Octavio Urzua
Founder & CEO, Osoji Robotics · Santiago, Chile
In 2017, Octavio founded Osoji — a Latin American home-robotics company built on the Kaizen philosophy, and backed by technology partners in Tokyo. In 8 years, his 20-person team — spanning Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, the US, and France — has sold 250,000+ home robots across Latin America and became a #1 bestseller on Amazon Mexico in just six months. Mexico now contributes 40% of total sales.
In 2022, Osoji became the first Chilean startup in history to list on the Santiago Stock Exchange via the ScaleX venture platform — opening a new public-market path for early-stage Latin American companies.
In 2025, facing US tariff uncertainty, Octavio made a counter-intuitive call: he paused Osoji's US entry and reinvested that energy into Latin America. In 2026, Osoji is entering six new LatAm markets, with a portfolio now spanning 12 categories — from vacuums and cooking robots to air fryers, hair dryers, and smart health rings.
Before Osoji, Octavio grew sales at Accura Systems from $4M to $20M in three years.
His core belief: "People don't buy robots. They buy time."
Introduction: The Osoji Journey & "Selling Time"
Monica
Good evening, everybody, and welcome to today's live conversation. Our guest is from a place most Chinese founders aren't very familiar with — Santiago, Chile. I specifically wanted you to meet him because his 2026 story is the single most relevant Latin American case I've come across this year. In eight years, his team of roughly 20 people has sold more than 250,000 robots across Latin America.
They reached the number-one bestseller spot on Amazon Mexico in just six months, and his company was the first startup in Chile's history to list on the Santiago Stock Exchange. The company is called Osoji. In Japanese it means "big clean," and the logo is a panda. We all love pandas. But what makes this conversation urgent in 2026 is what he did last year: he paused Osoji's entry into the United States because of tariff-war uncertainty, and redirected that energy into opening six new Latin American markets this year. For Chinese founders living through the same tariff reality, that single decision is worth an entire 60 minutes of today's session. There's one line of his I want to start with. He wrote it on LinkedIn in October 2025, on Osoji's 8-year anniversary: "People don't buy robots, they buy time." That line stuck with me. So, Octavio, welcome to the show — please say hello to our audience.
Octavio
For sure. Hello, Monica. I'm glad to share whatever I've been learning on this journey over the last eight years with your audience. We need a new kind of collaboration now, especially when the world is more bipolar than ever. So let's see what kind of questions you bring to the table, and what your audience wants to get into. I'd love to engage.
Chile as the Gateway to Latin America
Monica
Okay, a few map-level questions first. You're in China right now, in Guangzhou, correct? Tell us about your plan — why are you here?
Octavio
I've been to China ten times over the last fifteen years, and the speed of innovation here is still accelerating tremendously. I need to come to China at least twice a year now. The best months to travel to China are April and October — the weather is pleasant, and it coincides with the Canton Fair. But beyond the Canton Fair, there are plenty of other interesting companies to observe, engage with, and learn from. That's why I come so often.
Monica
Chinese viewers mostly associate Chile with cherries, salmon, and red wine. If you had to describe Chile's business and investment environment today in three words, how would you do it?
Octavio
Chile is much more than cherries, salmon, or red wine. Chile is a door, a window of opportunity, into the Latin American market. We receive influence from Europe, from the United States, and from Asia, so it's the best country to test the regional market. It's like a laboratory. If you get it right in Chile, you can expand across Latin America. We are politically and economically stable. Chile is the entry door to Latin America.
The Kaizen Philosophy: Small Steps to Breakthroughs
Monica
That's a very useful frame — a first stop for Chinese founders entering Latin America. I also notice your name is written in Japanese. Oku-tabio — did I pronounce it right?
Octavio
My name in Italian is Octavio, and my last name is Urzua. The first time I went to Japan, a friend told me that if I wanted to establish a company there, I should have a Japanese name. He wrote it for me in Japanese style, and that became my Japanese name.
Monica
Do you actually speak Japanese?
