Lessons from Leading Base in Mexico

Nine months as Base Country Lead Mexico taught me more about people than about crypto.

I came in with a mandate to build Coinbase's L2 presence in Mexico from scratch. What that actually meant in practice: breakfast meetings with fintech founders, late night Spaces with traders, DeFi workshops with developers building products most people hadn't heard of yet, and partnership conversations with VCs watching the space carefully from the sidelines.

No two audiences spoke the same language, not literally but professionally. A DeFi developer wants to talk about infrastructure and composability. A fintech CEO wants to talk about regulatory risk and product market fit. A trader wants to talk about fees and UX. A creator wants to talk about reach and community. Learning to translate the same Base thesis into something that resonated with each of these groups was the actual job.

What I kept coming back to: the work of building human relationships cannot be automated. You can airdrop tokens, run ads, publish documentation. But you cannot replace the moment when someone trusts you enough to introduce you to their network because you showed up for them consistently.

Toward the end of my time at Base, the direction shifted: from an ecosystem approach to a product approach, specifically around the Base App and trading. That was a real challenge. My role transformed almost overnight from partnership builder to growth marketer for a consumer product. I adapted, because that's what the role required.

But what stays with me, lo bailado nadie me lo quita, is the ecosystem built during those months. The developers who got their first grant. The fintech that integrated USDC payments because of a meeting at a breakfast table. The creators who started talking about onchain for the first time.

Building those relationships, one conversation at a time, is the actual work. The strategy docs, the growth metrics, the product launches: none of it holds without the human foundation underneath.