La Frontera 🌵 Podcast, Episode 15 - The Creative Edge: A Musician’s Leap into AI & Entrepreneurship

Tomás Uribe

We’re thrilled to finally welcome Tomás Uribe to La Frontera. His unconventional path, unique style and perspective is a refreshing one, and his journey has a bit of everything: from a childhood steeped in music and the arts to a leap from Colombia to New York City. He shares hard-won lessons navigating the U.S. immigration maze and building a startup that’s caught the attention of investors like Pharrell Williams and Morgan Stanley. In this episode, Tomás shares how his creative roots give him an edge in tech, why being authentic helped him fundraise, and how he’s using AI to supercharge creative work.

If you’re a founder from an unconventional background, an immigrant entrepreneur, or an investor interested in the creative economy, this conversation is packed with golden insights.

Tomás was kind enough to share a special discount code for 15% off Mavity just for La Frontera readers.

You can find the code at the bottom of this newsletter!

Episode 15 Summary

  • From Bogotá to NYC: How Tomás’s musical upbringing and love for New York set the stage for his founder journey.

  • Music & Tech – A Creative Edge: Why a background in music composition became Tomás’s secret weapon for problem-solving in business.

  • Early Pivots & “Necessary” Mistakes: The early false starts and painful lessons that ultimately shaped Mavity’s direction.

  • Authenticity in Fundraising: Tips from Tomás’s fundraising playbook – be yourself, prioritize good design and storytelling, and sweat the details.

  • Creativity Meets AI: How Mavity leverages AI tools to free up creators’ time and why human creativity remains “the most important currency” in the age of automation.

  • Navigating the Visa Gauntlet: Tomás’s advice for immigrant founders on doing your homework with U.S. visa options, finding sponsors, and building networks to achieve the American startup dream.

  • Building Community & Giving Back: Why Tomás engages in policy advocacy and how his Latino heritage influences Mavity’s inclusive culture.

🎨Mavity: Modern Creative Operations, Powered by AI

🚀 Founded: 2022 (New York, NY)
📈 Stage: Seed
💰 Total Funding Raised: ~$2M
🤝 Investors: Techstars, Black Ambition (Pharrell Williams), L’Attitude Ventures, Google, Morgan Stanley, among others
🎯 Mission: Empower go to market teams with fast, easy and scalable creative asset orchestration

Mavity is an AI-powered platform that orchestrates the creation, management, and delivery of go-to-market (GTM) assets like one-pagers, sales decks, social content, and ads, through a multi-format asset builder that ensures all assets are interconnected and consistently up to date. It integrates directly with CRM and sales tools to turn customers and deal data into personalized, performance-optimized creative. Mavity matters because GTM teams need to move fast and scale content across multiple channels, but traditional creative workflows are slow, fragmented, and expensive. Today, they have a team spread across New York, Colombia, and beyond, all working to “supercharge creative operations” for businesses and brands.

🎶 From Classical Composition to Startup CEO

Tomás’s path to tech founder is anything but typical. Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia in a highly artistic family, Tomás was immersed in music from a young age. By seven he was learning instruments, and in his teens he even formed a band – which, in true entrepreneurial fashion, he and his bandmates incorporated as a company to sell music for ads and build custom audio equipment for other musicians. This early mix of art and business planted the seed for his future startup life.

But it was Tomás’s love of New York City that ultimately pulled him north. Fascinated by NYC’s creative energy and diversity, he set his sights on studying there. He applied (to exactly one school!) and earned a spot in Parsons’ media technology program, moving to New York in 2013. That move kicked off a decade-long adventure: from building a music-tech app with his now co-founder, to marketing stints at the UN and a Brooklyn startup – all while moonlighting in the city’s music scene. The common thread? Tomás was constantly at the intersection of creativity and technology, whether hacking on a music discovery app or managing creative projects in advertising.

It’s no surprise, then, that when Tomás started Mavity, he approached it with a creative mindset. He sees clear parallels between composing music and building a business.

“He’s just using his music and his way of being creative to channel different ideas and solve problems. And that’s literally what music is… you’re solving a problem at every single measure,” Tomás says, referring to Nine Inch Nails frontman-turned-tech executive Trent Reznor as an inspiration.