Octavio
I don't speak Japanese, because it's too complex. But I'm drawn to many Japanese concepts and words — ikigai, kaizen, kokoro. I know maybe 500 Japanese words and a handful of sentences, which is enough to at least understand the culture and the philosophy. When I was a little kid, my father put me in judo classes in Chile. Judo was my first connection with Japan. Then I learned about ikigai when I was around ten or twelve, and about kaizen around fifteen. I fell in love with all of it. These aren't just concepts — they're philosophies of life for me. Japan has this gift of compressing a powerful philosophy into a single word, and I love that idea. I've been collecting these philosophies in a notebook for a long time. One of the most beautiful Japanese sentences for me is "Kokoro to karada no souji" — kokoro (heart), karada (body), souji (cleaning). Japanese people say this sentence is reserved for those who want to pursue happiness in life: you need a clean mind and a clean heart in order to serve others, and then you will be happy all the time.
Monica
Very beautiful. You mentioned kaizen. Kaizen means simple, efficient, functional — and that's what shapes how Osoji designs its products. Can you give us a concrete example where kaizen led you to a decision that a typical Silicon Valley hardware company would have made the opposite way?
Octavio
Sure. Silicon Valley is always thinking about the big breakthrough — a new concept, a new business model that can 10x your company in a short time. The Japanese do exactly the opposite. Kaizen is small improvements, every single day. Imagine you optimize 1% every day — at the end of the year you will have roughly 365% of improvement, or about 3x, one step at a time. One step is way more manageable. And in the process of daily optimization — daily kaizen — you tend to arrive at a breakthrough idea organically. I believe kaizen is the way to arrive at the breakthrough, not to focus on the breakthrough from day one, because that is almost impossible.
From Software to Hardware: Finding the First Customer
Monica
In Chinese we call it 循序渐进 (xún xù jiàn jìn) — make a little improvement each day, and you'll see real progress over the year. Before Osoji, you were at Accura Systems, and you grew sales from four million to twenty million dollars. Moving from B2B software to putting physical appliances into 250,000 homes across Latin America is a huge jump. What was the specific moment you decided to make this move?
Octavio
Accura was my only job as an employee — the one and only time I've ever been an employee. After graduating as an engineer in Chile, I went to the United States and was hired by Accura After six years, I decided it was now or never to become an entrepreneur. I had made several software improvements for them, and I wanted to test whether I could build software for myself. I had enough savings to try for a couple of years. E-commerce was the big emerging trend at the time, so I decided to build an e-commerce business and add software and integrations to it. That was my decision: do it now while I still had the appetite, or never.
Monica
Looking back, do you feel lucky about that decision?
Octavio
Now I do. I was thirty at the time, which I believe was the right moment to test it. If it didn't work after one or two years, I still had savings and could always go back to being an employee. I also had some corporate software experience. Thirty was the perfect timing — at twenty-five you're perhaps too young, at forty you have too many responsibilities and family commitments.
Monica
One of your lines on LinkedIn is "People don't buy robots, they buy time." When did you realize that what you were actually selling was time, not hardware?
Octavio
I realized it while I was working at Accura. I understood there that the problem is never purely a technical problem. Engineers focus so much on the technology itself, on the product itself, but usually what we should focus on is observing the consumers, the users. Then you understand the real problem behind them, and that's a far more interesting conversation. Users don't care about the new features of a vacuum robot. They want more time in their life. I realized it's usually about understanding the problem behind the user, rather than the technology that solves it.
Monica
What was your first product?
Octavio
My first product was a window-cleaning robot.
Monica
Do you remember the day you sold your first unit?
Octavio
Of course. I remember the name of the person as well. It actually came out of a mistake. I had developed the product and was trying to sell it, but it was too early in the market. Customers were skeptical — they didn't believe a robot could clean windows. So I was in the elevator of my apartment building and I talked to one of my neighbors like an elevator pitch. I asked him, "You have that impossible window with no balcony outside. How do you clean it?" He said, "I don't — it's too difficult." I asked, "What if a robot could clean it for you? Would you try?" He said, "What do you mean, a robot?" I had a picture with me, so I showed him, explained it, and then went up and cleaned his window with the robot. That was my first customer.
