In Peru we're all entrepreneurs.
The guy who opens a corner store. The one who starts a chifa with his severance pay. The lady selling emoliente at 6 in the morning. The kid reselling sneakers on Instagram.
We say it with pride. And that's fine, most of us come from there.
But we're still poor. And that's not a figure of speech.
In 2025, 1 in 4 Peruvians was poor. 25.7% according to INEI, Peru's statistics office. Poor means spending less than 462 soles a month. Not even 16 soles a day.
And worse: we're poorer than before the pandemic. In 2019 it was 20.2%. 6 years later, we still haven't gotten back.
Source: INEI, Peru: Evolution of monetary poverty 2016-2025 (May 2026).
Something doesn't add up.
I saw it abroad
I lived almost 10 years in Buenos Aires. And careful, Argentina isn't Switzerland. It has its crises, its inflation, its mess. But it works a bit better than Peru, and it's not just me saying it:
Sources: World Bank (GDP per capita 2024). Informality: INDEC (31 cities, Q4 2025) and INEI (urban areas, April 2025 to March 2026). Unicorns: Ámbito and Gestión.
And when you live there, something hits you that you can't see from inside.
A business isn't opening a chifa and that's it.
It's design. It's thinking about why someone would pick you over the place next door. How it looks, how you treat people, what you do that the other one doesn't.
Here we open the same corner store as the one down the street. Then we fight the neighbor on price. We both lose.
From entrepreneur to business builder
Being an entrepreneur is opening something. Anyone with drive can do it.
Being a business builder is making something different. Something people choose even when there's a cheaper option 2 blocks away. Something that grows even when you're not behind the counter.
The bridge between the two is called standing out. And today the biggest way to stand out is technology.
A corner store grows as far as the block. Software grows as far as the internet. One sells hours. The other sells something that multiplies on its own.
I learned it washing clothes
With GetLavado we didn't invent anything. Washing clothes is one of the oldest businesses in the world. In any Lima neighborhood there's someone who's been doing it for 30 years.
What we did was redesign it. Platform, logistics, data. Same old thing, but thought through. That's why it crossed into Colombia. That's why a company from abroad wanted to buy it.
The guy on the corner and us washed the same clothes. We weren't playing the same game.
We're shit (with love)
If being an entrepreneur were enough, Peru would be a superpower. We have entrepreneurs to spare. What we're missing are business builders who make technology.
And at that, as a country, today we're shit. I say it smiling, but I say it.
Until we see it that way, we'll keep celebrating that we survived.
Being an entrepreneur gets you ahead.
Standing out with technology can get a whole country ahead.
