About

My first business lesson came on a street corner in Miami, where my friend Manny and I sold mangos as kids. When the police walked up and asked Manny where we got them, he took off running. I learned a few lessons about business that day.

The first business I co-founded was Catopia, a cat bed and breakfast that's still running today. It didn't make me rich. It did deepen my joy in building, and early on it showed me that I learn and perform best when I'm a little over my head.

Both have stayed true ever since.

I started building early: websites in high school, and my first paying clients in college. In college I also traded a campus bookstore job for night shifts at a traffic school. I started on the phones and left a few years later as director of call center operations. Then came a family-owned promotional products company, where I ran programs for Fortune 500 brands like Coca-Cola and Clorox and left as general manager.

I joined Interline Brands, a $1.4B distributor with more than 3,000 people, the day Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. In my first 30 days I built its community and customer response program with the C-suite, then ran it for five years while rising to director of marketing and corporate sales. Then I co-founded CoWork Jax and One Spark, a crowdfunding festival that grew to more than 320,000 people downtown. One Spark was wild, and it ended hard. I learned as much from the ending as from the growth... probably more.

The first half of my career was go-to-market, for my own companies and for billion-dollar enterprises. The second half has been operations. I co-founded Semi Exact, a direct-to-consumer company that became part of MRCA, and today I'm MRCA's COO. I also lead our work in applied AI. I believe AI's real value shows up in how a company runs, not in how many pilots it launches, and I'd rather help people use it well than watch from the sidelines.

Almost every role I've taken, I walked in without the "perfect" background, and it turned out better than expected. Manufacturing without a manufacturing background. Portfolio operations without a private equity background. Grit, perhaps. Stubbornness, likely. What closed the gap was never confidence. It was trusting God, asking a lot of questions, listening to the people who had been doing the work for years, and building systems that hold up when I'm not in the room.

Faith is the foundation of my life. When I volunteered at church with my great friend Matt, he said I was acting as an executive pastor. I thought I was just helping out.

I write about that here and on LinkedIn: how organizations actually run, where trust comes from, and what changes when AI joins the team.

These days home is the Pacific Northwest. When I'm not working, I'm usually outside: hiking, trail running, cycling and skiing. Those that know me know I echo the saying... there's no bad weather, there's just bad gear. I've found the same is true of most companies.

A few true things

• I once spent more than a year on the road, working remotely across the country.
• An elk once walked five feet behind me during a video call.
• I've skied from the top of Mount St. Helens.
• I've walked with penguins in Patagonia.
• I've been asked to leave a company I co-founded. Watching what happened next from the outside was harder than leaving.
• I ran at least a mile every day for three years. I stopped on purpose, at Camp Muir, during Seattle's record heat wave. It seemed as good a time as any.
• I haven't missed a month on skis since December 2021.

The streaks taught me more about leadership than the summits did: show up every day, and you're ready when the big days come.

I don't like writing about myself. It always feels a little strange. So I asked the AI team I work with every day to describe me, from what I've shared and how I work. I checked every line for accuracy. The words are theirs.

In someone else's words

Elton Rivas has built companies from nothing and run them at scale, which is rarer than it sounds. As COO of MRCA, a group of manufacturers and consumer brands, he leads operations, people, technology and M&A, and builds its applied AI himself.

His range is wide. He helped lead Interline Brands, a $1.4B distributor, from catalog to ecommerce. He co-founded One Spark, a festival that drew more than 320,000 people. He co-founded Semi Exact and saw it through to its sale to MRCA.

Working with him, a few things stand out. He wants the true version over the better story. He decides fast once the options are clear, and he takes good pushback without ego. He leads from faith and is an endurance athlete at heart.

If you're building something, I'd like to hear about it.

Christian. Husband. Thinker. Builder. Adventurer. Human.