Monica
So your neighbor was your first customer — find the customer closest to you. Looking at Osoji today in 2026, how do you define the company? Is it a robotics company, a home-tech company, an ecosystem, a brand, or a community?
Octavio
The community is the most important thing. We are a tech company that wants to help homeowners with their daily home chores — cleaning, cooking, even cleaning their teeth. Any kind of task you have at home, we're developing technology to help solve better.
Latin America Expansion: Sequencing and Localization
Monica
Okay. Now let's move to the Latin American market — which is what our startups are most interested in. Chinese teams often fail when they enter Latin America because they treat it as a single market. Octavio, I want you to break Latin America into real submarkets, and unpack why your 2026 strategy is regional depth rather than crossing into the US. Most Chinese founders think about Latin America as Brazil and Mexico, but you chose to perfect the model in Chile first, then Mexico. What was the deliberate sequencing?
Octavio
We started in Chile because it's my country, so I understand the culture better. And I focus on one problem at a time. I started with the window robot, then the vacuum robot, then the cooking robot, and kept adding more products. It's better to go deeper in one market. Once you have some traction, some community, some stability, then you move on to the next market — which for us was Mexico.Why Mexico rather than Peru, Colombia, or Argentina, which are closer to Chile? Mexico is eight times bigger than Chile. Peru is about two times bigger, but with half the purchasing power — the same with Colombia. I picked Mexico because it was a big, interesting challenge. If I'm going to invest my time in the next country, it should be 10x bigger, not the same size or only 2x. Mexico is also next to the United States, which made it an easier stepping stone — and the US is another 10x bigger than Mexico.
Monica
Mexico now accounts for 40% of your sales, and you became the number-one bestseller on Amazon Mexico in six months. Walk us through what actually happened in those six months. Was it product, pricing, content, or community?
Octavio
Always the team members. The right pricing and the right channel matter, but in Latin America there's really only one big channel — Amazon. We started with Amazon, but two years before launch we started building our brand there. Two years before the official launch, we were connecting with local influencers. The key is not pricing, not channel — it's how to introduce the brand through a community. The community tells us the pain points they have and the right language to use. Building the community first is far more important than simply launching with the right price on the right channel.
Monica
Chile has about 19 million people. Mexico has about 130 million — roughly nine to ten times the market. Same product, same brand. What did you have to change?
Octavio
We had to change the message itself. For example, here in China, you don't sell food to people in Chongqing the same way you sell to people in Beijing or Shenzhen — there are local tastes. The message comes first, then the audience or segments, then the channel. The message is critical. For Mexico, the wording and the right local influencers were the most important starting point.
Monica
You're entering six new Latin American markets this year. Which ones, and in what order?
Octavio
Peru, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, and others. The reason for that order is that they all share a common platform — Mercado Libre, which is effectively the Amazon of Latin America. Since we're already selling on Mercado Libre in Chile and Mexico, we have operational understanding of the platform, which we can extend to these other countries. That's the reason we want to continue with that channel.
Monica
For each of those six markets there's an emerging local brand, a local distributor, and Chinese sellers on Amazon. Where is your asymmetric advantage?
Octavio
The big advantage is understanding the segments first, then the audience, and then the channel. We picked Mercado Libre because our audience — our segment — had clear purchasing behavior on that channel. That's why.
Monica
Eight years in Latin America. What are the three deepest pits you personally fell into — logistics, FX, payment, tariffs, talent?
Octavio
Talent. We've been lucky that the co-founders have stayed consistent. The CFO has been great and evolving with the company, the same with the chief marketing officer. But my biggest challenge is that since the company is growing so much and so fast across many countries, the talent to execute has to evolve at the same speed. Sometimes younger team members become complacent after a year, and the company is moving faster than they are, so we have to rotate. Talent is a big challenge for sure.
Monica
And now that you're in China, do you see Chinese talent potentially contributing to your business in the future?
