• Latina in an Arab community, Muslim in a Latina community. Fernanda belonged to neither side.

• When you belong nowhere, the strongest temptation is to earn your place by doing more. It’s a trap.

• “My identity was based on what I did.” The day you stop doing, you stop being. And a bad day always arrives.

• She came out in three movements: pause, return to being, reconcile the roots. Presence helped. She built the system.

• “Reverse the order. Instead of starting from doing, start from being.” Fernanda learned this at 24. You can start tomorrow.

  ---

👋 Hi, it’s Luisa Javier. Welcome to Aziul Connections ( 🌎🔬The Sustainable Systems Lab), where I study how sustainable systems are built for business, leadership, and life.

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🎧 Listen to the full interview with Fernanda Peñaherrera

Lee el artículo en Español

There is a question almost no one dares to ask out loud: who am I when I belong nowhere?

Fernanda Peñaherrera had to answer it twice before turning 24. The first time she answered without a system. The second time she had one. That is why she is here.

Fernanda is Ecuadorian, lives in Riyadh, converted to Islam at 21, is married to a Yemeni man, founded Ssuubi (a humanitarian project in Uganda) and is expecting her first baby. But none of that is the system. That is the context. The system comes from inside.

“Did you have another crisis?” “A bad one.”

When Fernanda converted to Islam, she thought the confusion was over. She was wrong.

“I felt very alone. I felt like no one understood me”, she says of the period right after. Family supported her. Old friends stayed at a distance. New friends did not exist yet. And in that empty space an old wound came back, one she already knew from high school: trying to belong by doing more.

When you belong nowhere

Fernanda was caught between two communities that refused to recognise her fully.

“Latinos criticize me and minimize me for being Muslim. And at the same time, the Arab community minimizes me for being Latina.”

This is not Fernanda’s personal problem. It is a documented pattern. A study published in Frontiers in Psychology on bicultural identity shows that people living between two cultures often experience simultaneous rejection from both sides, and that double rejection is one of the strongest predictors of identity crisis in young adults.

The problem with belonging nowhere is that the only exit that seems logical is: earn your place.

The trap of belonging by doing

Fernanda names it plainly:

“My identity was based on what I did.”

This sounds admirable. It sounds like an ambitious, productive, purposeful woman. And she was all of those things. But the problem is mathematical: if your identity depends on what you do, the day you stop doing, you stop being. And a day when you cannot do always arrives. Burnout, illness, a mistake, pregnancy, any of it. On that day you do not just lose your productivity. You lose yourself.

The movement of return

Fernanda came out in three movements, not one. They were not clean steps. They overlapped. But the order matters.

First, pause. Not run. Not search for the next community to belong to. Just stop. Fernanda decided to step away from both communities that were confusing her. She said something that costs a lot to say: “I prefer to be alone and feel alone than to be with people who are making me confused.”

Second, return to being. This is where her pilgrimage to Mecca played a role, though she clarifies it herself: “I’m not going to say that every time someone is in a crisis they should go on pilgrimage to Mecca. That’s not realistic.” What that trip gave her was a structured pause and an anchor that did not depend on anyone else’s opinion.

Third, reconcile the roots. Meeting her husband (Yemeni) helped her stop fighting with her Latina identity. He told her: “I love your culture. Teach me more.” Fernanda started to understand she did not have to pick between two worlds. They could coexist.

She closed the system herself, near the end of the conversation, like someone handing over the key:

“Reverse the order. Instead of starting from doing, start from being.”

That is the sentence that holds the system. It is not new. Others have said it in other ways. But Fernanda learned it by living through it twice before turning 24.

Three questions to start tomorrow

• Who are you when you do not do?

• Which community asks you for constant proof of belonging?

• If you paused everything you are doing today to fit in, what would be left?

These are not questions to answer fast. They are questions to answer alone.

What else we talked about

There are three moments in the conversation with Fernanda that did not fit in this article but are worth listening to in the audio: her work with Ssuubi in Uganda, her encounter with a Bedouin girl named Islam in the Wadi Rum desert, and how she learned not to accept online hate as a gift that isn’t hers.

