Pablo Marichal
In 2014 I was in Venezuela, training for triathlon and working as a full stack developer. That world was not going well for me. I owned a racing bike I had put real time and money into. At the same time I was trying to climb out of a comfort zone that had turned into mediocrity, and I saw that SAP was the door to the next level of my career. I priced the certification and made the call: I sold the bike.
It was not a dramatic sacrifice. It was a calculated bet — and triathlon was definitely not my thing, at least not then. That is what I mean by a system: identify the right resource, move it to the right place, at the right time. That decision opened the door that brought me here.
Where I come from
I was born in Uruguay in 1980 and moved three times before I was old enough to have an opinion: to Venezuela at two, back to Uruguay at four, to Venezuela again at ten. That is where I stayed. That is where I grew up, studied computer engineering and project management, and built an entire life.
Leaving Venezuela in January 2018 was not just another emigration. It was getting out of a disaster: the country was chaos.
My wife was the one who saw me off. We met again two or three months later, once I had settled here. I landed at my sister's place, lived there for a month, then rented something near my job — which I started earning roughly what a junior earns. I took it because it was my field, SAP, and from there I could start building again.
Paperwork was not the problem: being Uruguayan made all of that easy. But it was a clean slate. Saying goodbye to a life, giving away almost everything because selling it was close to pointless. The house, the car, my books.
The books felt like that scene from the film where they burn them. I did not burn mine: I listed them, and people carried them off for a price that was almost a joke. Something like ten books for the cost of a coffee here in Uruguay.
The hard part is rebuilding. Something I always had in my head was Naval's line: that if you drop someone into a society with nothing but what they know, in five years or less they can be back where they were, or better. That happened to me. The reboot cost, but it worked.
The work
I have worked in enterprise technology for over twenty years, the last stretch as a tech lead in large corporations. I lead AI adoption in teams that run critical processes, and I present in English to executive committees. Everything I write comes out of that, not out of reading the news.
The body is the deadline
I started running in 2010 because I had gained weight and wanted a real change. I took it seriously: that year I ran a half marathon, a full marathon, and in September my first Major — Berlin.
Nineteen marathons so far — Berlin (2), Chicago (2), New York, Tokyo, Buenos Aires (5), Caracas (5), Punta del Este, Montevideo (2) — on the way to the six World Majors and working to go under three hours.
I apply to my body the same logic I apply to a system that has to last years: a standard core — sleep, nutrition, movement — with no toxic customizations layered on top. To hold up teams in critical situations you need a machine that can take it. Without that, you are a zombie system waiting to fall over.
Why I write this
The philosopher Éric Sadin writes about the vegetalization of humanity: delegating so much cognitive agency to algorithms that we end up as passive nodes in the system rather than agents in it. I see it every day in the corporate world: people copying prompts without understanding what they execute, managers who think Copilot replaces judgment, juniors who cannot debug because they never learned the error from the ground up.
That is what I write about every Tuesday: what is actually happening with AI inside large enterprises, without the smoke and without the hype. That is In Production.
Above Average is something else: the system I arrived at along the way, and the book I am writing about it. Three layers — the biological kernel (a body in shape), the technical extensions (AI, SAP, architecture) and cognitive sovereignty (judgment no AI can replace). Version 1.0 is published and free, in Resources.
For Max and Mía
I also write this for my kids. So that one day, when they are adults and the world has changed again in ways I cannot picture, they find here a record of how their old man navigated uncertainty without freezing.
Not because he was special. Because he had systems and used them every day.
In Production
Every Tuesday: what is actually happening with AI inside large enterprises, written by someone implementing it there. No hype, nothing to sell.