Puerto Rico's First Unicorn Starts at a Hackathon | Pedro Cruz

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Recorded01 Sep 2026

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Three days after Hurricane Maria, Pedro Cruz lost his job. No electricity, no plan. So he pointed a drone at the SOS messages people had spray-painted on their roads, because the government helicopters kept flying over and the help kept not arriving. That project won an IBM hackathon and became DroneAid. This was back when AI was still "ten years away."Pedro's thesis comes out of that story. A fresh ChatGPT session knows nothing about you. Context is what makes AI useful, and locals are the context. I ended up summarizing it back to him as AI built for Puerto Rico beating AI imported to it.But the line I keep coming back to is darker: nobody is coming to fix the island. "We shouldn't expect it to change. We need to create that change." Singapore did it in 50 years. Pedro's mechanism is the hackathon he's leading at the Caribbean AI Summit: get hundreds of people building, and in a year or two, maybe a unicorn, maybe two.He also co-founded an AR startup (MeshMap, a few million raised), there's an AI-designed Obama statue in Old San Juan that nobody asked for, a surprise pivot into nuclear energy, and a roast where he made me feel geologically old (I'm 52, his parents are 53). And I spent a good minute proposing that Waymo prove itself on an island where the distance markers are in kilometers and the speed limits are in miles per hour.I'm Edward Roske, and this is Asking Good Questions. New conversations with the people figuring out the human side of AI. If one of these questions stuck with you, subscribe and send it to someone who'd take the other side.Pedro leads the hackathon at the Caribbean AI Summit this October in San Juan. Come build the unicorn: CaribbeanSummit.AILINKSCaribbean AI Summit (Pedro leads the hackathon, Oct 9-10): https://CaribbeanSummit.AIPedro on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pedrocruztech/Pedro's site: https://pedrocruz.ioPedro on Instagram and X: @pedrocruztechBOOKS & RESEARCH MENTIONEDDroneAid (Pedro's post-Maria SOS-detection project, IBM hackathon winner)MeshMap (his AR startup; Magic Leap experiences in New York)BrainHi (the Puerto Rico startup that went through Y Combinator)The BONUS nuclear reactor in Rincón (Puerto Rico's 1960s experiment)Also mentioned: ChatGPT, Claude, Pokemon Go, Waymo, FarmVille, the Wayback MachineThis episode of Asking Good Questions is brought to you by Caprus.Ai.Check how we empower the office of the CFO to harness the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and revolutionize their operations.

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