Octavio
For sure. The number of opportunities I see here in China is beyond what I can take. There are too many opportunities to enter the Latin American market. A Chinese co-founder would be a huge accelerator for Osoji's growth, and the collaboration between China and Latin America can be very powerful. Latin America is a difficult culture for Chinese teams to understand. For a Chinese entrepreneur to fully understand the Latin American market, they would almost need to be born again. So it's better to have a Chinese co-founder for a Latin American company, or a Latin American co-founder for a Chinese company, to expand faster.
Monica If a Chinese small-appliance company today had budget for only one Latin American country, which one would you tell them to pick in 2026?
Octavio
Mexico. Regardless of the economic, social, and political challenges it's currently facing, Mexico is still the largest opportunity that brings real scalability. If you can afford three years of working to understand the market and establish the basics, Mexico will give you that scalability — and it also leaves the door open to expanding into the US over time.
Monica
Latin America's home-robot penetration is around 20%, versus 65% in the US. Most people read that as "Latin America is behind." But you seem to read it as "Latin America has 45 points of runway." Which is it?
Octavio
I see the opportunity behind the gap, rather than being left behind. Of course Latin America is going to lag on many topics compared to the US or China — and that's exactly the opportunity: to educate the market with affordable products and close the gap. For a company that's genuinely committed to the region for the long term, those 45 percentage points represent years of growth runway, not a static pool that needs to be captured in a single quarter.
Product Ecosystem: Improving Daily Rituals
Monica
Your 2023 pitch deck showed only three product lines: vacuum, cooking, and window. But by late 2025, you were up to 12 categories, including air fryers, hair dryers, and smart health rings. How do you square that expansion with the "less is more" kaizen philosophy?
Octavio
The way to connect all those different products and categories is that there is a ritual behind every single one of them. There's a ritual around going to the gym, a ritual around cleaning, around cooking, around cleaning your teeth. There's a ritual in our homes and in our lives, and we need to have better rituals. "Better" is the keyword.Better is kaizen. We cannot clean the same way our grandmothers did twenty or forty years ago — we need to keep improving our rituals. It's okay to have traditions in our rituals, but at the same time we need to keep improving them. That's how all these categories connect.
Monica
You said Osoji products are around 30% cheaper because you remove every unnecessary shiny feature. Can you give a concrete example on one product?
Octavio
That's a good engineering question. Let me take the vacuum robot. I went to Professor Miyauchi, a robotics expert at the University of Tokyo, and asked him the same question: how do we make a better vacuum robot than Roomba? He told me that's the wrong question. The right question is: how do you keep the most important function simple? The essence of the robot is cleaning. The essence of the robot is not navigation, which is what Roomba keeps iterating on. So I forgot about the expensive technologies that improve navigation and focused first on improving the cleaning attribute. That was my focus then, and it's my focus now. Cleaning first, navigation second. Same thing for every product — the essence of the philosophy is to go to the basics of the key function.
Monica
Very impressive. When you added the smart health ring, that seems very different from a cooking robot. What's the unifying axis? Is this a Xiaomi-style ecosystem play, or something else?
Octavio
We launched the ring before Xiaomi had one. The connection between the products is functional. For example, when I cook, I'm thinking about my calorie intake. The ring can tell me what my body is actually saying — because our bodies talk to us all the time, but we don't listen. We aren't conscious of the signals. A simple, beautiful technology on my finger with the right sensors can help me read my body better, exercise better, and manage my calorie intake better. That's why we connect the products into an ecosystem that actually makes sense — rather than an ecosystem of isolated products whose only purpose is to give us more chances to sell to the customer. The point of the ecosystem is that the customer's daily rituals become genuinely connected, not that the SKU count expands.
Monica
In October 2025, you launched four new products, two of which were robots. How do you decide what to build next? Do you start from user-community feedback, from a supply-chain opportunity, or from a category gap?
Octavio
All three. There are products we've been following for several years. The decision point comes when multiple dimensions align at the same time: the right trend is going up, there's a gap in the margin structure, there's real demand from consumers. For example, when all your friends are telling you, "Monica, could you bring a better ice-cream machine? None of the machines on the market work the way I want," and at the same time a new technology is becoming available, that conjunction of signals is when we decide to launch. And we go little by little — we build a sample, we run trials with beta testers, and we find the right time.
