Daniela Carvajalino: On Subtraction, Impact, and the Discipline of Choosing

Daniela cried. So did her sisters.

This was BizFest, the free youth entrepreneurship festival Daniela and her sisters, Karen and Stephanie, built in Colombia. The image people reach for when telling the story is of the packed arena, the lights, the sheer scale of the event. But the more revealing part of the story begins after the photograph. It concerns what Daniela decided she could no longer keep doing, including some of the things she had worked hardest to build.

Daniela's company, Biz Nation, is an e-learning platform focused on upskilling and reskilling across Latin America, with more than 100,000 students. It has expanded into corporate training across nine countries, and AI training is now its most requested offering.

The first BizFest was held in Cartagena, where the sisters are from, with roughly 1,000 students. Daniela calls that small now, an indication of how thoroughly her sense of proportion has changed. She and her sisters looked at that first gathering, decided the audience should be larger, and set their sights on Movistar Arena.

Then COVID happened, and an initiative predicated on assembling thousands of teenagers under one roof became effectively impossible. The sisters took that first big edition online instead, and around 100,000 people logged on, which Daniela still finds funny, because in Colombia at the time "people didn't have anything else to do." By the time they reached the arena in 2022, Daniela had picked up a good deal of doubt. "Maybe it was a mistake," she remembers thinking. People told the Carvajalino sisters they were crazy to try to fill an arena, and crazier still to make the event free; one man told them flatly that arenas are filled by Maluma. They went ahead anyway.

The photographs leave out other aspects of the business: a startup competition, seed capital, university and certification scholarships, and a job fair where a student with no professional network can start building one. Daniela is precise about the distinction between technological adoption and organizational transformation. The outcome she wants reaches past greater throughput toward a change in how an organization thinks: teams reconsider the problems they are solving, interrogate inherited assumptions, and stop treating headcount as the default mechanism for producing better results.

Daniela arrived at the Executive Program in November 2025 I at the center of how she understands her work; technology, in her formulation, is an amplifier. The person who recommended the program had told her, "Daniela, these people are like 10 years in the future." She already felt the pace of change outrunning everyone's expectations. What she did not anticipate was that one of the program's most useful connections would also be profoundly uncomfortable.

It came from Vivienne Ming, a neuroscientist, AI expert, and Singularity University faculty member. She told Daniela, "If we use AI and new technologies just to be faster, just to be more productive, just to feel like you have productivity superpowers, you're doing everything wrong."

Daniela heard it as a challenge to her own business.

"I know AI can make us smart. I know this can make us faster. But she was talking about something greater than that. How do you think beyond what you would usually think? How do you become a better person and impact the world in a better way? That was one of the questions I kept thinking about."

Biz Nation was already building AI training. Daniela could have returned home, expanded the offering, and likely produced a successful product. But viability was no longer a sufficient criterion. Daniela thought,"I cannot just be another AI training company. That's not enough. I need to make an impact."

One of the Executive Program's functions is refinement in addition to ideation. Daniela thinks entrepreneurs have 3,000 ideas on an ordinary day; a week at Singularity, she says, multiplies that by a factor of 10.

Daniela was preparing to leave Puerto Rico for Miami when she arrived at the program, and Biz Nation's AI work was already outgrowing its place inside the company. She says the program was "the final push that I needed to say, ‘I need to take this seriously.’" She handed off leadership of three departments she had been overseeing, bringing in new leaders to assume responsibilities long associated with her. She completed her move from Puerto Rico to Miami. She also stepped back from the presidency of Cartagena International School, the K–12 school her family built around entrepreneurship and financial education.The hardest part, she says, was prioritizing.The promise of exponential thinking is multiplicative: dramatically greater impact, reach, or capacity. But its practical demand is often subtractive. Before doing more, a leader may have to relinquish work she does well, and that others still expect her to own.

For Daniela, that was familial as well as organizational. Her sister Karen now runs BizFest in Colombia, leading every edition. 

Large corporations remain central to Biz Nation's business model. They have training budgets. At the opposite end of the market are small businesses that could benefit enormously from the same capabilities but often cannot afford them.

Rather than making the existing product incrementally cheaper, Biz Nation reconsidered who their target customer was. The company began using government and corporate grants to finance training for small businesses priced out of buying it directly. That was new after Singularity.

BizFest underwent a similar expansion. Before Singularity, it was one annual event. In 2026, the organization is running four editions in Colombia, with an edition in Miami planned for next year. Across 10 editions, the festival has drawn more than 210,000 attendees.

This means Daniela and her sisters are working in completely different ways than they ever did before. Her technique for using AI may be the most transferable idea from our conversation. Most people open an AI system and ask it for answers. Daniela asks it to construct the questions.

"Create a prompt that will interview you. Write some notes and say, okay, I went to Singularity University. My mind is all over the place. I want to do so many things. Interview me. Ask me 15 questions about where I am right now, and tell me exactly how you would approach this."

She feeds the system notes from whatever has challenged her assumptions, then dictates her responses instead of typing them. Speaking produces a different kind of material: less edited, more associative, closer to the way an unresolved problem actually exists in the mind.

Daniela blocks time for this kind of thinking every week, although she makes no attempt to romanticize the discipline. "It's extremely hard," she says. She protects those hours anyway: "These are times that are sacred."

That difficulty helps explain a recurring failure she observes in companies adopting AI: teams automate what is conspicuous, not what is consequential. They choose the things that are, in her words, “cool” and “flashy,” the tasks that make for an impressive demonstration instead of the processes putting the most pressure on the organization.

The same philosophy undergirds the school and the festival.For years, students are rewarded for producing correct answers to questions someone else has formulated. But in a world where answers are getting more abundant and cheaper to generate, the premium shifts toward framing the problem, evaluating evidence, recognizing a poor answer, and knowing what a good one should look like.

The sisters build those skills through entrepreneurship, at the school and at BizFest. The skills are useful whether or not a student ever starts a company.

Some of the most important lessons Daniela learned didn’t come from a classroom.

She and her sisters were six, seven, and eight years old in Barranquilla when they started a chocolate business with $15, going door to door to sell what they had made. The first knock was terrifying; the person on the other side might say no. But, Daniela says, "The second time it's like, you know what? You're going to buy. And the third time we were competing over who gets to make the person who said no say yes."

The lessons are about uncertainty, rejection, iteration, and persuasion. There’s agency in the discovery that an unfavorable first answer is information to act on, and rarely the final word.

Those doors still shape how the sisters move through the world. They are often the only women in the room, the youngest, and the only Latinas, which can be intimidating. But now, Daniela says, "I can walk into a room where I'm the only woman, Latina, whatever, I will feel comfortable." It is also why she and her sisters are so obsessed with giving other young people an education like theirs.

On September 8, 14,000 students filled the arena for free, in a building Daniela was once told could only be filled by musicians. Four weeks earlier, an earthquake had struck Colombia, and the sisters rebuilt the tenth edition around the recovery, calling it BizFest Solidario: La generación que reconstruye, the generation that rebuilds, with a goal of mobilizing 50,000 volunteer hours for affected communities and entrepreneurs. All three sisters were onstage, in the same wash of light that hides everything past the first few rows. They knew what was out there now.

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