Follow Fernanda

Personal Instagram: @fernanda.penaherrera

Ssuubi: @s.suubi

To go deeper

Henríquez D., Urzúa A., López-López W. (2021). “Acculturation Profiles and Mental Health Among Immigrants and Native-Born Adolescents.” Frontiers in Psychology. Study on bicultural identity and double rejection: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8565597

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Public lab studying sustainable systems across business, leadership, and life. Essays, experiments, field observations and case studies from a climate-tech founder (Dr. Luisa Javier) operating between LATAM and MENA. Aziul = Azul (the planet) + Luisa (backwards)

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About the author - Dr. Luisa Javier

Dr. Luisa Javier is a scientist and climate-tech entrepreneur across LATAM & MENA, focused on designing sustainable systems for business and society. She is the Founder and CEO of WAYAKIT Group and the author of Aziul Connections.

Aziul Connections is the public lab where I study how sustainable systems are built.

“I build sustainable living through WAYAKIT, and study the systems behind it through Aziul Connections.”

Thank you for reading or listening to this article, share it or leave a comment if you find this information useful!

Luisa

Connect with me

📩 luisa@aziulconnections.com

LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook · Snapchat · TikTok

• Catalina arrived in Riyadh with the professional pitch she had built in Bogota. Fifteen seconds in, she discovered it no longer worked

• Before Saudi Arabia, she had already lost another building: a nine-year creative agency built with her ex-husband

• The phrase that stayed with her from that loss: “I started building an empire on someone else’s foundation”

• The response was not to start over. It was to design a system: internationalization of the self, five layers that begin with the being

• Today she teaches that system. This conversation is what I learned when I gave her back the question she asked me three years ago

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👋 Hi, it’s Luisa Javier. Welcome to Aziul Connections ( 🌎🔬The Sustainable Systems Lab), where I study how sustainable systems are built for business, leadership, and life.

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🎧 Listen to the full interview with Catalina González Calle

Lee el artículo en Español

Catalina is the first woman I interview for this series. The three previous conversations were with men building startups: Esteban Canepa, Hassan Bash and Rodrigo Jiménez Sandoval. That case four is with a woman, and that the woman is Catalina, is not accidental. Three years ago, in a difficult moment of WAYAKIT, she was my coach. Aziul Connections began to take shape in those sessions, when she saw something in me that I could not yet see. This case study was born there.

Let me start with the scene she told me when I asked what happened the first time, she introduced herself professionally in Riyadh.

Who am I when the titles are taken away

Catalina arrived at a networking event with her usual pitch. Nice to meet you, I am proudly Colombian, my name is Catalina, I work in strategy. The person on the other side asked her two questions she had never heard before.

And where is Colombia? What does your name mean?

Fifteen seconds. That is how long a professional introduction lasts. And in fifteen seconds Catalina realized hers was built from supports that did not exist in that room. The contact network, the recognition of her name, the shared context of fifteen years working strategy for Latin American companies — none of those pieces traveled with her to Riyadh.

Underneath the house of cards that collapsed that night sat a question she had never asked herself.

Who am I when the titles are taken away.

This is not the question of someone who lost a job. It is the question of someone who understands, all at once, that her professional identity was held up by a building that was no longer there.

What is lost when you build on someone else’s foundation

The scene in Riyadh was not the first time Catalina lost a building. Before Saudi Arabia, in Bogota, she had already lost a much bigger one.

She told me that for nine years she built a creative agency with her then husband. When the relationship ended, the company did too. They did not close it. It kept his last name. Catalina gave it up for her peace. And in giving up the building, she lost the professional name she had built inside it.

I started building an empire on someone else’s foundation.

That sentence is not only about divorce. It is about any woman who built her career inside a borrowed identity. The company where you were the visible face, but the owner had a different name. The cofounder’s project where you carried operations. Someone else’s personal brand inside which your work was invisible.