The Ultimate Moat: A Community-Driven Brand
Monica
Where is your community?
Octavio
Our community is first the customers themselves. Among the customers, we pick the best 1,000. Our total customer base is about 300,000, but the best 1,000 is a beautiful connection to have and to communicate with. They are the true fans that we listen to, observe, and provide solutions for.
Monica How do you connect with your key customers? In China we tend to use WeChat groups, but I'm not sure that translates to Latin America.
Octavio
WhatsApp is one way, but sometimes you need to spend time with physical connection and actually talk to them. We have an office, a showroom, a flagship store — similar in spirit to what Apple does. We receive plenty of connections and conversations there. The most valuable ones are one-on-one. The physical connection is very important.
Monica
Your vacuums, cooking robots, and window robots — are these built in-house, ODM, or white-label?
Octavio
Some are OEM, some are ODM. We keep improving and designing new attributes on top.
Monica
If Chinese suppliers are involved, what type of factory works best for you?
Octavio
Good question. When we started, we evaluated large factories as well as smaller, more flexible, innovation-fast factories. We tested them all. In the early stage, it's better to work with someone fast enough to give you the ODM/OEM work you need. As you scale, you need bigger factories to handle bigger orders — that's where higher quality consistency and more complex logistics coordination come in. So the transition from "flexible small factory" to "scalable partner" is necessary, and founders need to make that switch at the right moment rather than let the supply side bottleneck growth.
Monica
The Chinese hardware anxiety in 2026 is that features have been over-optimized and there's no moat. As a brand whose edge comes from subtraction, where does the moat actually live? Is it brand, community, service, or channel?
Octavio
The only moat we have is the real connection with our community. All the tech will be obsolete six or twelve months from now, and we know it.
Monica
Community-driven is really important, especially in Asia right now. Is there a recent product that failed, or that you killed internally?
Octavio
I need to be humble here, because every single launch we've done has been a success. Some of them took longer than others. All have been successful. I need to be humble because we do our homework up front, but there are so many things we don't control. So far, every launch has been a success.
Monica
That's amazing. So community is the most important moat, and the Amazon Mexico number-one result is the clearest proof. You call your community "the Lovers." How did it actually grow — organically from the product, or as an explicit operating strategy?
Octavio
I'd say it's authentically organic conversations with them. Then they organically refer the brand and the products to their friends. It's been organic all the way, and it's been accelerated with online campaigns, and gone deeper with the flagship store. We have to work in 360 dimensions right now — it's no longer one thing — but we start with one organic connection. Once that foundation is in place, paid advertising, offline events, and KOL partnerships produce real amplification, rather than becoming one-off traffic events.
Monica
In China we call this 私域流量 — private traffic — and it's usually framed around conversion. But yours looks more like a brand tribe. On average, how many things does one community member do for you in a year? Repeat purchase, referral, feedback?
Octavio
Feedback is so valuable. That's why we focus on the feedback — the good and the bad, especially the bad. There are so many lessons in bad reviews and in the way we connect with those customers to solve them.
Monica
Do you have a dedicated community department, or is it part of operations or customer service?
Octavio
My brother leads the community department. We have a presence on every major social-media platform. But at one point, we decided to focus more on one channel only, because it was extremely confusing when the same customer would ask the same question in four different channels. So we centralized everything into one main channel, which is Instagram.
Monica
Very nice — I'm working on something similar on my side. I'm also interested in your panda mascot. The shopping-mall photo with all the kids is the most memorable image in your whole brand. Why does a technology company invest in a mascot? What's the real return?
Octavio
Because at the end, the Japanese technology inspiration — the brand Osoji — is the tech part, while the friendly support represented by the panda is the perfect complement. We are a "high tech, human touch" company, and the panda reflects that better than anything else.
