at scale.
The MA/MBA program at Stanford provided me with the unique opportunity to combine the strength of the Graduate School of Business (GSB)’s leadership and entrepreneurship curriculum with the Graduate School of Education (GSE)’s focus on applying learning science and technology to assess learning environments and build EdTech products. More importantly, being at Stanford increased my level of aspirations and injected me with a strong dose of confidence to dream big that I would not have experienced anywhere else.
You co-founded and are now the Chairman of Mentors4U Colombia, a non-profit mentorship organization. What motivated you to start this organization? What have you learned during the founder’s journey?
After benefitting from SEO’s career acceleration program – whose focus was to place students from underrepresented communities in industries such as finance – I felt the urge to bring this model to Colombia because of how much deeper inequality of opportunities is in Latin America and especially because I had not seen similar models in the region.
From SEO I learned a “playbook” to systematically identify and connect talented college students with career development opportunities at scale. When building Mentors4U Colombia with a clear thesis of using the power of mentorship to bolster social mobility, I adapted the SEO model to the needs of both low-income college students and volunteer mentors, while adding a strong career exploration and interview prep curriculum, partnering up with Stanford Professor Bill Burnett and using his “Design Your Life” methodology.
My main surprise about the founder’s journey is that building a non-profit in a region with little philanthropic funding is hard, and it helped me develop more empathy and admiration for those working across the social and education sectors. It also taught me that it’s not too different from building a “bootstrapped” for-profit venture, and that a scrappy mindset forces you to get creative and come up with solutions you would never have thought of, a strongly valued skillset in today’s venture ecosystem.

What led you to become an education venture philanthropy investor at VélezReyes+?
Having built and operated both non and for-profit education ventures before arriving to Stanford, and then having the chance to invest across Latin America’s EdTech ecosystem while at Stanford working with both Owl Ventures and the GSB’s Impact Fund Education team, I was committed to returning to the region to build an impactful venture in education.
That’s why I couldn’t reject the invitation from David Vélez (Founder & CEO of Nubank, and Stanford Alumni) and his wife Mariel Reyes, to join them in building a new venture philanthropy platform, that aspires to transform Latin America into a region of equal access to opportunities for all, by incubating and investing in education and leadership initiatives. It’s been almost 3 years since joining, and I’m excited about the real chance this organization has to fulfill its mission, attracting the most talented and mission-oriented founders to the sector and helping catalyze the growth of the region’s education entrepreneurship ecosystem.
What trends and innovations are you most excited about in the education entrepreneurship landscape?
I’m excited about the opportunities that AI could bring to the workforce development and post-secondary education ecosystem in Latin America. I’m especially eager to see institutions shifting to a skills-first approach, implementing work-integrated learning methodologies (including apprenticeships, project based learning, applied research projects, etc) into their curriculums, with a bigger emphasis on building communities and strengthening social capital. It’s about time for degrees to become shorter, more flexible, more affordable, and pertinent to labor market needs, where the majority of the students can graduate on time and onramp to quality jobs. I see many opportunities for new, challenger institutions and academic programs fully focused on improving student outcomes.
What is one unique criteria you look for when evaluating potential investments? How important is learning science and efficacy research in your work?
One I consider very important when assessing early stage ventures, but certainly not unique to me, is the founding team’s “Founder Market Fit”, or the relevance of their life stories, experiences and their particular obsession to solve the problem they’re working on. Building impactful learning products with financially sustainable business models that serve vulnerable populations is not easy and thus require a deep level of passion, commitment, and persistence to succeed, key traits I look for in founders.
Using learning science and efficacy research when assessing new investments is essential for us, and we advise founders to be aware of the latest evidence emerging in their fields. Part of the winning formula for founders is to constantly assess their intervention’s efficacy, while taking into consideration both learner and educator feedback into their product development process.

What was your favorite education class at Stanford and why?
Gloria Chie Lee’s “Transforming Education through Entrepreneurship” class. We discussed the growth trajectories of both non and for-profit education ventures, and the strategic challenges they faced as they tried to maximize educational impact and efficacy, while improving financial sustainability as they scale. This is the main challenge I see education ventures struggle with as they grow, and the frameworks we used in the class still help me better assess and support the founders I work with.
Gloria, an education entrepreneur herself, is not only a fantastic teacher, but has also become a friend and a mentor. We discussed in length the particular growth challenges education entrepreneurs face in Latin America, and what they could teach US-based founders, which sparked the idea of showcasing these differences to her students. This led us to write a Case Study about Eleva Educação (now Salta Educação), an organization I had worked with during the summer, who in only a decade has become the largest private K-12 school operator in Latin America.
What advice would you give to Stanford students interested in education entrepreneurship?
First, I can’t think of a better place and time to be right now than Stanford, especially, during this “golden moment” of AI considering the university’s connections to the leading academics and technologists that are looking to better apply this technology in the education space.
Make sure you take advantage of the university’s faculty, student and alumni network. You would not only be surprised at the number of Stanford Alumni that have founded or work in organizations across the education entrepreneurship ecosystem: EdTech startups (TeachFX, Guild, Duolingo), education non-profits (Teach for All, Khan Academy), EdTech VC’s (Owl Ventures, Reach Capital, Rethink Education) and education philanthropy funders (Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Emerson Collective, DRK), but at their willingness to chat and help a fellow students get into the space.
Also, make sure you enroll at the GSE’s Education Entrepreneurship classes (highly recommend Sergio Monsalve’s “Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Education Technology Seminar” and Rob Urstein’s “Disruptions in Education”) and join the events organized by the GSB & GSE’s EdClub.