The track record behind CiteHQ.io — financial discipline, results, leadership, and business creativity across two decades of venture-building.
David Maruyama founded Hexagram Advisors in 2007 to do one thing: structure and build technology ventures in markets that had not been mapped yet — mobile money, prepaid wireless, cross-border payments, retail telecommunication services, and virtual mobile operators across the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Every engagement CiteHQ.io runs today rests on the same instinct proven across that professional experience: find the real opportunity before the market agrees it exists, then execute with the discipline to prove it.
Four pillars show up in every venture in this professional experience, in every market, regardless of the product. Financial discipline — a number, not a forecast. Results focus — proof within months, not years. Leadership — moving a team or a partner through uncertainty before the outcome is obvious. And business creativity — seeing the angle a conventional operator would walk past. What follows is the record, not the résumé.
Some of that discipline came from further back than any classroom or trading floor. David grew up inside a Japanese heritage that treats discipline not as a virtue to aspire to but as a baseline — the assumption that mastery comes from repetition, that the work is done properly or it is not done, and that mental focus is not a talent some people have and others don't, but a muscle you are expected to train. That upbringing also gave him a competitiveness that has nothing to do with beating the person next to him and everything to do with a private, unforgiving standard: did the venture actually solve the problem, or did it just produce something that looked like a solution. Every venture in this professional experience has been judged against that standard before anyone else ever saw the numbers. And alongside the discipline came something people rarely pair with it — a real appetite for business creativity, for finding the unconventional entry point a more conventional operator would walk past. Tuyo Móvil succeeded in Costa Rica not by outspending the state monopoly — Canal 7's capital and infrastructure made the venture possible, but ICE still held every structural advantage — but because the strategy found a commercial angle ICE was incapable of seeing. Discipline made the execution precise. Creativity is what made the opportunity visible in the first place.
Before the Telefónica and Mastercard joint venture, there was Phone1. Phone1 began as a long-distance calling provider operating through public phones — a simple, declining business model in a market where mobile was about to make public telephony irrelevant. David structured Phone1's evolution away from that model entirely, building a strategy around mobile-to-mobile transactions that leveraged the banking platform of the Gilinski Group, the Colombian financial conglomerate — turning a phone company into a channel for financial transactions before most of the industry had connected those two ideas. The strategy produced a genuine first: the first international money transfer transaction executed from a mobile phone in the United States to an ATM in Colombia — proof the banking-platform approach worked in practice, not just on paper. That same instinct — using an existing banking platform to move money over a mobile network rather than building new payment rails from nothing — became the template for what came next.
When Telefónica and Mastercard needed a joint venture — named Wanda — to bring mobile money to a market that had never used it, David built the go-to-market strategy and the execution that took the concept from paper to rapid, measurable adoption within its first months — proof that a market will adopt a new financial behavior quickly if the reason to change outweighs the friction of learning something new. Financial discipline structured the deal so the economics worked before the first transaction happened; results focus is the speed of that early adoption itself, not a projection of what the venture might eventually do.
Through 2007 to 2009, David launched a prepaid mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) built specifically for the US Hispanic community — a market the major national carriers were structurally unequipped to serve, treated as an afterthought rather than a core customer base. The venture signed a network agreement with Verizon to carry its traffic and launched in 10 markets — Dallas, Houston, Raleigh-Durham, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Boston, Providence, West Palm Beach, Orlando, and Tampa — a footprint spanning Texas, the Carolinas, New England, and Florida, chosen specifically for Hispanic population density rather than simply following where the national carriers already had a strong retail presence. It was also the first in the category to include calls to and from Mexico as regular mobile minutes rather than premium international charges — a product decision built around how the target customer actually used a phone, not around how the industry was used to pricing an international call.
Separately, and around the same period, David partnered with a Venezuelan investment group to build and develop a retail distribution network for the US Hispanic market — physical points of sale offering both telecom and payment services in neighborhoods the national carriers rarely reached directly. This was a distinct venture from the MVNO, not the same project under a different name: its own distribution strategy, its own retail partnerships, its own commercial model. The network grew to 10 retail stores across Miami, West Palm Beach, and Boca Raton, generating more than $5.0 million in revenue within 18 months. It was sold after 30 months — a complete cycle from build to exit, not a strategy that stalled before it proved anything.
