Felipe Labbé
I have spent thirty years in rooms where decisions get made. What is missing is almost never information. What is missing is someone to frame the question, hold the criteria, and carry the discomfort of saying the answer is not the one anyone hoped for.
Chilean, based in Mexico City. An engineer by training and by reflex. I write here about how hard decisions actually get made inside companies, with what I have seen work and what I have seen fail.
I grew up watching people work with their hands, and it shaped how I think about business.
My family has run a leather workshop for almost fifty years, Atelier Labbé. That is where I learned what no course teaches: a business stands on craft and on cash, and growing without cash is just another way of closing.
Then came eighteen years at a technology multinational, including the job of opening its operation in Chile from nothing. I founded an analytics firm and sold it. I advised a regional telecommunications group for a decade. And today I am building a boutique strategy firm with my daughter.
Three countries, two business cultures and one stubborn conclusion: technology is almost never the problem.
What I am doing now
Several hats, one craft.
- Founding partnerLadibu
A boutique strategy, technology and data firm, cofounded with Jimena Labbé. Diagnostics for hard decisions, strategic advisory, and instruments of our own.
- Founding partnerDigiCars
A platform connecting car buyers with dealerships in Mexico. Under construction.
- AdvisorCorporate advisory
A decade advising a regional telecommunications group on industry vertical strategy, working at the general management level across several countries.
- Board member8B and Atelier Labbé
A Mexican family house working in leather since 1975, under a different name in its early decades. It survived the arrival of Chinese products and the entry of international brands into the country. In 2020, with department stores closed and nobody buying luxury leather goods, 8B was born: a board game line sold direct to consumers, to reach people confined at home. My son Pablo runs it today. I sit on both boards, working on growth, governance and generational transition. It is the table where I am most useful: the craft is already proven and what needs ordering is what comes next.
- MentorEndeavor network
Working with founders of high growth companies on scaling and regional expansion.
- AlsoOther boards and advisory mandates
I work alongside general managers in technology, services and healthcare companies. I do not name them here: discretion is part of what gets hired.
The newsletter · Before You Decide
Every two weeks, one decision looked at closely.
A short piece, the kind you read in five minutes: a decision I watched go well or badly, what held it together or pulled it apart, and what you can take to your own table. No trend lists and no predictions about artificial intelligence.
What you will not find here
No identifiable client, no one else’s numbers, no conversation that happened in confidence. When a story is useful, it gets abstracted until no one can be recognized. It is the only way to write in public without betraying the room.
Subscribe
The first issue goes out this autumn. Write to me and I will add you to the list.
Every two weeks. No advertising and no shared lists. You can leave whenever you want.
What I wrote last
The archive, open.
- Coming soonArtificial intelligence can recommend. The signature cannot be delegated.
If nobody can sign a decision with their name, that decision is not ready to be automated. A three question test, out of the closing question of a panel at EGADE.
Contact
If there is a decision on the table, let us talk for thirty minutes.
No proposal involved. If there turns out to be work that makes sense, we discuss it. If there is not, I say so.