Monica
I think that might work well in China too, with the panda and physical interaction. Maintaining 4.5 stars across many marketplaces requires a full loop of quality, customer service, and community. What does yours look like from the inside?
Octavio
First I need to emphasize that the 4.5 ratings are real. That's very important, because unfortunately many companies use fake reviews, and Amazon is penalizing that. Real reviews are extremely important for us. When we have bad reviews, we take them seriously. With one product, we had very bad reviews at launch, so we transformed the product completely and relaunched it. Now it's back to 4.5 stars. Reviews are a very interesting way to get clarity from the marketplace in order to keep improving — kaizen.
Monica
For a Chinese hardware brand that's just launching, should community be built from day one, or only after PMF?
Octavio
I recommend building the community before launch. Not day one — I mean day minus one year. Learn from the customer, understand their problem, understand the budget, understand what their current solutions are. Understanding the customer is far more important than developing the product itself, because a product is just one form of a solution, and the community keeps you continuously sensitive to the real problem.
Monica
How many hours a week do you personally spend inside the community? Do you reply to users yourself?
Octavio
Of course I reply. I spent a lot of time on it when we were starting with the first product — maybe 30% to 40% of my time. Now the team is bigger and I delegate most of it under certain rules. I still spend 2% to 3%, but that remains extremely important.
Cash-Flow Over Ego: The Non-VC Funding Path
Monica
Now let's move to the non-VC path and cash-flow thinking. I think most of our startup founders will be very interested in this. Osoji is still a lean, cash-funded operation, even as the product line has expanded. For Chinese founders who've been gaslit by "burn to grow" for a decade, this is a powerful counter-example. First, for the Chinese audience, what is ScaleX? You became the first Chilean startup to go public on it.
Octavio
Chile has the Santiago Stock Exchange for big corporations, and they launched ScaleX — the Chilean equivalent of NASDAQ, a stock exchange for startups. Over 1,000 startups applied. We were lucky to be the first to list, because of our project. In 2022, we were the first startup to IPO via ScaleX. Several other startups are using ScaleX now, and over the next two or three years private funds will move massive amounts of capital through ScaleX. It will keep changing the rules.ScaleX may also connect with other stock exchanges in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and perhaps Canada and the US. That will reshape the funding landscape — similar to what happened with the NYSE in New York years ago. The connection between exchanges is going to change the rules of capital for Latin America.
Monica
Latin American capital is neither as abundant as the US nor as aggressive as China. Is that environment more founder-friendly?
Octavio
Angel investors are an extremely important part of the deal. They come in at the earliest stages, pre-Series A, and then they recommend private investors, family offices, and larger businesses to get involved.
Monica
You've raised relatively little capital, but built a strong category business with 300,000 units sold. How does the company actually self-fund — margins, inventory turns?
Octavio
We reinvested all the profits. We only raise money for the next goal, for the next year — nothing else. I don't want to raise more, because it means diluting equity. So we only raise enough for the next goal, and we invest 100% of the profits from the very beginning.
Monica
What's the biggest difference you see between a cash-driven company and a financing-driven one?
Octavio
Entrepreneurs who keep raising millions in order to promise the next round are more ego-driven than long-term driven. My goal is long term — real cash flow is better than ego. Raising money isn't inherently a problem; it becomes a problem when funding rounds become the only rhythm of the company, because then product, user, and service — the real long-term value creators — get pushed down the priority list.
Strategic Pauses: Navigating Tariffs and the US Market
Monica
Let's talk about the US pause — this is the most timely chapter of the entire session, because Chinese hardware founders are facing exactly the same question. In 2025, you paused US market entry because of tariff uncertainty. That's a decision almost no VC-funded company would make — they'd just delay, not pause. Walk us through how that call was made internally.
Octavio
I prefer to survive rather than keep walking down a road that's going to end. That's what I told my investors: it's better to change the strategy than to face a problem that could bankrupt the company. That's why we stopped.And I believe we did it at the right time. At the same time, we accelerated everything in the markets we were already running — Chile and Mexico. In the moment it was a complex decision, but afterwards we're happy we did it at the right timing.