Both were B2C businesses in the truest sense, won or lost one retail transaction at a time, in a market where trust and language mattered as much as price. Leadership here meant building two separate distribution efforts from nothing, in a segment the rest of the industry had decided was not worth the effort — which is exactly the kind of business creativity that turns an overlooked market into two real, revenue-generating businesses instead of zero.
From 2010 to 2013, David served as General Manager of Tuyo Móvil, Costa Rica's first private competitor to the state telecom monopoly ICE in mobile telephony. Canal 7, Costa Rica's leading broadcaster, provided the capital and the promotional infrastructure. David made the launch possible: he assembled the telecommunications equipment, structured the commercial and launch strategy, built the working team, set up the distribution chain, negotiated with mobile handset suppliers, and led every action through to launch.
David also worked directly with the SIM card manufacturer to build a genuine innovation for its time: displaying the prepaid account balance directly on the phone screen, on the basic Nokia-era handsets that still made up most of the market. Few prepaid carriers anywhere had built anything like it in 2010 — it required custom programming on the SIM card itself, not an app, since these phones had none. For the customer, the result was simple and real: they could see exactly what they had left without dialing a balance-check code, years before that kind of visibility became standard.
Tuyo Móvil also integrated Canal 7's television content directly to mobile users — turning the parent broadcaster's programming into a product advantage ICE had no way to match, since ICE had no television network behind it. It was the same instinct that shaped Phone1 years earlier: rather than building a content platform from nothing, the strategy took an asset that already existed and moved it onto the network Tuyo Móvil was building.
Tuyo Móvil's brand launched in a controlled release on May 31, 2011, with full public prepaid sales beginning two weeks later on June 15. Costa Rica's national newspaper La Nación reported that the new carrier had signed more than 500 lines within two weeks of going on sale, naming it the first real competitor ICE had faced in cellular telephony.
By December of that year, Tuyo Móvil was expanding into international calling, with David quoted in La Nación as the company's general manager, discussing a service built to help Costa Rican families reach relatives abroad over the holidays. Under David's leadership, Tuyo Móvil reached 10% market penetration and positive EBITDA within nine months of launch — a result built against an entrenched, decades-old state monopoly with none of its infrastructure advantages, achieved entirely on execution.
What emerges across a first mobile operator, a mobile money joint venture, two ventures built for the US Hispanic market, and nearly two decades of advisory work spanning the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean is that the frameworks for building something from nothing do not really change. Identify precisely who the real customer is. Build the offer that earns their trust faster than the incumbent can react. Measure everything, not just the metrics that make the story sound good. Adjust the plan in weeks, not quarters. Hold the venture accountable to a number, not a narrative.
Across Phone1, Wanda (the Telefónica and Mastercard joint venture), two separate ventures built for the US Hispanic market, and Tuyo Móvil, the same four pillars carried every result. Financial discipline, structuring each deal so the numbers worked before the first customer signed up. Results focus, proving the model within months rather than years. The leadership to move partners and teams through markets that had never done this before. And the business creativity to see an opening — a banking platform, an underserved community, a monopoly's blind spot — before anyone else did. That professional experience is the foundation CiteHQ.io is built on.
That same discipline is being applied now to a new kind of zero: the moment when an entire category of businesses discovers that the way their customers find them has quietly changed, and almost nobody has built the playbook yet for how to compete in it. It is the same work it has always been. Only the terrain is new. Those same four pillars are the main allies for navigating the dynamics of major change and intense competition.
What runs through every one of these ventures — the MVNO, the retail network, Wanda, Phone1 — is proximity to the actual consumer: not selling infrastructure to a carrier, but earning trust one subscriber, one transaction, one storefront at a time. That built a specific kind of B2C know-how — reading what an individual customer actually needs, not what a corporate buyer signs off on — a different kind of proof than infrastructure work provides. It is exactly the kind CiteHQ.io is built to deliver today: visibility measured by whether real people actually trust and choose a brand, not just whether the infrastructure behind it works.
Read more about David's full background on About Us, the larger vision behind the work in The Bigger Picture Behind CiteHQ.io, or the Lucent and internet-infrastructure chapter in I Was Inside the Machine the Last Time This Happened.