As General Manager for APAC at Spare-it, a US-based sustainability technology company, Jose Manuel Rodriguez Moreno has spent the past five years building out the firm’s Asia Pacific operation more or less from scratch.

During our hour-long conversation at his shared office in Quarry Bay, it transpires that it’s not his first time he’s built things in a new place.

Jose grew up in San Luis Potosí, a manufacturing city in central Mexico, and studied industrial engineering at Tecnológico de Monterrey. An exchange programme took him then to the University of Technology of Compiègne in France, and when the timing made an immediate return to class in Mexico impractical, he enrolled in a second 6-month exchange in Curitiba, Brazil, rather than wait around.

“I tend to be very intense sometimes,” he says, sporting a perma-grin. “And when I get an idea into my head, I have to do it.”

Curitiba made an impression — he talks about its architecture and city planning with a newborn-like fascination — and the pattern of building something somewhere unfamiliar slowly became part of the fabric.

“The first time you arrive to a new city, you don’t have friends, you don’t know where to go for coffee. After six months, life makes sense. That for me was always very fulfilling.”

After finishing his degree, he joined Grundfos, the Danish pump manufacturer, through its global graduate programme — a role that was partly chosen, he suspects, because of the international experience already on his CV.

In unsurprising fashion, Grundfos promptly sent him all around the world. Over the following three years he worked across Mexico, Denmark, and China, the last of these which he sought out after making Chinese friends in his second living experience in Europe. 6 months in Suzhou – and one experience of watching the lightning-fast construction of an apartment block after – and the thought of a longer-term relationship between Latin America and Asia came on the radar.

“I think we in Latin America are too inclined to the US or to North America,” he says. “We should start diversifying more.” Indeed, it is a point he has returned to. But not before going on a complete tangent into entrepreneurship.

His father, a neurologist, had identified a gap in provision for elderly patients — dementia rates were rising, suitable facilities were scarce — and asked if Jose wanted to build something around it. And so, Momentum, a day centre for senior care, in his grandmother’s former home, was born.

He is matter-of-fact about the process: he knew he was not the medical expert and did not try to be. His role was operational — recruiting the right clinicians, building the systems, creating a business that could run without him at the centre. “I made sure that I surrounded myself by experts,” he says.

Within one year, nothing became five day-centre employees catering to almost 25 people, and a clinic with almost 10 medical practitioners. But a forced closure through COVID ultimately meant that by 2019, Jose was ready for something that had been on his mind since his Grundfos days – Asia.

“I have always treated my career as being somewhat industry agnostic. How do I excel being the best person to contact whenever you need someone to go from zero to one?”

The decision to pursue an MBA in Hong Kong was a part of this plan, coming after concluding that the city offered a useful vantage point due to its proximity to mainland China, a favourable visa regime, and international recognition. Moreover, the programme’s Asia-focused curriculum — business cases built around Alibaba and Tencent rather than the American companies he was accustomed to — was also appealing.

Upon graduating, Jose stayed true to his global and entrepreneurial DNA, by joining Spare-it as one of the US company’s first hires outside the founding team. The brief was to build out Hong Kong, where Spare-it had secured an early contract with Swire Properties, and Jose has done exactly that — extending the company’s IoT-enabled sustainability platform across a growing portfolio of commercial buildings, while managing the full P&L for the region — all while engaging the Mexican community in Hong Kong as the Secretary General for the Mexican Chamber in, which he has since stepped back from.

What connects the different phases of his career — manufacturing consultancy, elder care, tech startup — seems disjointed. However, he describes it as being “industry agnostic”: focused on the question of how to build something that works, rather than on any particular sector.

And there are advantages to a journeyman career. Living and working across so many different places has, he thinks, made him quicker at reading people and contexts — better at understanding what others need without having to be told directly.

“Living abroad many times means having to be faster at empathising with people,” he says, “even if your language is not the same, even if the way you express emotions is not the same.” He pauses. “I think that was a very critical skill.”

He has a way of describing the experience of arriving somewhere new — no friends, no routines, everything to figure out — that makes it sound less like a challenge than an adventure. Once you know where to get coffee and where to find the supermarket and, in Suzhou, where to dance salsa on a Friday night, something has been built where nothing was before. The same logic applies to work. “I’m here to help people who want to build something from scratch, who have a big concept but don’t know how to implement,” he says. “That’s what I’m there for.”

As we finish up with coffee, I ask him how he thinks about taking risk for such an adventurous approach to his professional goals — particularly now, with a family and a city as expensive as Hong Kong.

“I think that risk can always be manageable,” he says while continuing his grin, “There will always be unpredictable things”. For him, it’s about hedging these risks, accumulating the buffer needed to ensure the wellbeing of his family. But outside of that, Jose insists full commitment to the cause: “Only if you give your all, I believe, will you be able to succeed,” And against someone who has endeavoured to do so repeatedly across three continents, it’s hard for me to argue.

Conversation with Jose Rodriguez (MBA, 2020), General Manager (APAC Office) of Spare-It, a US waste intelligence platform. He may be contacted via Linkedin.