Camilo Sánchez Villamarín and the pull of starting over

Before Camilo Sánchez Villamarín sold pet supplies, he sold pillows. It is an agreeable beginning for an entrepreneur: a product devoted to rest, followed by a career with rather different requirements. Years later, after helping build Laika into a retailer operating across Latin American markets, he made another change. He stepped away from the chief executive’s job. His sister Manuela took over in August 2025. Camilo wanted to build something from the beginning again.

The sequence matters. A founder can spend years persuading people that a company deserves to exist, then discover that keeping it running requires a different relationship with work. Sánchez has put his preference plainly. Creating from zero is the part he loves. His next venture, True Blue, keeps him in the pet business while giving him a different assignment. To understand that choice, it helps to go back past the investment announcements, to the pillows and the people around a family table.

The entrepreneur at the family table

Sánchez studied law at Universidad de los Andes between 2010 and 2016. A university paper bearing his full name, coauthored with Nicolás Torres Forero in 2016, examined crowdfunding regulation in Colombia. It is a small, revealing item in the chronology: questions about financing enterprises appeared in his work before Laika’s fundraising became part of his public career. His early business experience, meanwhile, involved bedding.

His sister Manuela had worked at Rappi before the siblings began building Laika. A Sunday family lunch helped bring the future partners together. Manuela’s husband, Felipe Samper, connected them with Tulio Jiménez, who had experience in the pet category at supermarket group Jerónimo Martins. Andrea González joined the founding group with Jiménez. The business launched in 2018.

In Camilo’s telling, his sister approached him because he was the family’s entrepreneur. There is affection in that job description, and a certain practical logic. The family already had someone trying to make a business work. A new opportunity had arrived. They would discover whether the experience travelled.

A shopping bag is a business plan

The opportunity began with an errand. Pet owners could buy nearby and pay more, or travel farther to find a specialist with better prices. Then they had to get the purchase home. A large bag of pet food provides its own argument for delivery; it has little interest in your plans for the afternoon. Laika aimed to put assortment, price and convenience in the same transaction.

In 2019, Sánchez described buying directly from suppliers and connecting those products with customers at home. The offer brought thousands of products together with scheduled and same-day delivery options. For a customer, the benefit was easy to understand: fewer separate searches and fewer trips. For the founders, each promise created work in purchasing, inventory and delivery.

One detail in his explanation of the model deserves attention. Laika accepted cash or card on delivery. A customer did not have to arrive with a credit card and a willingness to pay online. That choice widened the doorway. It also made the service proposition concrete: the company had thought about how a person would finish the purchase, as well as how they would start it.

The early search for buyers was equally direct. In a 2024 podcast appearance, his story included offering discounts to friends of friends through Facebook. A recommendation had to travel beyond the immediate circle. That is a different task from raising investment: someone has to decide the offer is useful enough to place an order. The purchase brings a verdict that a friendly conversation can postpone. For Sánchez and the team, each additional customer meant another chance to see whether the service worked outside the group that wanted them to succeed. A business launched among relatives and friends eventually has to become useful to strangers.

The name supplied a little space-age ambition. Laika, the Soviet dog sent into orbit, became the reference for a business concerned with much more domestic journeys. The gap between the name and the daily task is rather charming. A pet-commerce company can borrow its imagery from space. Its reputation still arrives at the front door.

The people behind the promise

Sánchez’s public account of service included the people doing the deliveries. In January 2022, he said Laika employed its delivery workers as part of its approach to providing better service. A year earlier, he had argued for formal employment and stability over the long term. Those statements put an employment choice inside the business story, alongside the app and the catalogue.

It is easy to talk about customer experience as though it lives on a screen. A delivery company gives the phrase a physical address. Someone checks the order. Someone carries it. Someone deals with the customer when the expected item is missing. The promise passes through several pairs of hands before the customer can decide whether the app was convenient.

His work also included a fairly unusual method of choosing a technology leader. In a recruitment process documented by Channge, seven shortlisted CTO candidates tackled a practical challenge after an initial field of 20 applicants. Sánchez was among the judges. The proposals addressed delivery times, manual processes and changes that could be implemented within three months.

Diego Zárate was selected even though he did not meet every experience requirement. That episode is more useful than an abstract claim about hiring talented people. The candidates had to work on the company’s actual problems. The decision gave demonstrated ability a chance to compete with the reassuring neatness of a résumé.

“She called me because I’m the entrepreneur of the family.”

Camilo Sánchez, January 2022

When more orders make more work

Laika entered Y Combinator’s Summer 2019 batch. Investment followed in stages: a $5 million seed round reported in July 2020, $12 million announced in 2021, and a $48 million Series B led by SoftBank in January 2022. The figures describe financing events. The everyday test remained whether the operation could keep up with what customers had been promised.

A later conversation gave the growth story some friction. In an August 2026 appearance on El Primer Paso, Sánchez discussed early ventures, finding backing and the difficulties that came with Laika’s expansion. The episode describes sales rising from around $3 million in 2019 to $30 million in 2020, alongside problems in cash flow, systems and operations.

Those are retrospective figures from that conversation, and they carry a useful complication. A rising sales total can coexist with a business that is becoming harder to run. Inventory needs money before the customer’s order has completed its journey. Systems that tolerated yesterday’s traffic may struggle with tomorrow’s. Success can arrive carrying a considerable amount of unfinished work.

The interview’s subjects include the pressure to raise money and grow quickly. Hearing that reflection after his CEO tenure changes the emphasis of the story. The question becomes how much an organization must learn while it is already moving. A founder gets an education in public, with customers expecting their orders throughout the lesson.

An app acquires a front door

During Sánchez’s years in charge, Laika also moved into physical retail. Its first shop, near the Fontanar shopping centre and serving the Chía and Cajicá area, was reported in January 2024. For a company associated with bringing the purchase home, opening a place customers could visit was a significant turn.

By March 2025, Laika had nine Colombian stores in Bogotá, Cajicá and Medellín. Sánchez described the transition as relatively fluid because customers already recognized the brand. He emphasized the ability to offer an immediate purchase, alongside the delivery proposition. The business was learning how to meet the same customer under different circumstances.

That development makes his career harder to compress into the phrase “app founder.” He helped lead a retailer whose work extended beyond its original interface. A shop requires a location, staff and stock whether anyone presses a button that day or not. The familiar brand had acquired a new set of practical commitments.

A different chair, another beginning

Manuela’s appointment as CEO was announced in August 2025. She had led retail and the store strategy. The handover therefore placed a cofounder associated with Laika’s physical expansion in charge of the wider company. Camilo announced that he would continue as chairman and a board member, supporting the business from a different position.

He explained his decision in terms of the work he wanted to do next: building from zero. By October 2025, he was identified as CEO and cofounder of True Blue, a Colombian pet-food company created with Sebastián Canal. Canal described it as an independent venture. Their previous experience at Laika supplied a connection between the partners and familiarity with the market.

The change brings him closer to the product itself. Laika assembled a shopping destination; True Blue develops a pet-food offer. Both depend on understanding the person who makes the purchase and the animal waiting at home. Experience gives a founder more to draw on. A new business still has to earn its place in the customer’s routine.

There is a pleasing circularity to Sánchez’s route: pillows, pet supplies, a new pet-food business. The products change; the decision to try building a company returns. After seven years holding the CEO title at Laika, he chose another beginning while keeping a seat at the board. His explanation needs little decoration. He knows which part of the job he wants to do again.