The loss of professional identity in migration is a documented phenomenon in clinical psychology. What Catalina did differently was stop treating it as grief and start treating it as a design problem.

The system that answered the loss

What Catalina built afterward she calls something I had not heard in any coaching manual: internationalization of the self. It is not a metaphor. It is a five-layer system that begins with the being and ends with sustainable expansion.

Being. Dreaming. Doing in balance. Remaining. Transcending.

That is the order. It is not accidental.

When I asked her to explain the logic, she said:

Having clarity about our roots, our values, our history, where we come from. That is unique. Irreplaceable.

The system inverts the logic with which most women founders build their brand. Being before doing. Roots before expansion. And most counterintuitive of all: transcending is not the goal of the system; it is the consequence of the four previous layers well designed.

What Catalina understood when she lost the building in Bogota and understood again when they asked about Colombia in Riyadh, is that no external system holds if the human being carrying it is not designed first.

It is the same idea that holds up this lab, said by a different woman, in a different language, after a different kind of collapse.

The question that changed my life, and I gave it back to her three years later

Three years ago, Catalina asked me a question that changed me.

Why aren’t you building your personal brand?

I was inside WAYAKIT, fused with my own company, not understanding that my personal brand was a different system from the company I ran. Catalina named it before I could see it.

In this interview I gave her the question back.

I am the one who asks the questions.

That was her first reaction. Pause. Short laugh. Resistance. And then, the answer of the woman, not the coach: that she is building, for the first time in her life, her own personal brand. That she had always built brands for others and never for herself. That she is enjoying it, and that she still cannot believe she is doing it.

Three questions you can ask yourself tomorrow

You do not need to be in Riyadh to ask yourself these three. A notebook is enough.

1. Who am I when the titles are taken away?

2. What questions would I rather not be asked, and which ones do I already have structured?

3. What network, what recognition, what reference holds up my professional identity today, and what would happen if I lost it tomorrow?

The answer does not arrive fast. Sometimes it does not arrive in a week. But the question opens something that does not close on its own. And as Catalina said closing the conversation:

When we think about expanding, let us start from ourselves.

What else we covered in the interview

This conversation opened three themes that do not fit in a quick note and that I will develop separately:

• Latin America and the Gulf as opposite and complementary systems. How the scarcity of the desert built a different abundance from ours, and what each side has to learn from the other

• Latin femininity and Arab femininity as two models of power. Different codes, different results, crossed lessons

• The two profiles of coach the sophisticated client looks for: the grounded one and the ethereal one. Why one without the other is no longer enough at this moment of the market

Follow Catalina

Catalina González Calle writes at Catalina entre dos mundos, her Substack between Bogotá and Riyadh. You can also find her on LinkedIn and Instagram as @catalinaconsultant.

The full interview is available on video. There Catalina explains the five layers of the system with the detail this note cannot reach and opens the three themes we left for later.

For further reading

1. Fundación Clínica de la Familia (2026), “Migrar y perder referencias: identidad, trabajo y nostalgia en la experiencia migrante,” clinical blog, Madrid.

Subscribe to Aziul Connections (The Sustainable Systems Lab)

Public lab studying sustainable systems across business, leadership, and life. Essays, experiments, field observations and case studies from a climate-tech founder (Dr. Luisa Javier) operating between LATAM and MENA. Aziul = Azul (the planet) + Luisa (backwards)

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About the author - Dr. Luisa Javier

Dr. Luisa Javier is a scientist and climate-tech entrepreneur across LATAM & MENA, focused on designing sustainable systems for business and society. She is the Founder and CEO of WAYAKIT Group and the author of Aziul Connections.

Aziul Connections is the public lab where I study how sustainable systems are built.

“I build sustainable living through WAYAKIT, and study the systems behind it through Aziul Connections.”

Thank you for reading or listening to this article, share it or leave a comment if you find this information useful!

Luisa

Connect with me

📩 luisa@aziulconnections.com

LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook · Snapchat · TikTok

• Polymeron turns Saudi date waste into pellets of biodegradable plastic. The original idea was to make plastics with fungi. It didn’t work.

