From typing class to tokenization

In the 1990s, my week had two classes that now feel like they came from different centuries. In one, I learned typing: posture, fingers on the home row, a sheet of paper and the clatter of the machine. In the other, I learned to turn on and use a personal computer, which was still an expensive and slightly mysterious novelty.

Nobody could say which of those skills would survive. It looks obvious today, but back then the safe bet was the typewriter. It worked, every office had one, and the computer still froze.

That feeling of not knowing which future will win has stayed with me ever since. I think it explains almost every choice I made afterwards.

I left technology so I would not be stuck in it

I graduated in Data Processing. I liked understanding how things worked inside, and programming was a way to build something from scratch.

But I soon noticed something uncomfortable: technology was changing too fast for me to bet my career on a specific tool. The language I mastered today could be worthless in five years. More importantly, staying only in code would hide what I did best: seeing a business, putting it together and selling it.

So I made a move many people found strange. I switched to Advertising, and later did a graduate program in Marketing. I traded how to build it for why someone will buy it.

Many businesses, one muscle

From then on, I spent years starting businesses in sectors that have nothing to do with each other. An advertising agency, an audio production studio for commercials, a beauty salon, a car dealership, a shoe store. I also worked in service and retail companies.

Seen from afar, it looks like a patchwork quilt. Seen up close, every one of them trained the same muscle: understanding what the customer values, organizing an operation to deliver it and making the numbers close at the end of the month.

Construction came later, and I started at the bottom, as a real estate broker. That is where I understood the market from the buyer’s side. Then came the construction company. In ten years, Imobcon has built and delivered more than 1,500 homes, between projects built for others and our own developments.

Technology came back through the front door

The curious part is that technology never really left. It just changed places.

In real estate, one of the oldest questions is how to make a heavy, expensive and illiquid asset more accessible. Traditionally, the answer involves funds, pooled purchase plans and complex legal structures, with many intermediaries.

Tokenization offers another answer: representing rights over a real asset in digital records that can be divided and programmed. That is how Token4Us was born. The kid from computer class met the broker and the developer in the same project.

I do not think that is a coincidence. I think it is the reward for betting on the skill, not on the tool.

What I would take from that classroom

If I could go back and talk to that kid torn between the typewriter and the computer, I would tell him three things.

Tools change; the question does not. Typing, programming, advertising, construction and blockchain answered, at different times, the same question: how to deliver value to someone better than before.

Not knowing the future is no reason to wait. The safe bet of the 1990s was the typewriter. Those who waited for the future to become clear arrived late to it.

Every experience becomes repertoire. What I learned selling shoes helped me sell apartments. What I learned programming helped me understand tokenization. Nothing is wasted when you pay attention.

That is what I plan to write about here: what I learn building companies, buildings and systems, with the same curiosity I had in that room with a typewriter on one side and a computer on the other.