I made my first money online when I was around 15.

It wasn't a startup.

I didn't have employees.

There wasn't a pitch deck or some big plan to become an entrepreneur.

I was a teenager in Argentina obsessed with financial markets.

I started using a platform called TradeHero. It was basically a stock-market simulator. You were given virtual capital and could build a portfolio without risking actual money.

I became completely obsessed with it.

I was reading about markets, teaching myself technical analysis, following stocks and trying to understand why prices moved.

I started with $1,000 in virtual capital.

Over the next few years, I grew that to roughly $500,000 on the platform.

I ended up ranking quite high globally, built a few thousand followers and eventually had around 100 people paying to follow my trading signals.

I was making something like $180 a month.

Today that number doesn't sound particularly impressive.

At 15, in Argentina, earning dollars from something I was doing from my bedroom?

It felt enormous.

More importantly, for the first time I had experienced something addictive:

I could build something myself and people would pay for it.

Then TradeHero disappeared.

Pretty much overnight, the platform I had built everything on was gone.

Followers.

Subscribers.

Distribution.

The little business.

Gone with it.

I remember being angry, but I also remember very quickly thinking:

Okay. What now?

So I moved.

I started rebuilding what I could on eToro.

At the time I definitely wasn't sitting there thinking about “platform risk” or “owned distribution.”

I was 15.

I just knew the thing I had built on didn't exist anymore.

But looking back, it probably gave me one of my earliest lessons about building businesses.

This is something we forget constantly on the internet.

10,000 LinkedIn followers feels like an audience.

50,000 X followers feels like an audience.

A successful Amazon store feels like a business.

A YouTube channel feels like a media company.

An Upwork profile with hundreds of reviews feels like a career.

And all of those things can be incredibly valuable.

But there's a difference between benefiting from a platform and controlling the platform.

Algorithms change.

Terms change.

Fees change.

Accounts get suspended.

Platforms get acquired.

Products shut down.

Entire distribution channels disappear.

I learned a very primitive version of that lesson at 15.

The thing that surprised me later was realizing that not everything disappeared with TradeHero.

I still knew how to analyze markets.

I still understood why people had followed me.

I still knew how to explain what I was doing.

I still knew how to attract attention around something I cared about.

And, most importantly, I'd already learned that strangers on the internet could become customers.

Those things moved with me.

I've built and worked inside much bigger companies since then.

Today I work in hiring and recruitment instead of sitting in my bedroom looking at stock charts.

But the same principle keeps coming back.

The valuable thing is rarely the software you're currently using.

It's the capability underneath it.

If LinkedIn disappeared tomorrow, could you still reach your customers?

If your CRM disappeared, would the relationships still exist?

If the AI tool you built your entire workflow around doubled its price, could you operate?

If Google stopped sending you traffic, would anyone know your brand?

I don't think the answer is to avoid platforms.

That would be stupid.

Platforms give you leverage.

I want to use LinkedIn.

I want to use X.

I'm keeping Substack.

We're testing all kinds of AI products.

But I've become much more interested in the question:

What are we building underneath them?

An audience you have an actual relationship with.

A brand people search for directly.

An email list.

Customer relationships.

Knowledge.

Processes.

A reputation.

A team.

Things that survive when the software changes.

I've spent a lot of time posting on LinkedIn and X.

I'll continue doing that.

But I want CEO to CEO to become somewhere I can go deeper.

Not another feed I'm trying to game.

A place where I can document what I'm seeing in hiring, HR tech, AI and building companies, test some of the products everyone is suddenly selling us, and probably change my mind about some of them along the way.

And I'd rather gradually build that somewhere I have more control over.

Maybe that instinct goes all the way back to TradeHero.

I don't know.

But losing that first little business taught me something useful very early:

Platforms are temporary.

The ability to build usually isn't.

And if the platform disappears?

Build again.

CEO to CEO

I write about hiring, AI, HR technology and what I'm learning from actually building companies.

If you're building something too, reply and tell me: what part of your business would be most painful if the platform underneath it disappeared tomorrow?