Cristian Álvarez: tech entrepreneur, musician, and founder of NYCRIS

My name is Cristian Álvarez. In music I go by Cris DAM. I was born in Medellín on November 18, 1998 with what I'd call a factory defect: I can't do something without wanting to understand how it works. I never learned to consume passively.

From the moment my family got our first computer — I was around seven — what drew me in wasn't using things, it was reverse-engineering them. I learned through YouTube, forums and documentation; I started uploading my own videos to share what I was learning and built my first pages with WordPress and HTML. My family moved often, which forced me to be more sociable than I naturally am: finding the thread quickly in each new place was training I didn't choose but am genuinely grateful for.

Music arrived at ten or eleven and I've never managed — or wanted — to leave it behind. I produced, mixed, wrote and collaborated. With Shennay we crossed a million organic streams and I experienced firsthand what it feels like when your songs start playing in the places. And also what it feels like when that moment slips through your fingers because you didn't know how to manage it: we didn't register what was ours, didn't collect what we should have, and bad contracts did their thing. It was an expensive lesson I don't forget — and one that taught me a business without systems loses even when it looks like it's winning.

At seventeen I co-founded Qué Código with Edinson Tique. What started in his living room ended up building technology at scale — including the complete infrastructure of an investment bank. Years of learning how to make other people's businesses profitable, understanding how companies actually work, and eventually realizing I wanted to build something of my own.

That something took shape after Loro Musical, a distributor where I served as Director of Operations and saw up close how systems fail when the business outgrows the operation: chaotic reporting, royalties that never arrived, zero transparency. I learned the problem wasn't only the music industry — it was any business that loses reservations, calls, or customers because processes aren't clear. That's where I started designing what I later registered as NYCRIS.

Today I'm Founder and CEO of NYCRIS. NYCRIS handles WhatsApp and calls in your tone, your menu, and your rules — no reservation gets lost while you're on the floor. The Meta add-on gives you social reports and content recommendations; you publish. I operate between Spain and Medellín. And I still make music as Cris DAM because I can't help it.

Timeline

From Medellín to NYCRIS

1998

The Medellín kid who wanted to understand how things worked (1998–2010)

I was born on November 18, 1998 in Medellín. From a very young age I got bored unless I was making or understanding something — I always needed to know how things worked, not just use them. My family moved fairly often, and what felt like an inconvenience as a kid turned out to be quiet training: changing schools, making new friends each time, adapting fast. When I was around seven, our first computer arrived and the screen became my laboratory. I wasn't interested in consuming games or programs — I wanted to figure out how they were built. I dug into YouTube, programming forums and documentation to understand how websites worked, and started posting my own videos explaining what I was learning — essentially content creation before the term existed. Back then, people who did this would meet up on Skype or grab ice cream at the mall; nobody called us YouTubers or influencers, we were just people who liked sharing what we knew online. I built my first pages with WordPress and then HTML with PHP, and I remember exactly the feeling when the first one worked: there were no more limits on what I could create. That feeling never left.

2010

Virtual DJ, Fruity Loops, and a million streams (2010–2016)

At ten or eleven I asked for a drum kit for Christmas and music took over everything. Virtual DJ for mixing in front of the family, Fruity Loops for my first beats — none of which ever went public, but that wasn't the point — and constant ear training between rock, ballads, and electronic music. I studied music production and DJing alongside secondary school. I did high school at Institución Educativa Aures in Robledo: a modern school with iMacs, film cameras, and an after-school media project called AULAB where we produced web series and multimedia content. In my final year I served as director of the project, and it was there I understood that managing teams and projects came naturally to me — when almost everything depends on you, you learn to be resourceful and self-taught out of necessity. Video editing, image work, audio-visual sound design: everything I know in those areas came from there. It was also at school, through a classmate, that I met Rubén Marín (Shennay) and Alexander Aguirre (Brauggen), my closest friends to this day. With Shennay we went all in on urban music: releases, a million organic streams, shows at clubs and towns, and front-row seats to the early days of J Balvin, Feid, SOG, Kevin Roldán and labels like Digital Records, Kapital Music, and Golpe a Golpe. We were living what felt like the dream. But the industry is brutal when you don't know how to navigate it: we didn't register the songs that were ours, didn't collect what we should have, and bad contracts did the rest. Sometimes the moment arrives before the preparation is ready to handle it — that lesson marked me permanently. Brauggen, meanwhile, was something else: we'd spend hours talking about music, go play tennis, make mashups and DJ sets at his place when he got his first controller. I've always considered him a better musician than me — he's too creative and obsessive not to be. Over the years he got into marketing too and we ended up collaborating on more and more projects.