• Rodrigo chose not to capitalize Polymeron through venture capital when he started, and today he approaches investors from a different position.

• His lowest moment was not technical or financial. It was a conflict with a cofounder during his PhD.

• The first spoon made from date waste took eight years to come out. The system that made it possible was not in the lab.

• When I asked him what system he would pass on to the next generation, Rodrigo answered in three words: a system of people.

  ---

👋 Hi, it’s Luisa Javier. Welcome to Aziul Connections (🌎🔬 The Sustainable Systems Lab), where I study how sustainable systems are built for business, leadership, and life.

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🎧 Listen to the full interview with Rodrigo Jiménez

Lee el caso de estudio en Español

Why Rodrigo is case study 003

Rodrigo Jiménez Sandoval is a biologist from UNAM in Mexico City. He arrived at KAUST in 2012 for a master’s in environmental science and engineering, returned to Mexico for four years, and came back in 2018 for the PhD. That second time around, he started Polymeron, the company he cofounded with Martín Ibarra to convert Saudi date waste into pellets of biodegradable plastic.

In 2019 the world produced 460 million tonnes of plastic, and only 6% came from recycled sources.

Polymeron is not the solution. It is a case study of how a small piece of the solution gets built over eight years without collapsing.

It started as a side project in my life

“As an idea, Polymeron came up at the end of 2018. It started as a side project in my life, and then we started winning competitions. There was a moment when I was completely wrapped up in the company.”

The first version of Polymeron was not date-based. It was fungal. Rodrigo and his team iterated, saw that it would not scale, and pivoted to date waste. Saudi Arabia is the world’s second largest date producer. The raw material was literally on the street.

What stands out is not the pivot. It is the pace. A full decade between the original idea and the first pellets sold. Most founders building deep tech collapse in year three because the initial round runs out before the science is ready.

If we had started with venture capital, we would have no room to attract investors today

This decision is the backbone of the Polymeron system.

“If we had capitalized through venture capital from the start, we would not have much room to attract investors at this stage.”

The capital sequence was specific and deliberate. First, the KAUST TAQADAM accelerator, which covered the company registration and the first products. Then an international competition by Tanmiah, Saudi Arabia’s second largest poultry producer, which spent ten million riyals a year disposing of chicken waste and wanted to monetize it instead. Polymeron won. Tanmiah became a business partner. After that came funding from the National Technology Development Program. Three non-dilutive sources. Zero equity given up.

Only now, with a finished product and first sales on the table, is Polymeron opening the door to venture capital. They walk in with leverage, not with a plea.

“It’s not just spending time and money. It’s energy. It’s mental health.”

The cost of the slow model is not just patience. It is the human wear of a decade where a cofounder walks out over disagreements, where the PhD and the company compete for the same twenty-four hours, and where the question “is this still worth it?” shows up more than once.

Wow, I created this

I asked Rodrigo what was the moment when he knew the system was working. He didn’t talk about a closed round or a patent. He talked about a spoon.

“When we had our first spoons made from date plastic, I felt something. I don’t know how to explain it, but it was like, wow, I created this. I made this. I want to keep going.”

This happened in the middle of the hardest stretch of his PhD, right after the cofounder conflict that almost made him quit everything. The spoon was not a trophy. It was relief. It was the first physical proof that eight years of holding on had produced something that fit in his hand.

The systems that hold for a decade are not sustained by motivation. They run on small material proofs, spread out over time, that tell the founder the path is going somewhere.

A system of people

At the end of the interview I asked the question I ask every guest: if you could pass on a single sustainable system to the next generation, which one would it be?

Rodrigo did not talk about technology.

“Having a system of people who help you push forward. We always need someone telling us we’re doing well. And sometimes you need a break. Take a weekend off and you’ll see things look different.”

Then, without being asked, he added the harder part:

“There has to be a balance. If you surround yourself with people who tell you all the time that you’re doing great, you go blind. But if you surround yourself with people who are too negative, you catch their energy.”