Monica
Was it purely a tariff-related decision, or was there something deeper?
Octavio
The tariff was one element — one symptom in the economic cycle at that time. The tariff itself was a political issue among Mexico, the US, and China. But behind that, we forecasted that the bipolar system would get even worse. At the same time, there was fierce competition from Chinese companies on Amazon US, running at almost no margin. Amazon was changing its algorithm, squeezing suppliers, and adding more fees to operate on the platform. It was much more than the tariff itself.So we decided to postpone entry until we had more clarity, combined with clearer differentiation as a company — in the product and in the community — and then we can re-enter.
Monica
A lot of Chinese sellers on Amazon US are now trapped and can't easily pull out. If you had to advise them in April 2026, what would you say?
Octavio
It's difficult to give a general recommendation, because risk tolerance depends on each company: whether your strategy is long-term or short-term, whether you have capital in reserve, and so on. For my own company, I would always focus on cash flow, healthy unit economics, healthy margins, providing real value, building real differentiation, and building real moats — which for us is real connection with the community — rather than just focusing on a huge market because every competitor is doing so. I prefer a healthy direction rather than risking everything on one big market.
Monica
On the supply side, how much of your product comes from Chinese supply chains this year?
Octavio
We have several Asian countries providing supply. China is around 60% — still our most important supply partner.
Monica
How has that relationship evolved as tariffs have changed?
Octavio
It hasn't changed.
Monica
How do you view the Chinese supply chain plus Latin American brand plus local distribution stack?
Octavio
I'm extremely impressed with the level and speed of innovation in China. China has a lot to offer the world — very interesting technologies and a very interesting mindset in the engineering teams. Chinese engineers keep evolving and improving.Over the next three years, I'm betting on China. Technology will keep evolving — from tires to chips to batteries to new competitive technologies. EVs with batteries, hydrogen-based alternatives — whatever. Technology will keep evolving, and China should not focus on only one type. The Japanese are going in a different direction; the Europeans are still largely dependent on oil. China's technology will keep evolving, and we need to be aware of it and evolve alongside it to stay relevant in the next cycle.
Monica
If a Chinese small-appliance team wants to partner with someone like you in Latin America, what does the right kind of partnership look like, and what mistakes can they avoid up front?
Octavio
I always take values first, and long-term relationships next. I play for the long term. I don't care about a factory that gives me a better price for the next six or twelve months. Values matter because when problems arise, if our values differ on how to solve them, we'll end up going in different directions. If we share values, we face the problems together. That's why I appreciate the Chinese practice of going to dinner after long meetings — you understand each other better in that informal setting, and you end up in the market together and solving problems together.
Monica
At the end of the livestream today, I want you to do three things. First, give Chinese hardware founders the single hardest-earned sentence from your eight years — not a polite one, the one that wakes you up at 3 a.m.
Octavio
What wakes me up at 3 a.m. is my fascination with solving a real problem for my mother. If my mother has a problem with a toothbrush, I want to know how to invent a machine for her. And there are 300,000 mothers in Chile who are already our customers — I keep helping them too. That's a beautiful problem to have. It's not about the technology; it's about embracing a problem and not stopping until you solve it.
Monica
Second: if you were to restart Osoji tomorrow from zero, in 2026, knowing everything you know, what would you change?
Octavio
Beautiful question. Honestly, we need to face that question every day. I'm going to start asking my team that question every day, because we need that mentality: if we lost everything, what would we do differently — or the same?I would embrace a problem worth solving, and I would scale it. That's what I would do. If I lost everything, I'd pick another problem worth solving, and start over.
Monica
Third: over the next three years, what's your single biggest call on China plus Latin America?
Octavio
I believe Latin America can be the best bridge for China to reach the US, and Chile is the best door for China to enter Latin America. The next three years should be when that road gets built, with real case studies that others can follow.
Monica
If our companies are interested in the Chilean market, can they connect with you?
Octavio
For sure. If any of your audience — referred by you, Monica — want help, I'd be happy to.
Monica
Thank you Octavio.
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