Leading the AI transformation in Houston — Founder of CiteHQ.io, Houston's first English/Spanish AEO/GEO digital marketing agency.
David Maruyama founded CiteHQ.io to lead the AI transformation in Houston — the city's first English/Spanish AEO/GEO digital marketing agency. Two decades before AI search existed, he was already inside the two technology shifts that built the world it now runs on: the IP revolution that became the technical foundation of today's internet, and the mobile handset revolution that carried the world from Nokia to BlackBerry to the iPhone.
Financial discipline was not a concept David learned in a classroom first. He spent five years in banking before business school — two years at Bank of Tokyo in Miami, then three years at Merrill Lynch managing international private client relationships across Latin America — the discipline of being accountable for other people's money before he was ever accountable for his own P&L. Execution, at that level, leaves no room for a narrative that does not match the number in the account.
Columbia Business School then gave him the strategic frameworks to generalize that discipline — the difference between a market correction and a market ending, between a company built on real demand and one built on a narrative. Leading through a technology inflection point takes the same four things every time, regardless of the wave. Financial discipline, to survive the uncertainty before the market agrees on what is real. Results-focused execution — a number at the end of the quarter, not a narrative. Enough business creativity to see the opportunity before anyone else has named it. And the leadership to move an organization through the change before the data makes the case obvious. David has led through two of these waves already.
In 1999, David joined Lucent Technologies at the exact moment the telecommunications industry was replacing a century of circuit-switched infrastructure with Internet Protocol — the packet-switched standard that every website, app, and AI platform in use today still runs on. This was not an incremental upgrade. It was a wholesale rebuild of how information moved, carrier by carrier, network by network, and it was the single most consequential infrastructure shift in the history of telecommunications.
That shift hit Latin America with particular force. Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, one government after another dismantled decades-old telecom monopolies and opened wireless markets to private competition for the first time. David was directly involved in that deregulation process across Central America, the Caribbean, Colombia, and Venezuela — selling and implementing the wireless network infrastructure that newly licensed operators needed to actually launch, market by market, as each one opened. He had a close view of the same pattern unfolding across the rest of Latin America as well — Brazil's breakup of the state monopoly Telebrás, Mexico, Peru, Argentina — watching country after country repeat the same sequence: state monopoly, deregulation, a scramble to build the network before a competitor could.
Independently sourcedIn November 2003, Costa Rica's national newspaper La Nación reported on Lucent's formal appeal of a decision by ICE, Costa Rica's state telecom authority, to award a national broadband contract to a competitor. David is named in that coverage as Lucent's representative, raising the process objections that led to the appeal. It is one contract, in one country, on one specific day — but it is a real, independently published, and still-findable record of this specific chapter, not a claim resting on memory alone.
David served as Business Development Director for Lucent's Central America and Caribbean region during the years this shift was won or lost in the market. He grew Voice over IP — the technology that moved telephone calls off legacy circuit-switched lines and onto the same IP networks carrying the emerging internet — from zero to 13% regional market share in twelve months, at a time when most carriers still doubted IP voice would ever be reliable enough to replace the network they had spent a century building. Growth like that does not come from a strategy memo. It requires leading a regional team through genuine skepticism and being personally accountable for the number at the end of every quarter — not a forecast, a result.
The internet's new IP foundation created the conditions for a second revolution to follow close behind it: the transformation of the mobile phone from a voice-only device into the primary computer most people on earth now carry. David watched this unfold from inside the infrastructure industry that had to keep rebuilding itself under each new generation of devices — first for a market defined by a handful of Finnish-designed Nokia handsets, then for BlackBerry, which turned the mobile phone into a business-critical tool by putting email and enterprise communication into a pocket for the first time.
Then, in 2007, the iPhone reset the definition of a mobile device entirely — turning phones into computers, and forcing every carrier and every equipment supplier to rebuild its data network strategy within a single product cycle. Having spent years inside the network infrastructure that every one of those devices depended on, David understood something most people watching from the outside did not: the handset gets the headlines, but the network underneath it decides whether the revolution actually works. Seeing that clearly, before the market agreed it mattered, was an exercise in business creativity as much as technical judgment — the kind of pattern recognition that only comes from having been inside the infrastructure the last time a category was rebuilt from the ground up.
