I'm Going Back To Venezuela

I grew up in Caracas, and then left, 24 years ago.

I learned how to read there. How to argue. How to value family in the particular Venezuelan way, loudly, around a table, with no clear end time. And somewhere around age twelve, sitting in front of a computer that had no business being as powerful as it felt, I taught myself how to build websites. Then web applications. The internet felt like a door that was open to anyone willing to figure out how to walk through it.

The last time I was there was fourteen years ago.

On April 13th, that changes. I'll be in Caracas for nine days: meeting educators, business leaders, founders, investors, and builders doing the hard work of innovation inside one of the most complex environments on the planet. I'm going as someone who has spent the last decade building Ampersand: a practice focused on AI and digital innovation, and a ventures operation that aims to back the opportunities most capital hasn't found yet. And I'm going with a thesis I've been sitting with long enough that it's time to say it out loud.

Venezuela doesn't need to be repaired. It needs to be built. And that distinction is where the real opportunity lives.

Joseph Schumpeter called it creative destruction. Growth doesn't happen in a straight line, it happens in cycles of collapse and creation, where old systems make way for new ones not gradually but violently.

Most countries don't get the clean slate. They carry legacy infrastructure, legacy institutions, legacy political arrangements into every attempt at modernization. They retrofit when they should rebuild. They protect incumbents when they should be clearing ground. The weight of what already exists is often the single greatest obstacle to what could.

Venezuela has the clean slate. Involuntarily. Painfully. But genuinely.

The question is never whether the clearing happened. The question is what gets built in the cleared field... and who shows up early enough to shape it.

In development economics, leapfrogging describes what happens when a country skips an entire generation of infrastructure and builds directly on what's current. Sub-Saharan Africa never built landlines at scale, it went straight to mobile. Today, mobile money penetration in Kenya exceeds credit card penetration in many developed markets. Rwanda digitized its land registry before most American counties did. Estonia, rebuilding after Soviet collapse, didn't replicate other bureaucratic systems, it built a digital-native civic infrastructure.

None of these countries recovered to where they were. They built something that hadn't existed before. The setback, in each case, became the precondition for the leap.

I did a version of this myself as a teenager in Caracas because the internet made it possible to skip the line. No formal training. No institution granting permission. Just a browser, a curiosity, and the dawning realization that the gap between where I was and where the world was building could be closed faster than anyone around me seemed to think. That's the leapfrog instinct. Venezuela has always had it. The question is whether the conditions are there now to run it at national scale.

I think they are.

Here's what's different now compared to any prior moment of Venezuelan reconstruction: the tools required to build from scratch have become dramatically cheaper, faster to deploy, and more accessible than at any point in history.

But the deeper shift isn't any single technology. It's the pace at which ideas become products.

What used to take a development team eighteen months can now take weeks. What used to require a large technical organization can now be driven by a small, highly capable team armed with the right tools and the right approach. The gap between a compelling vision for what Venezuelan healthcare or agriculture or financial infrastructure could look like, and an actual working product in the hands of actual users, has compressed in ways that change the entire investment calculus. You're not betting on a five-year build anymore. You're betting on something that can demonstrate proof of concept in a timeframe that keeps early investors engaged and the ecosystem moving.

The sectors that define Venezuela's next chapter, agriculture, energy, healthcare, connectivity, housing, tourism, are precisely where this compression matters most.

And here's where it becomes directly relevant to what Ampersand does.

The most exciting work we're doing right now isn't advising. It's building. Sitting inside the problem with our clients, using the most capable tools available today to move from concept to working product. We explore the art of the possible and we ship it. That distinction matters, because the rarest thing in any transformation isn't the strategy. It's the ability to make something real fast enough before the momentum dies.

Bringing together strategic clarity, technical depth, and the tools to compress execution is what Venezuela, entering a new era, is going to need. Not a report. Not a roadmap. A working thing, in their hands, showing them what's actually achievable. Being early in those relationships, with genuine roots in the country and a thesis that goes beyond any single engagement, is a positioning that can't be replicated by showing up with a generic global practice and a plane ticket.

There will be capital that comes to Venezuela for the stabilization trade. Fast in, fastest path to exit, capture the spread, move on. That capital has its logic. It also has a track record in Venezuela and that track record is part of why the country is where it is.

The more interesting bet is the creation trade. Capital that comes not to extract from a moment but to build toward a decade. Real businesses in agritech, fintech, digital health, connectivity, housing, tourism. Backed by investors who bring more than a check. Who bring the ability to accelerate what's being built, not just fund it.

At Ampersand Ventures, this is how we invest. We back opportunities where our work and our networks give us genuine advantages that purely financial capital doesn't have. We don't write checks to disappear. We build alongside.

Venezuela adds a dimension to that approach I can't manufacture and wouldn't want to. It's not just a market where the thesis makes strategic sense. It's a place I have some responsibility to. And the combination of those two things: clear-eyed about the opportunity and personally invested in the outcome, is exactly the posture a market like this requires.

I've watched the Venezuelan diaspora from inside it for years. The talent is extraordinary. The ambition is undiminished. The desire to contribute from wherever people landed is more present than most outside observers understand.

I'm not moving back. Not yet, anyway. But I am going back. And I expect to be spending considerably more time there as what I'm seeing takes shape.

The kid who taught himself to build web applications in Caracas is now running an AI practice, investing in the future that matters, and flying back with a thesis about why the country that shaped him might be one of the most compelling places to build in the next decade.

The leap is real. The window is open. The question is who shows up early enough to help define what gets built.

I'll be in Caracas April 13–22. If you're building, investing, or thinking seriously about either in Venezuela, let's talk. 👋