I sat down to interview Luis for a work bio. Somewhere in the first ten minutes I gave up on that and just started listening, because the guy will not describe himself in normal LinkedIn language. I asked him why he's good at his job, expecting something like "strong communicator, detail-oriented." Instead I got: "I hyper-focus. If somebody asks me to do something, I try to understand it, and I get into it, and I try to resolve it. It's done." That's it. That's the whole personality, delivered like it's not a big deal.
He's been like this since before Agileana existed. Back in 1994, he began his studies at Universidad del Valle in Colombia, one of the few universities in the country offering internet access at the time. Luis wanted to study graphic design. His dad talked him out of it. "My father suggested I study computer science, because he thought that was the career of the future," Luis told me — and you can hear, even thirty years later, that he still finds this a little funny. But his dad also gave him an out: he could still apply design to it. So he just did both. By 1995 he already had his own internet account and was teaching himself to build websites, playing with drawings, graphics, and interfaces that felt ahead of their time. A couple of years later, a friend introduced him to the group inside Universidad del Valle that ran the school's servers, and he ended up redesigning the student portal — hosted on a server named "calvin," which he leaned into with a Calvin-and-Hobbes theme — then the page for the university's Sun Microsystems server resources, and eventually the university's main website. That's where he picked up the basics of usability, style guides, and web design — years before either word meant a job title.
In his final semesters of university, he and a few friends started their own little thing, which he now calls, laughing, "playing entrepreneurship." His words. "We really liked to be entrepreneurs. We were, you know, like playing entrepreneurship in some way, because we didn't know a lot about that." The income was inconsistent half the time, in the specific way small Colombian agencies ran back then — clients haggling for discounts, invoices paid late or not at all, and everyone so invested in keeping the company alive that sometimes they just skipped their own paychecks. Real passion, terrible payroll. His friend Felipe, still at Agileana today, was going through the exact same thing somewhere else. So when Luis met Blake in 2007, the pitch didn't need much selling: standardized, steady, and if they were organized about it, they could knock out two websites a week.
Here's my favorite thing he told me, and I don't think he realizes how good a story it is. Early on, they shipped a site, and the contact form quietly didn't work. Nobody noticed until the client did. So the fix wasn't a meeting, or a new framework — it was one more line added to a checklist: test the contact form. That's the entire origin of Agilena's process discipline, according to Luis. Not a philosophy. A list of things that broke once, that are never allowed to break again.
That worked fine until Agilena started landing U.S. government contracts, which meant Luis moving to the States, a work visa, background checks, the whole thing — and a checklist stops covering you once the projects get that complicated. He described the years before they really nailed Agile with real exasperation, like he's still a little annoyed about it: months of gathering requirements, months of quietly building, and then the reveal, where the client says something like "but I told you six months ago I wanted the logo green," and everyone in the room remembers that meeting differently. Nobody fixed that by reading a book. They fixed it by living through it enough times to never want to again.
That's also the version of Agileana that ended up on NASA's TechPort project — a web-based system that catalogs NASA's technology research and development, giving public and internal audiences visibility into project details, funding, lead organizations, and technology maturity levels, all in service of encouraging collaboration and commercial partnerships. Agileana worked alongside other companies on the build, handling the user interface: HTML/CSS, JavaScript functionality, graphics, responsive design, and 508 compliance. Luis led that interface work, on a tool meant to help NASA staff make more informed decisions — pulling reports from past projects, reusing existing research and materials, and applying lessons learned to new proposals, instead of re-solving the same problem every time someone proposed going back to the Moon. "I was able to go there and get an award from the director of NASA at that time," he said, no false modesty at all, which I respected. He later ran the front end for the Federal Communications Commission's site, a project where, as he put it, the exposure "in how to lead this type of federal contract" mattered more to him than the project itself.
He's also disarmingly honest that none of this made him a good boss right away. He was around 33 — "if I'm not wrong," he added, as if his own age were a detail he's not fully sure of — when he started leading people, with no real experience doing it, working alongside actual friends. "I was trying to micromanage the projects," he told me, "and by micromanaging, I was actually not a good leader, because when you micromanage, you can't do other stuff." His fix, eventually, was something closer to trust but verify — check in quickly instead of hovering constantly, and save the hard conversation for a retrospective instead of ambushing someone in the hallway. Now 48, he says he's more patient, more analytical, and — grinning, during our call — that he can still learn plenty from someone half his age. Meaning me.
The best thing he said all interview, though, was about what he calls the peak of ignorance. "When you're at the peak, you think you know everything, and in reality you know nothing," he said. "You have a lot of confidence at that peak." The people who get stuck, he says, are the ones who like the view. Once you get past it, you know more, but you're constantly second-guessing yourself — which he finds funny, because it sounds like a downgrade, but it isn't one. "That's what keeps you learning," he said, like that settles it.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, he also spent an afternoon fixing a video-generation problem I brought to him — dug through why the tool I was using hard-capped every clip at eight seconds, found a different one that didn't, and tested it himself before telling me anything. I only bring it up because it's the same guy, doing the exact same thing he's apparently been doing since he was nineteen: someone hands him a problem, and he will not let it go until it's actually, properly solved.