Skip to main content
← Writing

Why I moved from Civil Engineering to AI automation

Yan Cruz·March 2026·5 min read

Some people pick a lane early and stay in it. I picked three.

I started in Civil Engineering because I wanted to build things — real things, infrastructure, systems that people rely on. What I did not expect was that the most interesting problems I would encounter were not about concrete or hydrology. They were about how projects fail, how teams communicate, and how decisions get made under uncertainty.

That gap between technical execution and human systems is where I have spent most of my career since. It is why I ended up at Bloomhaus VC, working with early-stage founders who are doing the impossible task of turning an idea into an organization. And it is why I built iDO! — because the access problem is real, and someone needs to work on it.

What changed

When AI tools started becoming genuinely useful for automation — not just impressive demos but actually reliable tools for real workflows — I started applying them to everything: document processing, transcription, extraction, analysis. The skills transferred directly from engineering: decompose the problem, understand the failure modes, test systematically.

What I am building now

Four projects live right now, each one an experiment in a different intersection: macOS utilities, SaaS products, ML pipelines, and entrepreneurship infrastructure. The common thread is that I build things I want to exist, and then I open them up.

If you are building something at a similar intersection and want to think together, reach out.

Back to all writing →