Alvaro Villalba

Madrid, Spain

Hi there, I'm Alvaro.

I'm an engineer, designer, entrepreneur.

I think a lot about distribution of information, technology-driven interactions, the power of data, and making an impact in the world.

I currently work as the CEO of Clous, where we build AI systems to help talent teams do more for their people.

I studied aerospace engineering at UPM and I'm a self-taught programmer.

Feel free to reach out.

Some things about me

Grew up in Cartagena, Spain
Built my first business at 14 (photoshoping fake IDs to go to night clubs)
Played soccer from ages 5 to 18
Fell in love with software products; it's been my real hometown ever since
Wear two hats daily: Engineering & Sales (architecture by morning, enterprise demos by afternoon).
Lived 7 years in Madrid for college (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)

Speed compounds. A week is 2 % of a year; ship, measure, iterate.
Small teams outperform headcount. Two aligned founders with leverage beat ten siloed engineers with meetings.
Code is a liability; clarity is the asset. The less you need to read tomorrow, the faster you can climb.
Energy > ideas. Ideas without wattage die in Notion docs; hustle turns "maybe" into ARR.
Knowledge compounds. I'd rather be world-class at many things than competent at one.
Learning should be organic. Those who learn from everything through life learn x10 more than those who force themselves to learn.
Dopamine from improvement beats dopamine from applause. Daily commits > conference keynote.
The efficient-market hypothesis is mostly cover for complacency. Find the weird, overlooked edges and build there.
You can refactor culture, too. Remove fear of failure and velocity doubles.
Physics sets the hard limits; everything else is an API design problem.