The biggest pivot in my life so far

It's been a while since the last time I wrote an entry on this blog. This year has proven to be challenging in terms of stress and doing hard things—not just hard things, but hard things you don't want to do, but have to.

Interestingly, the biggest challenge I took on was an easy call for me: pivoting my entire life to do something completely new. A choice full of responsibility, hardship, and risk, but also opportunity. The kind of asymmetric choice I like to bet on.

Today, I'm writing about why I decided to move back to Venezuela, leave my comfy Software Engineering job, and try to turn around a declining, brick-and-mortar family business.

Everything building up to it

There are a few factors that made this a fairly easy call for me, even considering the downside. Not all of them contributed to the same degree—the first definitely weighed more than the rest—but together, they provided a compounding set of reasons to make the move.

• Family: This is ultimately the reason why I decided to come. As my parents aged and their health became a concern, I couldn't bear the thought of being so far away from them. I had spent the last few years trying to convince them to move to Spain with me. Every year they visited, I think all of us left believing they'd finally do whatever was necessary to make the move, but as time passed and they faced the practical hurdles, that thought became a distant dream. The situation was never quite right for them to relocate, so it all worked out for the best in the end. Which brings me to the next point...
• A major responsibility back home: The biggest thing tying my family down was the business they run here. A 40+ year-old bakery with employees who have accumulated labor liabilities over decades means your exit strategies are limited—especially in a crisis-struck country with tight liquidity and capital constraints. In hindsight, it's only recently that the local environment shifted enough for a real exit path to appear. Internal optimism meant more people were looking to invest in the country, though probably not fast enough.
• Pressure building up locally: My father had been running things here on his own for the past three years, but he was never an operator. That role had been handled by his brother and business partner (R.I.P.) from the start. Thrust into this new position, my father placed his trust in people who—as we discovered late last year—held significant operational power, gained his trust, and harbored hidden, conflicting interests. I can only assume these individuals worked in the shadows to bring the business down, hoping to step in as saviors and buy an enterprise for pennies. Life took a deeply technical person out of his engineering work and placed him in a boardroom full of sharks, taking a severe toll on his health.
• A feeling of helplessness from a distance: Last December, after my sister rightfully became suspicious of certain employees, she stepped up to assume control of the family business and help my father retire. Watching all of this unfold from afar made me feel completely useless. Seeing the immense weight of running the operations fall entirely on my sister was too much to witness from across the ocean. I traveled back in February 2026 to evaluate the situation firsthand, and it immediately became clear that I had to move back. I made the call that month, giving myself a couple of months to wrap up my life in Spain and arrange the move.
• Burnout from working long hours for someone else: I've written about this in previous posts. When I left Ontruck for Collate, I did so to increase my income, but it also coincided with a period where I felt deeply motivated to start my own ventures. I fell into a trap: I was earning decent money that would finally let me buy a house within a reasonable timeframe, while building my CV at a major startup backing a recognizable open-source project. Yet, I was deeply unhappy with how my time was being spent. Working 10–12 hours a day for long stretches took a heavy toll on my emotional health. I was irritable, short-tempered, unsatisfied, and generally not pleasant to be around.

Even though running a food factory wasn't my original idea of entrepreneurship, it was close enough to the raw operational experience I wanted. And honestly, I didn't have much of a choice—I cared too much about my family to ignore what was happening.

These five reasons, in this order, were the primary motivators. They made a decision that sounds radical on paper far easier than I would have ever imagined. If you had asked me in 2025 whether I saw myself moving back to Venezuela in 2026, I would have said not in a million years. The truth is, I had long lost hope in the country and had found a new place where I felt I belonged. Making this call meant leaving my home.

Leaving a home isn't just about changing locations; it's about all the goodbyes, the friends you leave behind, the routines you break, the apartment you loved, and the belongings you can't bring along. It's about a wave of massive changes hitting all at once.

What's changed?

I'm still working long hours, but now the ultimate responsibility rests on my shoulders. All decisions go through me, and I need to be aware of everything happening across the business. If the Tax Office pays a visit, I'm the one who shows up. If employees go on vacation and HR hasn't hired a replacement, I have to organize coverage or step into the role myself. If we need people, I have to hire them.