Tomás Uribe

In Tomás’s view, writing a song and running a startup both boil down to continuous problem-solving and iteration, you’re always refining, adjusting, and improvising to get to a harmonious result.

That creative edge gives Tomás a unique perspective as a founder. He admits he’s “more of a creator than an executioner” at heart, brimming with new ideas. One of his favorite sayings is “the worst thing that can happen to one idea is another idea.” In other words, focus is key – a challenge for any creative person. Tomás has had to learn to balance that imaginative flair with the discipline to see an idea through. As he puts it, creators often fall in love with the next shiny concept (whether it’s the best song ever or a new product feature), but success comes from doubling down on the rightidea long enough to make it real. It’s a lesson in persistence that any founder can relate to.

Finally, Tomás believes creative people have never been more important in tech. With AI on the rise (more on that later), human originality is a priceless asset.

“Human creativity is the single most important currency from here onwards”

Tomás Uribe

He emphasizes that ingenuity and out-of-the-box thinking are what will differentiate companies in an age where so much can be automated. As a founder who straddles both art and tech, Tomás embodies that principle, and encourages more folks from artistic backgrounds to dive into entrepreneurship. The startup world, he insists, needs creative perspectives now more than ever.

💡 Early Pivots, Hard Lessons

Mavity’s vision didn’t spring forth fully formed. Tomás is refreshingly candid that the journey was messy and full of mistakes, each one a learning experience that shaped the company.

“We could stay here forever talking about mistakes,” Tomás laughs. “In retrospect, it was like a necessary evil to get to where we are” he says of the bumps along the way.

Tomás Uribe

One of the earliest forks in the road came during Mavity’s time in Techstars. Back then, the startup was focused exclusively on agencies. The team assumed creative agencies would love a platform to manage freelance creators. Spoiler alert: they didn’t. “Complete crickets – nobody cared,” Tomás admits of that initial hypothesis. They had poured time into building features for agencies, only to realize the real demand was elsewhere.

Fortunately, being in an accelerator helped Mavity find its true North Star. Other founders in Tomás’s Techstars cohort started clamoring for creative help: pitch decks, marketing assets, you name it. Unlike agencies, startups desperately needed a reliable way to get these things done. The lightbulb went off – Mavity pivoted to serve startup and small business customers, not agencies. That pivot was a turning point: suddenly Mavity had paying clients and a clearer value prop. But new mistakes were made in the process, too.

Tomás recounts another early misstep: spending too much effort on the creative “supply” side of the marketplace. In trying to please the freelancers on Mavity, the team built out robust dashboards and features for creatives – only to later scrap much of it. Why? Because the priority had to be the paying customers’ experience. Mavity learned the hard way not to over-engineer for one side of a marketplace at the expense of the other.

“We spent a lot of time and resources building for [creatives], rather than the end customer… It’s painful, but it’s not there anymore.”

Tomás Uribe

The takeaway: focus on delivering value to whoever pays the bills (and in a marketplace, avoid “happy ears” that lead you to build stuff people say they want, rather than what they’ll actually use).

Another lesson from the trenches was around hiring. As a first-time CEO, Tomás admits he made some hiring mistakes – bringing on people who looked perfect on paper but weren’t the right fit in practice. Early on, he was slow to address those mismatches. Now, he’s quicker to act. Firing fast is never easy, but it saves the whole team pain in the long run. Tomás has learned to trust his gut if something feels off in the first few weeks with a new hire – and to make the tough call before a minor issue becomes a major drain.

From botched product ideas to personnel dilemmas, these experiences underscore an encouraging point: mistakes are part of the process. Tomás doesn’t shy away from them; instead, he views each stumble as fuel for growth. Founders, take note – even a “necessary evil” of a mistake can push you toward clarity if you’re willing to adapt. As Tomás reflects, every pivot and hard decision at Mavity ultimately led to a stronger business. The key is maintaining humility and staying responsive to feedback, no matter how far off-course you might find yourself.

💰 Fundraising with Authenticity and Design

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