I shared with him something I heard at a Tony Robbins event two years ago. A makeup entrepreneur was talking about the microphone: who you turn the volume up for and who you don’t. Her rule was simple. You turn up the volume for whoever already did what you’re trying to do. Whoever has the case, the numbers, the scar. You turn it down for the rest, not because they don’t matter as people, but because opinion on paper and opinion with a scar are different languages.

Rodrigo confirmed the analogy in his own words. The most critical system Polymeron built was not chemical. It was an architecture of who gets a microphone and who does not.

What we also talked about in the interview

• How growing up in Mexico City gave Rodrigo the resilience to build in Arabia. A city that builds character, that teaches you to ask for things.

• What Arabia gave him that Mexico had not: the habit of getting to know the person before the deal. Endless tea and coffee before talking about numbers.

• The most concrete cultural difference he learned. The day of the KAUST orientation in 2012 when he extended his hand to a Saudi student, and she, embarrassed, explained that it wasn’t the custom.

• His next steps: consolidate Saudi Arabia, expand across the Gulf, and eventually take the model to Mexico with avocado waste and to Brazil with a local palm whose name he couldn’t recall during the interview.

The full audio is above.

What you can do tomorrow

Three questions to check your own system, not Rodrigo’s:

• What non-dilutive grant, competition, or fund exists in your industry that you’ve been postponing to apply for because “this doesn’t apply to us”?

• Who are you turning up the microphone for who has not gone through what you’re building?

• What’s the first “spoon” you need to see come out to know the system you’re building is actually working, and how far are you from holding it in your hand?

This is the third case study in the Aziul Connections series. The first was Esteban Sánchez-Canepa, CTO of Sadeem Technology and KAUST alumnus, on what really sustains a founder when the external system collapses. The second was Hassan Bash, a Saudi-American operations consultant, on the diagnostic question he uses with every founder before taking them on as a client. The next one comes soon.

Follow Rodrigo and Polymeron

• Rodrigo Jiménez Sandoval on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/rodrigo-jimenez-sandoval-

• Polymeron on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/polymeronksa

• Polymeron website: polymeron.com

  ---

Subscribe to Aziul Connections (The Sustainable Systems Lab)

Public lab studying sustainable systems across business, leadership, and life. Essays, experiments, field observations and case studies from a climate-tech founder (Dr. Luisa Javier) operating between LATAM and MENA. Aziul = Azul (the planet) + Luisa (backwards)

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About the author - Dr. Luisa Javier

Dr. Luisa Javier is a scientist and climate-tech entrepreneur across LATAM & MENA, focused on designing sustainable systems for business and society. She is the Founder and CEO of WAYAKIT Group and the author of Aziul Connections.

Aziul Connections is the public lab where I study how sustainable systems are built.

“I build sustainable living through WAYAKIT, and study the systems behind it through Aziul Connections.”

Thank you for reading or listening to this article, share it or leave a comment if you find this information useful!

Luisa

Connect with me

📩 luisa@aziulconnections.com

LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook · Snapchat · TikTok

Further reading:

1. OECD (2022), “Plastic pollution is growing relentlessly as waste management and recycling fall short,” OECD Newsroom.

2. KAUST (2025), “Turning date waste into ‘green’ plastic: KAUST startup Polymeron champions circular economy,” KAUST News.

3. AGBI (2025), “The Saudi quest to turn campus ideas into startup success,” Arab Gulf Business Insight.

• Most companies don’t have a revenue problem, they have a silent dependency problem

• Where do decisions slow down when you’re not in the room? That’s Hassan’s diagnostic question

• AI without clarity or alignment doesn’t solve dependency, it just scales it faster

• The weekly operating rhythm is the 20-minute tool that keeps the system alive

• Without weekly pause, no investment in AI or automation actually moves your business

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  👋 Hi, it’s Luisa Javier. Welcome to Aziul Connections ( 🌎🔬The Sustainable Systems Lab), where I study how sustainable systems are built for business, leadership, and life.

