Raimundo Page and the art of starting again

Before Raimundo Page was selling companies on the possibilities of data, he had a smaller problem of presentation: looking old enough to be taken seriously. In the early days of Option, prospective clients asked the founders their age. They were 23, his co-founder Fernando Oliver recalls. Page grew a beard. Every young business needs a strategy; this one could at least be maintained with a razor.

The story belongs to a beginning in 2008, when Page and Oliver started Option while still at university. A borrowed room at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez served as an early base. Work also happened at Page’s house. Oliver remembers carrying an inflatable mattress and sleeping at friends’ homes. The furniture was provisional. So, in time, would be the business they thought they were building.

Today Page is CEO and co-founder of Option, a technology consultancy working in data and artificial intelligence. He also co-founded Option Venture Studio and served as president of Chiletec from 2023 to 2025. Those titles suggest an orderly ascent. The more interesting thread is how often the work changed, and how practical its starting points could be.

A bank customer’s birthday

One of Option’s early assignments was a service that sent birthday greetings to a Chilean bank’s customers. There is something pleasingly modest about that origin. Before predictive models and discussions of autonomous agents, there was a customer, a date and a message that needed to arrive. The machinery existed to perform an ordinary courtesy reliably.

Page and his partners built custom cloud services, along with applications for the web, mobile devices and smart televisions. His interest was in products that could become services. GuruContact, their email marketing platform, put that idea to work: a repeatable offering that other businesses could use, rather than a fresh commission for every customer.

By September 2016, its free plan had attracted more than 10,000 registered users. Page wanted to expand paid subscriptions across Chile, Peru, Mexico and Colombia. He described the entry-level offering as help for entrepreneurs who were new to email marketing. That detail gives the product a human scale: somebody starting a business should be able to start communicating, too.

GuruContact later became an exit for the founders through emBlue. A bank’s birthday greeting had led into a product business and then a sale. In Page’s career, the humble assignment deserves its place beside the impressive job title. It explains where the next opportunity might come from.

The attraction of a smaller bet

Page’s approach to technology becomes particularly clear in his writing about digital acceleration. He argues for short projects, achievable goals and an early opportunity to test a concept. A grand project can lose the people working on it long before it produces something useful. Ambition, apparently, benefits from a shorter meeting with reality.

He gives the cloud a practical job in that argument. Infrastructure and software available as services let a company try an idea without buying everything required to own the experiment outright. The value lies in the tools and the speed of learning. Renting a server changes the cost of being wrong, which changes how readily a team can try again.

He closes with an invitation to make use of tools that have become widely accessible. The sentence is inviting, but the method around it is disciplined. Test at manageable cost. Learn. Correct. Let the next decision benefit from the previous attempt.

“Hoy las herramientas están al alcance de todos, solo falta atreverse.”

Raimundo Page · on digital acceleration

That philosophy helps explain the distance between Option’s early software work and its present focus. The company now offers data consulting, foundations, analytics and AI. Its work reaches industries including mining, manufacturing, energy, financial services and retail. Beneath the changing vocabulary sits a familiar commercial question: what can this technology help a customer actually do?

Making room for other founders

In 2022, Page took part in another beginning. Together with Oliver and entrepreneur and investor George Cargill, he co-founded Option Venture Studio. Cargill became its CEO; Page and Oliver became co-founders and partners. The arrangement brought an established technology business into the work of creating new ones.

The studio combines technical experience, capital and hands-on company building. Its team supports product development, legal matters, administration, branding, recruitment and fundraising. For a founder, these are the jobs that crowd around an idea as soon as it acquires customers, contracts or colleagues. A business has an extraordinary talent for producing work beyond the thing it sells.

Its early projects included Levannta, Startups Latam, Curo Art and Inpersona. Those ventures ranged across financing, entrepreneurial media, digital art and AI. Their variety matters more here than any convenient industry label. Page was helping build an arrangement through which other founders could develop companies with technical and operational support already close at hand.

In December 2022, Chiletec recognized Option with its Innovation and Impact award for the studio’s creation. The recognition arrived before Page’s later election as the association’s president. For his own story, the studio marks a change in responsibility: alongside running Option, he had become a partner in other people’s beginnings.

A bigger table, with more chairs

Page joined Chiletec’s board in April 2018 and was elected president in May 2023. The role widened the frame from the needs of a particular client to those of an industry. His agenda included reaching beyond Santiago, bringing younger companies into the association and improving the way its working groups operated.

He also wanted better information about the technology sector itself. A proposed industry study with fellow associations ACTI and AIE would help establish what businesses faced and what decisions might follow. There is a certain consistency in a data company’s founder asking his own industry to understand itself more precisely.

The following year brought a renewed presidential term and a changed board. For the first time in Chiletec’s history, half its directors were women. Page welcomed the different perspectives of the incoming leaders and argued for greater participation by women in technology. The room in which decisions were made was changing along with the subjects on its agenda.

By the April 2025 annual assembly, Page was reporting on work that included six meetings with government digital teams, a seminar on the digital state and stronger connections with Colombian institutions. He thanked member companies, fellow directors and the association’s staff. In May, Felipe Mancini succeeded him as president, closing Page’s two-year tenure.

Taking Chile’s technology abroad

The international part of Page’s work extends beyond Option’s commercial reach. In 2024, he and Francisco Mardones joined the Digital Trade Connect network through the Chilean Pacific Foundation’s efforts. The network connects work on digital trade and connectivity with business bodies linked to APEC and ASEAN.

Its remit includes exchanging practical experience and discussing the conditions under which digital commerce can develop. That is less photogenic than a product launch, but it belongs to the same business of making technology useful across borders. The product must travel; so must the understanding of how it can be used.

At home, Page’s public arguments have included the need to develop specialized talent and reduce regional gaps in digital access and capability. He has also pressed the government to give the technology industry clearer support. The opportunity he describes depends on more people being able to participate, whether they run a small company, build software or work outside the capital.

A conversation still in progress

There is a social side to this career that survives all the technical terminology. Page helped organize After Next Santiago 2024, an Option gathering with Google at the Metropolitan, where the invitation included conversation, wine and a sunset. At a Chiletec members’ lunch, he spoke about the value of contact between companies and the alliances those conversations might produce.

He has also returned to the university setting as a guest sharing his experience. In 2025, lecturer Claudio Parraguez thanked him for speaking to a digital transformation class at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez. They talked about AI, discussed business experience and laughed. A borrowed university room makes a rather good place for this particular story to circle back.

The present work continues into data and AI, with Option operating in Chile, Peru, Colombia and the United States. Page’s public activity includes discussions with clients and colleagues in Bogotá, and an interest in how intelligent agents might change the organization of work. The technologies have acquired new names; the need to explain their use remains.

There is no need to make the beard carry more symbolism than a beard can reasonably bear. It was an early attempt to solve the problem in front of him. Much of what followed has a similar rhythm: get a hearing, make something useful, see what it becomes. Page’s career has accumulated titles. Its livelier story is in the repeated willingness to begin.