Angeles Pérez

I started leading at ten. The scout troop took me in early — younger than the official minimum — and within months I was running a patrol of kids three to five years older than me. Nobody complained because the relational and organizational pieces had always come naturally. That pattern repeated for years: classrooms, soccer teams, handball teams, embassy projects, offices.

Childhood happened across five cities: Encarnación, Asunción, Buenos Aires, Posadas, San Lorenzo — then later Wichita, Kansas. Two trips out of the region completed the map: Abu Dhabi and Spain. I was traveling alone between cities by age ten and moved out at fifteen to start working. Family was complicated; that's the most I'll say in public. The short version is that being new in a place and working hard isn't new to me. It's the baseline.

At thirteen I was called up to the national handball team. At fifteen, again. I couldn't go either time, and that's when I traded sports for studies and service. I became class president, scout leader, captain of every team I joined, lead organizer of every initiative. Two of those steps eventually landed me inside large multinationals — Grant Thornton in Paraguay and the Kansas Small Business Development Center in the U.S. — where I learned what it means to deliver under enterprise-grade standards.

My biggest inspiration is my mother. She reinvented herself on another continent in her late thirties and never looked back. Watching her do that taught me there's no expiration date on starting over.

Today I co-found Metrika, host Mente Maestra, ship products and write essays. Marketing degree from Universidad Americana (5.0/5.0, twice Valedictorian), a year at Wichita State (3.96/4.0) cut short by a knee injury that brought me home. I work where strategy, AI and editorial thinking meet — and my next curve is Responsible AI governance.