Small businesses have always been and will always be the engine that drives the US economy forward, but the financial system still treats them as edge cases. That is why I started Novo in 2016. Getting a business bank account should not be harder than starting the business itself. We built the product I wished existed. It started as a simple business checking account that lived on your phone, and grew into a financial platform that hundreds of thousands of businesses run on.
Then, in 2024, my daughter was born and I stepped back from running the company day to day. I took nearly two years off to be with my family. It was the most clarifying stretch of my career. Ownership stopped being an abstraction about cap tables and became a question about what I want to hand to her: the habit of building something of your own.
That is not what I was taught. My father was four when his family left Cuba. My mother was born in Miami, a generation into the same story. They taught me what those families teach: get the degree, get the good job, and you will be safe. They were right for their time.
I started a company instead, put my own savings into it, and left myself no safety net. Walking away from a salary and benefits looked reckless then. It does not look reckless now, and not because it worked out for me. It is because AI is dismantling the safe path itself. The careers my parents pointed me toward are being compressed in real time, and millions of people who took that path are holding jobs they do not own and cannot count on being there.
Fast-forward to 2026. AI is in full force on both sides of the coin, displacing careers and empowering entrepreneurs, and it is only getting started. But one thing has become crystal clear for me: owning the business, owning the customer relationship, owning the judgment calls that software cannot make. That is the only defensible position anymore. A steady job was security in an economy that changed slowly. In one that reprices skills on what feels like a monthly basis, security is the ability to respond, and only owners have it. The independent economy is not the alternative economy. It is the real one, and for the first time, the technology is pushing in their direction harder than everything else is pushing back.
By sitting on Novo’s board of directors, I had a front-row view of what was happening to small businesses in America. But the boardroom was not where I wanted to stay while the argument I built a company on became the biggest story in the economy. So I came back. Not to run the company again, but to make the case in public for the people it was built to serve.
