Why The Antifragility Lab?

I began my professional career in audit and business valuations at a Big 4 firm. Despite rapid advancement and strong performance reviews, I couldn’t shake a persistent feeling of incompleteness in my work. I then did a short stint in private equity, drawn in by years of working with such firms in valuations, only to encounter the same feeling.

What private equity allowed me to realize, however, was where that feeling was coming from. It gave me the opportunity, early in my professional life, to sit on the boards of directors of remarkable companies, listening to discussions around strategy and transformational projects, from generational transitions to organic growth opportunities, mergers and acquisitions, and long-term strategic planning. I was suddenly let in on what felt like the secrets of the gods: the most consequential changes some exceptional companies and management teams were navigating at that moment. I was in awe. The other people around the table, all of whom had far more grey in their hair than I did, must have been wondering who that starry-eyed kid was, sitting there with his mouth perpetually half open.

When the meetings ended, all I wanted was to stay, to work alongside the management teams as these strategies and projects took shape. This was my lightbulb moment: I was meant to work with entrepreneurs.

I chose my words deliberately here. I mean working with entrepreneurs, not being one. Improving and elevating other people’s ideas has always excited me more than building something entirely from my own. Maybe I simply hadn’t found an idea compelling enough to do so… yet.

I then made the jump into the SME world as a CFO and helped grow the business by a factor of three, working alongside two entrepreneurs who became mentors. This experience taught me how business actually works once board-level discussions meet reality. While I was getting closer to closing that open loop, the lingering feeling of incompleteness, something was still missing.

In hindsight, what was missing wasn’t ambition or execution, but exposure: the ability to make a positive contribution beyond the business itself, and to do so with real skin in the game.

Speaking of skin in the game, the Incerto series by Nassim Nicholas Taleb profoundly shaped my worldview, particularly its fourth book, Antifragile (Skin in the Game being the fifth). In my view, Antifragile is the most directly applicable of the series. Taleb introduces the opposite of fragility, what is harmed by volatility, not as robustness, which merely resists change, but as antifragility: systems that benefit from volatility. Toward the end of the book, he also makes a compelling case for why nature itself is inherently antifragile.

This lens finally connected the dots for me and led me to my current professional role at Ecotierra, working at the intersection of finance, nature, and business. Ecotierra works directly with small landowners to responsibly steward land in ways that accelerate community-led sustainable development, while addressing climate change and land degradation. It does so through three operational pillars: Ecotierra Project Management, which develops and manages impact projects in partnership with local communities; Ecotierra Capital, which mobilizes capital into agroforestry value chains; and ElevaFinca, which brings the commodities produced by these communities to global markets.

The Antifragility Lab is my thinking space, a place to explore antifragility through different lenses, without the immediate pressure of execution. Ecotierra, by contrast, is where I strive to apply these principles in the real world through the lens of regenerative capital, making me a practitioner rather than merely an intellectual.

The Lab exists to question, test, and refine ideas. Ecotierra and other applied projects in the future exist to expose them to reality.

Over time, I hope to add new lenses to this framework. Enduring Objects is the next one: an exploration of things designed to age well, improve with use, and resist obsolescence in a world obsessed with the new thing.

This is an attempt to build with meaning, and to expose my work to the real world. What comes next is the record of that attempt.