Foreword

This book is an experiment.

I wrote it with AI as my working partner — three of them, in fact. Gemini, Claude Code, and Codex helped me think, research, draft, and refine. I versioned every chapter in GitHub, the way an engineer versions software, so I could see exactly what changed and why. I built custom skills to train the agents on the kind of book I was trying to write. And I had the three models supervise one another, each critiquing the others' output until the content got sharper.

That matters. The central argument in this book is that AI, used well, expands an individual's creativity, judgment, and productive capacity. I could not make that argument honestly while pretending to work the old way.

The result may not be perfect. But I enjoyed the creative journey.

One chapter ends, another begins

Opinno, the company that has filled the last eighteen years of my life, is coming to an end.

It started in my bedroom in Madrid in 2008, in the teeth of the global financial crisis, as an innovation consultancy. Over time it grew to two hundred and fifty people across Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. It survived the 2012 collapse, the pandemic, and several major shifts in the market. Again and again, we did what we told our clients to do: we reinvented ourselves. Opinno served its purpose. It ran its course.

Reinventing it one more time would mean optimizing a model built for another era. AI is rewriting the economics of creative work so completely that the best place to apply it is a blank page: no legacy costs, no accumulated decisions, no structures built for a previous world. So I'm starting over. My next venture begins in 2026 on that blank page.

The word "vibe" has a specific, recent origin in this book. In early 2025, Andrej Karpathy, the researcher and OpenAI co-founder, popularized "vibe coding" to describe a new way of building software. The developer no longer writes every line by hand. Instead, she sets the intent, corrects the direction, and judges the output while AI does most of the mechanical work. The idea moved quickly from coding into other fields: vibe writing, vibe design, vibe research. What felt astonishing in software turned out to be revealing almost everywhere else.

Vibe Innovation extends that logic beyond code. The premise is simple: in a volatile world, with a tool as powerful as AI available to almost anyone, we have to rethink who we are and how we operate—as individuals and as a species. How we organize. How we work. How we learn. How we lead. How we show up as citizens.

I understand the fear many people feel about AI. Its power is real. The speed of its arrival is real. Any technology that rewrites the relationship between people and work deserves respect, scrutiny, and guardrails. But there is another emotion here, harder to name and just as real: the prospect of freeing imagination, creative energy, and entrepreneurial ambition from constraints that once made them impossible to act on. For the first time, the binding constraint is rarely the team, the funding, or the infrastructure. More often, it is what we can imagine clearly enough, and decide seriously enough, to build.

This book lives inside both emotions. It doesn't deny the fear. It doesn't let fear win.

It tries to do two things at once. First, it lays the foundation for my next professional chapter: an argument that large human structures, high fixed costs, and heavy bureaucracy are becoming sailing ships in the age of steamboats, and that the future belongs to sovereign individuals who know how to operate as nodes in a network. Second, it is an invitation to apply that same logic far beyond entrepreneurship—to education, to leadership, to the way we organize society. Whole chapters are devoted to those implications. I want this book to be useful to the founder working from a bedroom, the executive inside a global organization, the teacher in front of a classroom, and the citizen standing in front of city hall.

Like almost everything in innovation, this book is a contribution in beta. Ideas stay alive only when they get tested. I'd love to know where you agree, where you push back, and what you would add to sharpen this first version. The hypothesis at the heart of the book will mature only if we work on it together.