puerto-rico
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Bessie Ramirez Knows Where the Next Pass Goes
Before she founded Marketing SI, Bessie Ramirez played volleyball for Puerto Rico and Penn State. Her work in marketing asks a familiar question: how do you get a group of people moving together?
Richard Carrión’s other currency
He helped put cash machines across Puerto Rico and Olympic broadcasts into American living rooms. The thread running through Richard Carrión’s career is what happens when people can take part.
Michael “Hutch” Hutchison and the business of getting everyone to dinner
After a career teaching people how to sell, Michael “Hutch” Hutchison helped build a travel club. Behind the international business sits a familiar parental wish: getting the family back around the same table.
Vicente Reynal and the price of thinking like an owner
From an aerospace factory floor to the chairmanship of Ingersoll Rand, Vicente Reynal kept returning to one question: who gets a stake in the value a company creates? His answer put employee ownership at the center of an industrial business.
Federico Grosso and the conversation without an agenda
At Assurant Puerto Rico, Federico Grosso brought a finance executive’s discipline to a quieter management habit: making time to listen. His story runs from mobile-sector refinancing to coffee conversations where work was off the menu.
Andro Nodarse-Leon and the hotel he couldn’t check into
A visit to Havana’s Hotel Nacional sparked his interest in hospitality. Years later, the LionGrove founder’s work runs from rebuilding a Puerto Rico hotel to deciding which deals are worth waiting for.
Grupo Guayacán: Before the Money, 100 Conversations
Puerto Rico’s business education nonprofit asks founders to test their ideas on strangers. Its larger experiment is turning private capital, patient teaching and local connections into businesses that can grow.
Parallel18’s $100,000 bet: build here, sell everywhere
Puerto Rico’s startup accelerator began by giving founders a reason to come to the island. Its next chapter gives them capital, customers, and a reason to stay.
Crowley: The Shipping Company That Knows Where Time Goes
A ship can cross an ocean and still lose the race at the gate. Crowley’s business is built around those awkward last yards - and the expensive work of making them disappear.
Pamela Vega and the Business of Paying Attention
A quarantine pastime became a jewelry label; a habit of noticing became a creative agency. Pamela Vega has made a career from the small details other people hurry past.
Gabriel Rodríguez-Calero Bet on the Unfashionable Molecule
A Puerto Rico-born chemist found a stubborn industrial problem hiding inside a membrane. A decade later, his company is trying to make green hydrogen ordinary enough to buy.
Ariel Quinones
Ariel Quinones is the co-founder and co-CEO of Ironhack, a global tech bootcamp he launched in Madrid in 2013 with Gonzalo Manrique after the two met at Wharton. Raised in a Puerto Rican family of educators, he spotted a mismatch he could not unsee: youth unemployment above 50% in Spain sitting beside hundreds of thousands of unfilled tech jobs. Ironhack was his answer - short, intensive, outcomes-obsessed training that has since graduated thousands of career-changers across campuses in Europe, the Americas, and beyond. He now leads from Miami, preaching a gospel of ruthless focus on student outcomes and over-delivering on what people expect.
Patrick Campbell
Patrick Campbell bootstrapped ProfitWell (originally Price Intelligently) from a cashed-out 401k into one of the most cited SaaS pricing authorities on the internet, serving 30,000+ companies for free before selling to Paddle for $200 million in 2022. Known as @Patticus, he turned a debate scholarship, a stint at the NSA, and a barista certificate into a decade-long conviction that pricing is the most underleveraged growth lever in SaaS. Now living in Puerto Rico and quietly building a new healthcare company.
Ronen Kirsh
Ronen Kirsh is an Israeli-born entrepreneur and blockchain investor at the intersection of Web3 gaming and venture capital. He co-founded Blockchain at Berkeley (2016), one of the largest university blockchain organizations in the US, then launched Dekrypt Capital with a $20M fund. He is a co-founder of Game7 (G7_DAO), which controls a $500M treasury and deployed $100M in grants to accelerate Web3 gaming, and serves as Strategic Partnerships lead at Forte. A former IDF Special Forces sergeant, he brings military discipline to the chaotic frontier of decentralized gaming.
Ozuna
Ozuna (Juan Carlos Ozuna Rosado) is Puerto Rico's reigning melodic reggaeton king — the artist who spent more consecutive weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Top Latin Albums than any male in history, held four Guinness World Records simultaneously, and became the most-viewed artist on YouTube globally in 2018. Raised by his grandmother above a San Juan bodega after losing his father at age three, he turned hardship into a sonic empire spanning seven studio albums, 23+ million Instagram followers, and collaborations with Cardi B, Selena Gomez, DJ Snake, and Rosalía. His smooth melodic tenor and genre-fluid approach — blending reggaeton, melodic trap, Afrobeats, and Latin pop — have made him a defining voice of the streaming era.