A long long time ago, in a faraway galaxy of tacos and tequila, a kid decided to study law because his mother said it was a good idea. She was right about most things.
I grew up in Mexico City. Loud. Chaotic. Beautiful. The kind of place where you learn to navigate systems before you can drive. I didn't know it then, but that was the first lesson in venture architecture: every structure has an invisible operating system, and the people who understand it run the show.
Big Law
I spent six years at a Big Law firm in New York and Mexico City. Corporate transactions. The kind of work where a misplaced comma in a $2 billion facility agreement could end your career and a late night was just a Tuesday. I closed deals for clients like ENGIE and Nissan across multiple jurisdictions. I wore the suit. I learned the language. I got very, very good at the invisible architecture of deals.
Here's what Big Law teaches you (if you're paying attention and not just billing hours): the governance clauses, the liquidation preferences, the board composition math — these aren't legal details. They're the power map. They determine who gets rich, who keeps control, and who gets quietly pushed out.
The most important parts of any deal are the parts nobody reads until something goes wrong.
I learned that. And then I started wondering: what if someone told founders this stuff before everything went wrong?
Yale and the Camino
I went to Yale for my MAM. Not because I needed another credential (okay, partly because I needed another credential). But because I wanted to understand the intersection of law, business, and whatever it is that makes some ventures survive and others collapse despite having better products, better teams, better everything.
The answer, it turns out, is structure. Always structure.
Then I walked the Camino de Santiago. 800 kilometres on foot across northern Spain. You carry everything you own on your back. You walk until your feet bleed, and then you walk some more. You sleep in rooms with strangers. You don't check your email (mostly because there's no Wi-Fi).
The Camino didn't teach me what to do next. It taught me what to stop doing. I was done being a lawyer inside someone else's machine. I wanted to build my own.
Africa
I moved to Nairobi. Then Kigali. Then wherever the work took me.
At the African Leadership Group I helped close more than $500M in fundraising, scaled operations across 25 countries on 3 continents, and launched commercial expansion into 5 new markets. I built governance frameworks from scratch for entities that didn't exist yet. I structured deals on napkins when the power went out (that actually happened — more than once).
Africa broke every assumption I had about how business works. In the best way.
The founders I met there were building extraordinary things on structural foundations held together with duct tape and optimism. Brilliant products. Terrible cap tables. Governance that was either nonexistent or copy-pasted from a Delaware template that had no business being anywhere near the East African Community.
That's when I saw the gap. Not a legal gap — a structural one. These founders didn't need another lawyer sending 40-page memos. They needed an architect who could see the whole picture and build the foundation before it cracked.
Then I got fired
Best thing that ever happened to me.
I'd spent years building something I believed in — scaling operations, raising capital, structuring ventures across a continent. And then one day, corporate politics happened (it always does), and I was out.
I sat in my apartment in Nairobi. I had a laptop, a phone, and six years of knowing exactly how deals break and how to build them so they don't.
I thought about going back to Big Law. For about twelve seconds.
Then I opened a blank document and typed: Mexzungu Group.
What Mexzungu actually is
It's an outlaw studio. That sounds like a branding exercise. It's not. It's a description.
"Outlaw" because the best structural work happens outside the lines. The founders I serve don't fit in boxes. Neither do I. The conventional consulting model — grey suits, 200-page reports, $500/hour for advice you could've gotten from a good Google search — that model is broken. I wanted to build something that actually works.
"Studio" because the work is hands-on. I don't advise from a distance. I get inside the structure, rebuild what's broken, and design what doesn't exist yet. Venture architecture: ownership, governance, capital architecture. The operating system underneath the company.
Today I run it from Barcelona. I work across Africa, Latin America, Europe, and anywhere the founders are interesting and the problems are structural. I wear pink nail polish to board meetings. I have Lego cufflinks. I got named to the GC Powerlist two years running.
None of those things are contradictions. All of them are the point.
Chaos starts companies. Structure builds them.
That's the line that goes on everything. Because it's true. The most creative founders in the world will fail if nobody builds the structural foundation underneath their chaos. And the most boring, process-driven operator will fail if nobody brings the creative fire that makes the structure worth building.
I'm the guy in the middle. Part architect, part rock star, part the-only-person-at-the-table-who-reads-the-shareholders-agreement.
That's why I built Mexzungu.
And honestly? I'm just getting started.
This is Postcards from the Wild Side — leadership lessons from unusual places. New postcard every other Thursday. If you want the structural stuff, the Outlaw Chronicles newsletter runs every Monday on mexzungu.com.