  Subscribe now

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🎧 Listen to the full interview with Hassan Bash

Lee el artículo en Español

Why Hassan is case study 002

Hassan Bash is a Saudi-American founder. Born in Saudi Arabia, raised between two cultures, today he works from Los Angeles with eight-figure service companies to turn more of their revenue into profit. He doesn’t call himself a consultant. He works as a partner inside the business until the business can run without needing the founder.

I chose him as case study 002 because the conversation we had changed how I see my own operational system. Two weeks ago I wrote about the day I became the system that was failing in my own business. Hassan has a question that would have saved me months of work. This is for you if you haven’t gotten to that point yet, and for me too.

The problem almost nobody names correctly

According to CB Insights, 38% of startups fail by running out of cash or failing to raise capital. But what very few recognize is the problem underneath: the founder became the only reason the business moves.

It’s Tuesday. You’ve been putting out fires for three hours. Approving things you shouldn’t be approving. Making decisions your team could make if they knew they could. And by end of day, the business hasn’t moved forward. It just didn’t fall. That’s not scale. That’s survival.

Hassan calls this by its real name:

“Most companies don’t have a revenue problem, they have a dependency problem. With AI, it’s even more visible. Because you can’t deploy AI into a business that doesn’t have enough clarity or alignment, and if you just add AI for the sake of adding AI, it just scales the chaos.”

The question nobody asks their own business

Last week I caught myself putting out fires without even knowing where we were headed. Hassan is right. Without pause, there’s no direction.

When I asked him what’s the first question he asks a founder to identify that bottleneck, his answer was surgical:

“Where do decisions slow down when you’re not in the room? That expands and unfolds other conversations. What I’m really, really looking for is where the team is waiting. Where are things getting stuck? And where the founder is the default.”

The question doesn’t diagnose broken processes. It diagnoses something more uncomfortable: where you’ve become the default without realizing it.

“Where do decisions slow down when you’re not in the room?”

What Hassan leaves as a portable system

I asked him one last question before closing the interview. The one I ask everyone: if you could pass forward just one system to the audience, something that would help them navigate all the other aspects of business and life, what would it be?

His answer was disarmingly simple:

“The one system to pass forward is weekly operating rhythm. Just 20 minutes to an hour a week. For you to set down as a leader and reflect for 20 to 60 minutes a week. About what worked, what didn’t, and what needs to happen the following week.”

Twenty minutes. Three questions. Once a week. That’s it. And then he closed with the line that stayed with me:

“Without that rhythm weekly, you can have all the AI tools in the world, and nothing will actually move. Without knowing what are the patterns?”

What we also talked about in our interview

• The difference between coaching and consulting, and why he refuses to call himself a consultant even though he works solving problems

• How trust operates in Saudi Arabia, where family enters before ROI, and how that connects to how we do business in Latin America

• Why pressure, well applied, is what creates the genius inside a team

The full audio is above.

What you can do tomorrow

Three concrete actions, all from Hassan, all to start on Monday.

One. Ask yourself the diagnostic question this week. Where do decisions slow down when you’re not in the room? Write the answer down. Don’t think it, write it.

Two. Identify one single thing where your team is waiting on you today without you knowing. Remove it. This week.

Three. Install the weekly operating rhythm. Twenty minutes, once a week, three questions. What worked. What didn’t. What has to happen next week.

Hassan shared his complete weekly reflection process — the Bash Weekly Sprint with Aziul Connections readers. It’s what he uses with his clients. You can do it with pen and paper.

Follow Hassan

• Web: hassanbash.com

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hassanbash

• Podcast: The Hassan Bash Show (Apple Podcasts, Spotify)

Subscribe to Aziul Connections (The Sustainable Systems Lab)

Public lab studying sustainable systems across business, leadership, and life. Essays, experiments, field observations and case studies from a climate-tech founder (Dr. Luisa Javier) operating between LATAM and MENA. Aziul = Azul (the planet) + Luisa (backwards)

Subscribe now

About the author - Dr. Luisa Javier

Dr. Luisa Javier is a scientist and climate-tech entrepreneur across LATAM & MENA, focused on designing sustainable systems for business and society. She is the Founder and CEO of WAYAKIT Group and the author of Aziul Connections.