In this short time running New York Cheese Cake (now Alimentos New York), I've had to handle QA for our products, hire sales representatives, become a salesperson myself, deal with interpersonal friction among staff, and interview for roles I've never personally performed—like drivers, collection analysts, and HR leads. I've had to run cost analyses, adjust pricing strategies, take a crash course in accounting, manage administration, and run the purchasing department.

And of course, I'm the IT department. I'm setting up infrastructure to digitize operations, streamlining business processes with the right software, reverse-engineering our ERP to build a data warehouse for our Business Intelligence layer, and leveraging a small fleet of AI agents to build whatever internal tooling we need to move faster.

All this responsibility comes with an economic reward, sure, but a rather small one. I've effectively lost eight-fold in purchasing power. My family's business was struggling post-crisis, and there is substantial foundation work to do before the company can support a proper executive salary for my role. This also means I'm back living at my parents' place alongside my sister (who is in the exact same boat) until we establish a reliable stream of higher income.

I also departed from Collate and OpenMetadata. I offered my skills on a modified basis, but my manager decided not to move forward with the arrangement. My last day at Collate was June 24—coincidentally the same day two 7+ magnitude earthquakes hit northern Venezuela. Anecdotally, a building just 100 meters away from my apartment collapsed, so it felt uncomfortably close to home. Thankfully, we were safe, and our place didn't suffer a scratch.

Now, I am opening up my bandwidth to offer end-to-end software services to startups, founders, or operators—from system architecture and design to production deployment. I am looking for focused, short-term projects that fit async workflows, defined deliverables, and part-time commitments.

This blog post marks the beginning of taking that search seriously. I cannot rely solely on what the business can pay me right now. I tried to push this off as long as possible so I could focus full-time on revamping Alimentos New York, but I realized that building the internal software tooling I envision requires higher-tier AI infrastructure subscriptions to let autonomous agents run all day. I can only responsibly fund those operational tools through client capital, not by burning through my personal savings.

One of the hardest personal trade-offs is that I don't get to spend as much time with my dog. She's happy living in a house full of people where she's the center of attention, and she adores my parents. But I miss her constantly. I spend all day at the factory, then head to the gym or play volleyball, and at night I plug back into my laptop to finish whatever IT tasks remain from the day. By the time I give her a final walk around the neighborhood, it feels like I barely saw her. That's probably the most heartbreaking change of all, though I'm grateful my parents take such good care of her.

Lastly, I'm back living with my parents at 31, after 10 years of living independently. It isn't bad—we have a great relationship, and they are genuinely thrilled to have us back. They were heartbroken when my sister and I emigrated a decade ago, so seeing their joy makes a big difference. Plus, given how intensely my sister and I are working, having help with domestic tasks at home is a massive relief. It really highlights the hidden labor of domestic work and how many people couldn't accomplish what they do without a partner or staff managing the household.

What now?

Well... work. Work, work, work. That's all I see on the horizon for the next two years.

I approach this transition as an asymmetric bet—the biggest one of my life so far. I've given myself a strict two-year deadline to evaluate whether keeping this engine running makes strategic sense.

Before reaching that deadline, I need to give it everything I have to take this business as far as possible. If the bet pays off in two years, my family and I will be in a position to sell or partner on highly favorable terms. From there, I might choose to move back to Spain—provided I can finally bring my parents along—or split my time between both countries. Alternatively, if the turnaround yields great numbers, I might decide to stick around longer. Reaching that inflection point would be an incredible spot to be in—the kind of position where opportunity is everywhere and living in abundance feels natural.

If that's not the case after two years—if I find myself running a business that barely breaks even while working two jobs just to maintain a reasonable lifestyle—then we will seriously consider closing down or selling at a discount to relieve ourselves of the burden.

Scenario A is full of opportunity; Scenario B is full of uncertainty and a tight budget. Luck, intelligence, and effort will dictate which way the scales tip. I can't control luck. Intelligence relies on my own limits and whatever talent I can hire, but the one variable I control completely is effort.

So, a new era of relentless execution begins—just like a decade ago when I was working and studying my way up. You can't escape hard work.

Looking for senior engineering execution?
If you're a founder, operator, or startup needing an experienced product engineer to design, build, and deploy systems end-to-end—or automate core operational friction—reach out directly at eugenio@donaque.xyz.