Partner & COO
San Francisco, California
About Esteban
Esteban is a Steward of Quorum1 and is the acting COO for the org. Esteban has been involved both in leading consulting projects for Quorum1’s clients, as well as developing and expanding our philosophy, understanding and technical approach to a new way to operate a business. Over the years he has been instrumental in our thought work, business operations and growth.
Esteban has been involved in providing technical and strategic leadership on foundational Quroum1 projects including:
- Rev Tokens - A novel security acting as our investment vehicle.
- The Quorum Financial Model - Our holonic financial design.
- The Formal Governance Model - Our evolving & emergent management process.
- The Quorum1 Network - Our skills-focused professional network layer.
- The Workstream - Our stigmergic coordination layer.
- The Quorum1 App Suite - Our custom app stack.
Additional Links
[ LinkedIn Profile ]
Professional Background
Esteban is a technical leader with a passion for making systems, business processes and operations more human-centric. Over the last 20+ years he has worked in the public, private and non-profit sectors in a variety of technical roles from engineering infrastructure to technical product management to IT & business systems and everything in-between.
His experience in multiple early-stage startups, founding projects and working for organizations large and small has given him a broad perspective on the challenges that we all face as entrepreneurs, businesses, investors and employees.
While Esteban has spent an entire career in tech, he is fond of describing himself as a “fake tech guy.” While starting school in computer science, he quickly pivoted and completed a BS in Religious Studies with a minor in Business Administration from The University Of Oregon. His multidisciplinary background and his career of learning and adapting to emerging technologies in a variety of industries gives him a unique and effective approach problem solving and a passion for improving how we live and work.
Professional Focus Areas
Zero Trust Networks
Esteban has focused on the principles of zero trust networks and applying them to not just networks, but to all aspects of Identity, business systems and processes, user workflows and product design since 2016. He has applied these principles to digital networks, engineering platforms, org design, workflows/user processes and security & compliance.
Remote-first & Emergent Org Design
Esteban is an expert in architecting remote-first internal business processes and strategies to operate decentralized and/or multi-regional organizations in ways that are secure, compliant and highly productive.
This includes HR, Finance, IT, Sales, Product, Engineering and Business operations work for teams of varying size and complexity.
Startups and Learning
Esteban has worked with a number of early stage startups as well as incubating a few ultimately unsuccessful projects of his own. These all have generated a lot of learning and growth over the years.
- InstantStyling: “A Stylist in your pocket.” This was a project he founded in 2010 with two partners that generated a lot of learning. We had focused the product on connecting people to people, but ran into the human scaling problem very early. There was an obvious need for some kind of curated experience in the time before offerings like Stitch Fix and Rent the Runway, but we were ultimately unable to land on the right mix of human interaction vs unit sales and weren’t interested or prepared to solve the logistics challenges of a physical supply chain.
- Colima Coffee Co: This was a project he started in 2013 to build a coffee collective to connect smaller coffee producers directly to specialty roasters. By simplifying the supply chain we aimed to connect consumers more closely with farmers and push value back up to increase the earning power of workers and famers. As a part of this effort we also developed a test farm to develop share and socialize emerging techniques to increase the quality of coffee farms were able to produce. The initial farm is still working and producing coffee in Colima, Mexico, but he stepped away from the project in 2016.
These two experiences were foundational and he learned a lot about the earliest stages of the entrepreneurial journey as well as how to think about professional networks and collective ways of doing business which inform a lot of what Esteban brings to Quroum1 today.
Some additional early-stage companies Esteban has worked with over the years:
- Zimride (Lyft) - Ridesharing platform.
- Virta Health - Digital health platform reversing Type 2 Diabetes.
- Aurora Solar - Successful SaaS unicorn in the solar space.