Aziul Connections is the public lab where I study how sustainable systems are built.

“I build sustainable living through WAYAKIT, and study the systems behind it through Aziul Connections.”

Thank you for reading or listening to this article, let’s keep building our Continuity floor, one system at a time!

Luisa

Connect with me

📩 luisa@aziulconnections.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luisajavier/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/luisa.emi

Snapchat: https://www.snapchat.com/@luisaemijavier

For further reading:

1. CB Insights (2024), “The Top 12 Reasons Startups Fail,” CB Insights Research.

2. Bash, H. (2026), “Bash Weekly Sprint: Weekly Operating Rhythm for Founders,” Bash Revenue.

3. Javier, L. (2026), “Experiment 002: When you are the system that fails,” Aziul Connections.

• Most founders report mental health challenges.

• Esteban Canepa, founder of Sadeem Technology, articulated two systems that operate on different layers.

• Purpose pushes you in the long term, but it does not sustain you on the days when purpose is not enough.

• Life is a jazz concert. Ritual is the structure. Bad days are the bars where you improvise.

• Building a company between Latin America and the Middle East requires a level of resilience few people understand.

  ---

  👋 Hi, it’s Luisa Javier. Welcome to Aziul Connections ( 🌎🔬The Sustainable Systems Lab), where I study how sustainable systems are built for business, leadership, and life.

  Subscribe now

🎧 Listen the full interview in Spanish here

Lee el artículo en Español

Why Esteban is the first case study

A few weeks ago, I interviewed Esteban Canepa, founder of Sadeem Technology, a flood prevention sensor company operating from Saudi Arabia across four countries.

I chose him as the first case study for Aziul Conexiones for a specific reason. We both arrived at KAUST in the same year, 2009. Together, we did something that, at the time, almost no one could even locate on a map: we built an intersection between Latin America and the Middle East. We chose to build in a country very few people in our region could understand.

Seventeen years later, we are both still here. Still building.

And that is what I wanted to study first: what life systems sustain a founder when the path looks nothing like anything you have ever seen before.

At one point in the conversation, Esteban paused and asked himself a question:

What do you do if you have several bad days in a row?

At that moment, I did not yet know that in a study published in Small Business Economics, 72% of founders report experiencing mental health challenges.

Esteban did not say that statistic. But the answer he gave explains why he is still standing ten years after founding Sadeem.

The system for good days is not the problem

Most founders are clear on their purpose. They know why they started. They have a long term drive that pushes them through the marathon.

The problem is that drive is designed to finish the marathon. Not to carry you through the kilometers where your body collapses.

Esteban said it like this, without me even asking:

I would describe it as a long term system, your drives. That is what pushes you to finish that 40 kilometer marathon. But on the other hand, you have your daily mitigation system, a smaller system.

Two systems. Not one. That distinction stopped me.

The first system is the why. The deep reason. What makes you a founder for life, as he put it.

The second system is something else entirely: a small ritual repeated every day, regardless of how you feel.

The drive pushes you through the marathon. The ritual sustains you in the kilometers where your body collapses.

Most founders I know only have the first one.

What Esteban does at 6 in the morning

I asked him what his mitigation ritual was. I expected something elaborate.

He said: I wake up early and I exercise.

That was it.

But then he added the line that changed how I think about morning routines:

It helps me feel empowered on the days I exercise.

Empowered. Not motivated. Not optimized. Empowered to face the day.

In my own experimentation, documented in this lab, I have seen the same thing. The continuity of a ritual is not discipline. It is architecture.

A morning routine does not exist for the days you feel like it. It exists for the days you do not feel like it and still show up.

The ritual is not for the good days. The ritual exists to give continuity to the mission on the bad days.

That is its function. To mitigate.

To prevent one bad day from becoming three.

Three from becoming a week.

A week from costing you your company.