That same mobile infrastructure became the foundation the entire app economy runs on today — every app, every screen tap, every notification riding on the network built during that shift. That foundation is now converging with AI directly, as voice prompts and spoken commands become as natural an interface as the touchscreen once was. It is the same underlying pattern appearing again, one layer up.
Both revolutions collided with the market's own excess. The NASDAQ peaked at 5,048 in March 2000 and lost 78% of its value by October 2002 — roughly $5 trillion erased from the technology sector in under three years. Pets.com, Webvan, eToys, and hundreds of companies that had been front-page news eighteen months earlier simply stopped existing. Telecom capital spending, which had funded the IP buildout at a breakneck pace, disappeared almost overnight, because the demand growth that had justified it had been wildly overestimated.
David held P&L responsibility for a $100 million-plus regional business through the worst of it — financial discipline in its most literal form, holding a P&L accountable when the market hands you every excuse not to. Revenue that had been built on selling capacity for a boom that assumed infinite growth had to be rebuilt on selling outcomes to buyers who had just watched their industry lose three-quarters of its value and were done buying hype. He repositioned an entire sales organization from product-transactional selling — here is a switch, here is its spec sheet — to solution-based selling: here is the specific business problem this solves, and here is how we prove it. Convincing an entire organization to change how it sold, under that kind of pressure, was a leadership act, not a policy update — and it kept revenue alive through two rounds of corporate restructuring while competitors around him disappeared entirely.
The companies that survived the correction and went on to define the next twenty years were, without exception, the ones solving a real problem rather than riding a narrative. Google indexed the web better than anyone else and made money doing it. PayPal solved a payments problem so well that eBay bought it in 2002 rather than compete with it. LinkedIn, founded in 2003, solved professional networking. None of them needed the bubble to succeed. They needed the correction to clear the field of companies that did. What set them apart was not the technology itself, but how precisely they used it: introducing products that genuinely increased effectiveness, efficiency, productivity, and real value for the customer — backed by a strategy disciplined enough to hold both short-term survival and long-term positioning at the same time.
David is watching the identical shape unfold again with AI, at a scale that dwarfs both the IP buildout and the mobile handset revolution combined. The infrastructure buildout is happening now — compute, models, and data infrastructure being built faster than most organizations can plan around. The narrative excess is happening now too — AI slapped onto product descriptions and press releases the same way "e-commerce enabled" and "internet-ready" got stapled onto everything in 1999, whether it meant anything or not. And the correction, when it comes for the companies that added AI as a keyword rather than a capability, will look exactly like 2001 looked for the companies that added ".com" to their name and little else.
To be precise about what this pattern recognition is and is not: it is not a claim of deep technical expertise in how large language models work. It is the same discipline that read the last two cycles correctly — knowing which infrastructure investments are real, which claims are narrative, and which businesses will still be standing when the correction comes. That distinction is exactly what CiteHQ.io is built to sell.
He knows what it costs to keep a business alive through the part of the cycle where the hype dies and only the substance is left standing. That is why he founded CiteHQ.io — Houston's first English/Spanish AEO/GEO digital marketing agency, built to help Houston companies become the answer AI systems cite, in English and in genuine, native Spanish, rather than another link in a list nobody reads anymore. Every CiteHQ engagement starts with a measured citation-share baseline across six AI platforms — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini, and Claude — and ends with a documented, scored improvement. Not a promise. A number, the same way it has always been.
He has led through this shape twice already — first as an operator inside someone else's company. This third time, he owns it fully, and it is not speculation.
SourceLa Nación (Costa Rica), "Lucent apelará decisión de ICE," November 15, 2003. nacion.com/el-pais/lucent-apelara-decision-de-ice
David Maruyama is Founder & CEO of CiteHQ.io, Houston's first English/Spanish AEO/GEO digital marketing agency. He holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, spent five years in banking prior to Columbia — at Bank of Tokyo in Miami and then Merrill Lynch — and spent 1999–2005 at Lucent Technologies during the IP infrastructure revolution and the dot-com correction that followed. Read more about David's full background on About Us, the fuller vision behind this work in The Bigger Picture Behind CiteHQ.io, or the full venture-building record in Building Things That Didn't Exist Yet.