2015

Qué Código: from a living room to an investment bank's infrastructure (2015–2021)

Late 2015, just finishing high school, I came across Edinson Tique in a Latin American programming group on Facebook. Pure coincidence: he lived fifteen minutes away on foot. We started talking, swapped knowledge and ideas, and in early 2016 co-founded Qué Código. Tique was exceptionally strong in programming; I handled the creative side. We made a good team. What began literally in his living room grew into dozens of websites and web applications for all kinds of clients. We also built MindFY — an online school where experts ran courses — our first proper product of our own. We worked alongside RutaN on the Medellín startup ecosystem, co-created spaces for business and technology development, helped drive the WordPress Medellín community, and contributed to what is now known as Aburrá Valley, including helping incubate startups that are still operating today like ePayco and HostingFácil. Years of pushing hard with clients over content and payments, learning how to make other people's businesses profitable, understanding that behind every project there's a real business with all its implications. The biggest project came in early 2020: building the entire technology infrastructure for an investment bank. A year and a half, fully dedicated to that single project, surviving the pandemic through sheer work. At some points we were practically living together just to get everything done — one of the most intense and formative periods of my life, as much for what we learned about finance as for the technology. When it ended, we decided to stop: we wanted to stop building only for others and start creating something of our own, something with real lasting value.

2022

Loro Musical, NYCRIS, and the road to Spain (2022–present)

After a sabbatical I genuinely needed, music came calling again. I was restarting things with Shennay and we were planning to launch an independent label we were going to call VIBRAS — there's a pact between us to get that name tattooed: he already has it; I still owe mine — when he introduced me to Andrés Morales, a bachata artist from the city. The collaboration between the two of them never materialized, but that meeting led somewhere else: I ended up partnering with Andrés and his wife María to continue building Loro Musical, a distributor they had started months earlier that had a lot of things to sort out. As Director of Operations, the first job was getting distribution to work properly and making sure artists' royalties actually arrived — no room to think about growing until the foundations were solid. As we solved problems we got better: we worked with names like Grupo Origen, José Mogollón, Grupo Climaxx, and Leonardo Marín, and got placement on tracks from Bellakath, Dani Flow, Yeison Jiménez, Luis Alfonso, and Pipe Bueno. Brauggen joined the team too and helped us move numbers. I learned an enormous amount from that time — the industry from the inside, how distribution actually works, what really sits behind a track on Spotify. But in parallel I started designing a different product: NYCRIS, built for hospitality businesses that lose reservations and calls when the team is on the floor. We parted ways with Loro in mid-2023; in August of that year I registered NYCRIS and started the first tests. In 2024 I went back to work with Loro to close that chapter properly, and by the end of the year we went fully separate ways — in business, the motivation can be there without the chemistry, and that's what happened. I relocated strategically to Spain to operate across Europe and Latin America, talked with Brauggen for several weeks, and proposed he join as a partner in NYCRIS. He said yes. Together we're working on solidifying the model, improving the technology, and growing the team with people committed to the mission.

The mission I've had clear with NYCRIS: no reservation gets lost while you're serving. WhatsApp and calls in your tone, your menu, and your rules; the Meta add-on for social reports and content recommendations — you publish. And music — as Cris DAM — keeps going, because I never abandoned it: I just transformed it.