Life as a jazz concert

Toward the end of the interview, I asked him a question I ask every founder who comes through here: if you could pass on one life system to the next generation, what would it be?

Esteban answered:

I think life is lived like a jazz concert. Songs have a structure, but the musician can improvise if they feel it. But that musician always returns to the structure.

Structure with improvisation.

The ritual is the structure. The bad days are the bars where you improvise. But you always return.

The reason most founders never build the second system is that admitting bad days will come feels like admitting the external system is not always enough. And in an industry that rewards the appearance of control, that is uncomfortable.

But jazz gives us the answer. The structure is not there to prevent bad days. It is there so you have somewhere to return to afterward.

What else we covered in the interview

The conversation with Esteban covered much more than what fits in this article. If you listen to the full version, you will find:

• The real distance between publishing a scientific paper and having your technology running in the field at 3 in the morning.

• Why he shifted from academia to entrepreneurship in a single week in 2016.

• What he assumed for years in the lab that reality later proved wrong.

• How he has sold technology in Middle Eastern and Latin American markets, and what fundamentally changes between them.

• And why he decided to found Fundación Amal alongside his company.

The full audio is above.

What you can do tomorrow

Three questions, directly from the conversation with Esteban:

• First: what is your long term drive? Most people can answer this. If you cannot yet, that is another article, another layer.

• Second: what is your daily mitigation ritual? This is where most people go quiet. If your answer is “I do not have one,” you already have your first data point.

• Third: what would happen if your ritual disappeared for three days? This one tells you the most. If the answer is “nothing, I will come back when I can,” you have a routine, not a system. If the answer is “everything else collapses,” then you have the architecture but not yet the system.

Esteban does not have a more sophisticated system than you. He has a smaller one. And a more consistent one.

That was the lesson.

What is your ritual for bad days? Share it in the comments. I want to see what other founders are building in their second system.

Next week, another founder. Another layer of the same system.

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Public lab studying sustainable systems across business, leadership, and life. Essays, experiments, field observations and case studies from a climate-tech founder (Dr. Luisa Javier) operating between LATAM and MENA. Aziul = Azul (the planet) + Luisa (backwards)

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About the author - Dr. Luisa Javier

Dr. Luisa Javier is a scientist and climate-tech entrepreneur across LATAM & MENA, focused on designing sustainable systems for business and society. She is the Founder and CEO of WAYAKIT Group and the author of Aziul Connections.

Aziul Connections is the public lab where I study how sustainable systems are built.

“I build sustainable living through WAYAKIT, and study the systems behind it through Aziul Connections.”

Thank you for reading or listening to this article, share it or leave a comment if you find this information useful!

Luisa

Connect with me

📩 luisa@aziulconnections.com

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Follow Esteban and Sadeem

Esteban Canepa regularly shares insights on entrepreneurship, film, and life between Latin America and the Middle East.

Instagram: @escanepa

LinkedIn: Esteban S. Canepa

Sadeem Technology

Fundación Amal — a social initiative in Mexico focused on children, entrepreneurship, and education

For further reading:

*Freeman, M. A., Staudenmaier, P. J., Zisser, M. R., & Andresen, L. A. (2019). The prevalence and co-occurrence of psychiatric conditions among entrepreneurs and their families. Small Business Economics, 53(2), 323–342. DOI: 10.1007/s11187-018-0059-8*

*Hobson, N. M., Schroeder, J., Risen, J. L., Xygalatas, D., & Inzlicht, M. (2018). The psychology of rituals: An integrative review and process-based framework. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22(3), 260–284. DOI: 10.1177/1088868317734944*

*Wood, W. (2017). Habit in personality and social psychology. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 21(4), 389–403. DOI: 10.1177/1088868317720362*

*Murnieks, C. Y., Arthurs, J. D., Cardon, M. S., Farah, N., Stornelli, J., & Haynie, J. M. (2020). Close your eyes or open your mind: Effects of sleep and mindfulness exercises on entrepreneurs’ exhaustion. Journal of Business Venturing, 35(2), 105918. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2018.12.004*