The useful thing Alvaro Silberstein brought home from Patagonia was not a photograph. It was a set of instructions. In late 2016, he and a team had worked out how to move through the steep, exposed trails of Torres del Paine with a specialized trekking chair. They planned the route, trained for months, raised money, recruited people with different skills and persuaded sponsors to help. Then, after finishing the roughly 50-kilometer journey, they left the chair at the park and wrote a guide so someone else could use it.
That final decision changed the shape of the story. A private ambition became a repeatable service. Before Silberstein had even completed the trip home, another family was asking to borrow the equipment. More requests followed. People did not simply want to applaud the expedition; they wanted the same information, contacts and confidence to make a trip of their own.
Silberstein and his lifelong friend Camilo Navarro paid attention to the difference. The pair would eventually build Wheel the World, with Silberstein as chief executive and Navarro as chief operating officer. What began as a difficult route through one national park became a travel platform that gathers verified accessibility information, supports bookings and helps destinations understand what they actually offer.
“We wanted all of that effort to be useful for other people too.”Alvaro Silberstein
A founder trained to see the system
Silberstein grew up in Santiago and studied industrial civil engineering with a concentration in information technology at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. The degree is a revealing combination: operations on one side, structured information on the other. After graduating in 2011, he worked in management consulting, then moved through business development and product roles at Chilean companies. He also co-founded Handcycling Chile as a volunteer initiative.
In 2015 he moved to California for an MBA at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He later said his application essay described a plan to become an entrepreneur and solve problems for people with disabilities. Haas gave that ambition a network and a workshop. Classmates joined the Patagonia team. Faculty and friends helped. Silberstein was selected to address his graduating MBA class in 2017, speaking about authenticity, community and the confidence to attempt projects that once felt unavailable.
The trek had the visual drama of a launch campaign, but its mechanics were closer to a consulting engagement. Silberstein assembled a multidisciplinary group, found an all-terrain chair, broke the goal into operating problems and tested on steep terrain around Santiago. When the expedition met hours of rain and mud, the team considered stopping. Silberstein proposed an hour to eat and dry out, then continuing. The sun returned. So did the schedule.
The product is the detail
Travel sites are excellent at compressing a hotel into a few familiar fields: price, stars, location, breakfast, pool. Accessibility often appears as a binary label, if it appears at all. Silberstein’s insight was that the label is almost useless without the underlying facts. Two travelers can read “accessible room” and need entirely different things. A bed height, door width, turning radius, shower configuration or clear photograph can decide whether the booking works.
Wheel the World treats those facts as structured data. Its mappers evaluate more than 200 data points at properties and travel services. A traveler creates an accessibility profile. The platform and its specialists can then connect that profile with hotels, activities and trips whose details have been checked. The job is not to declare a place universally accessible. It is to show enough verified information for a person to judge the fit.
The company also sells to the supply side. Tourism boards and destination marketing organizations work with Wheel the World to map hotels, restaurants and attractions, train local partners and publish verified destination guides. This creates a tidy flywheel. Better information gives travelers more confidence. Visible demand gives suppliers a commercial reason to improve. More participating suppliers make the platform more useful.
Silberstein’s language has evolved with the business. He talks about accessibility not merely as compliance, but as a customer experience and an economic opportunity. The distinction matters. Compliance asks whether a minimum was met. A travel company has to ask whether the whole sequence works: discovery, reservation, arrival, room, activity and support. A single broken handoff can undo every correct checkbox before it.
“We’re not just helping people navigate the world, we’re helping the world become more navigable.”Alvaro Silberstein, 2026
Ten travelers can be a market signal
The early fundraising story was less smooth. Silberstein has recalled a 2018 meeting in which an angel investor asked how many travelers had experienced the original Patagonia trip. He proudly answered ten. “But that’s nothing,” the investor replied. He left frustrated, then accepted the practical message: the company would need more evidence before conventional capital understood the opportunity.
Silberstein and Navarro used grants, revenue and other sources to bootstrap. This was not a romantic rejection of venture capital. It was a way to keep learning until the proof matched the size of the pitch. Every trip surfaced another operational detail. Every destination added supply. Every customer request helped translate a broad mission into a product specification.
Early traction is contextual. Ten ordinary bookings may be small. Ten people repeating a trip that previously lacked a clear route, reliable information and bookable support can reveal a new category.
The institutional money eventually arrived. In February 2026, Wheel the World announced an $11 million Series A. The company said it had assembled verified information across more than 150 destinations and thousands of travel services. The funding was intended to expand its marketplace, accessibility data and work with destinations. Nearly a decade after the Patagonia expedition, investors were no longer being asked to imagine the same thing from ten examples.
Silberstein graduates as an industrial civil engineer and begins a career in consulting.
He moves to Berkeley for an MBA and begins developing an entrepreneurship plan around accessibility.
The Torres del Paine expedition creates the first reusable route, equipment and guide.
Wheel the World takes shape as a travel company co-founded with Camilo Navarro.
The company announces an $11 million Series A and expands its destination-data model.
From expedition to ordinary reliability
Origin stories are useful until they become a substitute for the work. Wheel the World’s first chapter was cinematic: Patagonia, a custom chair, a team moving through rain beneath granite towers. The company Silberstein runs now is deliberately less dramatic. Its value appears when a measurement is accurate, a photo answers a question, a reservation holds and the traveler arrives without discovering that a broad promise concealed a decisive detail.
That evolution says something about Silberstein as an operator. He keeps returning to the same move: take a personal experience, identify the transferable knowledge, then design a system that lets other people benefit. The donated chair was an early version of the model. So was the guide left at the park. The database, traveler profile and destination partnerships are more scalable versions of the same instinct.
The company still uses experience as a teaching tool. When Amanda Powers joined as vice president of business development in 2026, her first week included an adaptive bicycle ride across San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. The outing was not separate from onboarding. Silberstein’s point was that someone asking destinations to improve the visitor experience should encounter the product context firsthand.
His public posts also reveal a founder who likes to turn field observations into operating principles. A survey of 173 community members asked what one thing hotels could do better. The answers ranged across rooms, reservations, photographs, measurements and staff knowledge. Silberstein summarized the lesson in a line: accessibility is the entire travel experience. It sounds larger than a booking site because it is. Wheel the World is trying to connect many small, checkable facts into one dependable journey.
The next layer
In 2026, Wheel the World highlighted an AI travel tool developed with Experience Grand Rapids. The interface lets a traveler describe specific needs and ask for matching local options. The fashionable part is the conversational agent. The durable part is the verified information underneath it. Without measurements and mapped services, the smartest interface can only produce a fluent guess.
This is where Silberstein’s engineering background and travel mission meet cleanly. Artificial intelligence can make a complex database easier to query, but the database still has to represent the physical world. A hotel changes. Equipment breaks. A room category gets assigned incorrectly. The company’s advantage depends on collecting, maintaining and explaining facts that cannot be conjured by software.
Silberstein’s aspiration remains broad: make the world accessible and enable millions of people to explore it. His method is unusually concrete. Measure the room. Photograph the feature. Train the partner. Match the traveler. Confirm the booking. Repeat across the next destination. The grand mission advances one reliable field at a time.
Patagonia supplied the founding image, but the better symbol may be the guide left beside the trekking chair. Someone had done the hard work once and recorded enough of it for a stranger to begin. That is what infrastructure does. It turns a remarkable first journey into a more ordinary second one - and leaves the route open for everyone after.