Cristian Álvarez: tech entrepreneur, musician, and founder of Sleem
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, without knowing it then, ended up being the seed of Sleem.
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 came through Loro Musical, a music distributor where I served as Director of Operations and saw the systemic failures of distribution up close: chaotic reporting, royalties that never arrived, total lack of transparency. The exact same problems that had hurt me years earlier as an artist — now I was seeing them from the other side of the system. That's where I started designing the core of what I registered in August 2023: Sleem.
Today I'm Founder and CEO of Sleem. I operate between Spain and Medellín with a goal that has never changed: independent artists stop being treated as products and start building profitable businesses. Transparency, technology, and a genuinely human team — those are the three pillars. Official launch is May 2026. And I still make music as Cris DAM because I can't help it.