He worked construction on scorching El Paso roofs, then left for Georgetown and Wall Street with one promise: come back and build something for his people. MiChamba is that promise, shipped.
Start on the roof. The El Paso sun does not negotiate, and the shingles can hit 120 degrees. That is where Ricardo Flores learned what work actually costs - not as a metaphor, but as a teenager with tar on his hands. He left carrying a line he would repeat for years: "One day I'll come back to build something for my people."
The detour was impressive on paper. Georgetown, where he studied Finance and International Economics. Then Wall Street, in Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs, with the FINRA badges to match - Series 63, Series 79, the SIE. He learned how capital moves and who it tends to move toward. Useful knowledge. Just not yet pointed at the people he had in mind.
Before founding anything, he got a startup education from the inside. Flores was one of the first team members at Wealth.com, the estate-planning fintech, helping scale it from its earliest, scrappiest days. That is where the financier learned to be a builder - product, speed, the particular adrenaline of zero-to-one.
"I lived the day-to-day realities of construction sites, so I know first-hand the massive gap between Silicon Valley software and the boring industries."
In 2024, the promise came due. Flores teamed up with Juan Humberto Bravo Castellanos and Gilberto Lopez to start MiChamba - a name that lands like an inside joke and a thesis at once. "Chamba" is Mexican slang for work, for a gig, for the hustle. MiChamba means, roughly, "my job." The company is named after the thing it dignifies.
The team's edge is that it has operator scars, not just spreadsheets. They know the foreman who can't read a Gantt chart but answers every WhatsApp in ninety seconds. They built for him.
Walk onto a job site in Monterrey or a hotel back-of-house in Cancun and you will not find people staring at a dashboard. You will find them on WhatsApp. In Latin America the app is not one channel among many; it is the operating system of daily work. Shift changes, supplier orders, "send me a photo when it's done" - all of it runs through green bubbles. The data lives there. The problem is that it dies there too, scattered across threads nobody can search.
Every other tool tried to drag those workers out of WhatsApp and into a purpose-built app. The adoption curve was brutal, because you were asking people to abandon the one tool they had already mastered. MiChamba inverted the move. Instead of competing with WhatsApp, it colonizes it - layering structure, memory and AI on top of the conversation that was happening anyway.
That timing is not an accident. Capable conversational AI arrived at the exact moment that frontline industries went fully mobile, and WhatsApp opened the door to business integrations at scale. Flores and his co-founders are standing in that doorway. Their wager is that the next billion software users will never open a desktop app - they'll just keep texting, and the software will meet them in the thread.
There is a deeper bet underneath the product one. For decades, the most valuable software was built for knowledge workers, because that is who the builders knew. MiChamba's founders know someone else - the foreman, the housekeeper, the driver, the inspector. Building for them is not charity. It is an enormous, underserved market that happened to be invisible to the people writing the code.
Construction work on the roofs of El Paso, Texas. The origin of the whole mission.
Georgetown University - Finance and International Economics.
Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs; earns FINRA Series 63, Series 79 and SIE credentials.
Among the first team members at fintech Wealth.com, scaling it from the earliest stage.
Becomes a Certified Scrum Professional.
Co-founds MiChamba with Juan Humberto Bravo Castellanos and Gilberto Lopez.
Wins the Latino Startup Pitch Competition; closes a $2.25M pre-seed led by Wollef.
"To democratize technology for underrepresented blue-collar sectors by meeting workers where they already are: on WhatsApp."
MiChamba's ambition is to become the first conversational project management platform for the 3 billion-plus people on WhatsApp worldwide - starting with Latin America and the U.S. Hispanic market, where Spanish-speaking adoption keeps climbing.