About this blog
Degrees of Freedom is where I write down what I'm building and what building it has taught me. Right now that means robotics: the hardware I put together, the code that drives it, and the AI I train to make machines move. It also means what I've been doing since 2014: building AI startups and taking them to market.
The two halves come with different credentials. In robotics I'm a learner, and the rule is learning in public: what I built, what it cost, what worked, and the real success rates, not the highlight reel. In startups, go-to-market and AI I've been doing the work since 2014, and I'll share what I learned, including what didn't work.
If you can code but robotics feels out of reach, this blog exists to show you the reach is shorter than you think. If you're building a startup, I've probably made the mistake you're about to make, and I'll tell you how it went.
The name comes from the first robotics term I learned: a degree of freedom is one independent way a machine can move. My SO-101 has six motors: five that move the arm, one that works the gripper.
About me
I'm Federico. I've been building AI startups and taking them to market since 2014, and there's a robot arm on my desk I've taught to do things.
I'm not an engineer (I actually studied business administration at university), but the geek side was always there. In 2002, at fifteen, I learned HTML and built my first website: a small job board where companies could post openings and people could search them. In 2016 I started learning to code properly (Python and JavaScript), and since 2020 I've written code every day.
Startups. I've seen them from almost every angle:
- MonkeyLearn. In 2014 I co-founded MonkeyLearn, a VC-backed machine learning startup, and was COO for more than seven years. We helped customers like Salesforce, Snapchat, GitHub, Atlassian, Twilio, Ticketmaster, Trivago, Stanford, and MIT automate business processes and get insights from their data automatically. MonkeyLearn was later acquired by Medallia. It taught me how to build a startup.
- Hugging Face. I joined while open-source AI was taking over the world. We were fewer than 30 people, valued at under $400 million, with less than half a million dollars a year in revenue. A year and a half later revenue passed $20 million a year, the team passed 200, we'd raised a $100 million Series C, and the company was valued at around $4 billion. It showed me what a rocket ship feels like from inside.
- Solopreneur. Today I build WordCrafter (an AI content platform for SEO teams), Signaly (LinkedIn lead generation), and Crowd Intelligence (audience research mined from Reddit), self-funded, with no investors.
- Advisor. I advise five technology companies on go-to-market, helping their founders make better decisions across marketing, sales, and customer success.
- Mentor. I'm a mentor at Endeavor Uruguay, helping high-potential founders grow their companies.
Go-to-market. Getting leads and customers is the hardest thing a startup has to figure out, and most never find a way that scales and repeats. I learned the craft from 2011 to 2013 at PIMOD, a digital marketing agency in Uruguay, running search ads, SEO, content and social for everyone from a 3D printer startup to hotels and lenders. At MonkeyLearn I led go-to-market across marketing, sales, operations and customer success. We tried nearly every channel; the one that scaled was SEO, turned into a playbook that put us at the top of Google for the searches that mattered in our space. At Hugging Face I was Head of Marketing and the third hire on the monetization team, and the problem flipped: everyone in AI already knew us, so the work was turning that attention into revenue. Now, as a solopreneur, I run go-to-market with hours instead of headcount, which keeps me focused on the few things that actually work.
AI. I've worked in AI since 2014, long before ChatGPT. At MonkeyLearn, our machine learning read customer feedback, support tickets and other text at scale, years before large language models made that look easy. Today AI is how I work: every product I run uses it to power features, I build with AI tools every day, and I've replaced paid tools like HubSpot, Intercom and Calendly with internal ones I built myself.
Robotics. It started in late 2025, with the realization that code on a screen was no longer the interesting frontier. I spent three months on electronics and Arduino foundations: motors, sensors, making things happen off-screen. The pet project was a “self-driving” toy car with a tiny camera for an eye that could find the TV on its own. It worked, and that's what gave me the confidence to buy an SO-101, the open-source robot arm designed by Hugging Face.
I assembled it, calibrated it, and learned to teleoperate it. My desk was a mess for the first run, and honestly it still is. Then I recorded 54 demonstrations of one deliberately simple task (pick up a sock, drop it in a cardboard box) and trained an ACT model overnight on my MacBook, about 24 hours. The arm did the task on its own. The first time it worked, my wife and I genuinely cheered. The success rate was about 30%: it fails more than it works, and I was thrilled anyway. Fifty-four examples and one overnight run taught a machine a physical task. Since then I've fine-tuned π0.5, a much bigger model, on a rented GPU in the cloud, because my laptop wasn't enough for that one.
Why robotics? First, because it's the most fun I've ever had building things: coding that reaches out of the screen and moves objects next to you. Second, because I think it's where AI is headed. Software is automating the digital world fast, but most of the world's real value is physical: moving, handling, making. AI reaches its full impact when it can act out here. As an entrepreneur, I can't unsee that.
Next in my robotics journey
Proper evaluations of the fine-tuned π0.5 against ACT, then tasks with real value instead of toy ones: clearing the table, tidying up the house, and the one I actually dream about, a robot that prepares my mate. (I'm Uruguayan. The mate doesn't stop just because I live in Berlin.)
Get in touch
Whether it's robotics, startups and go-to-market, a collaboration or a talk, or you just want to say hi, I'd love to hear from you. Write to me below.