Sebastián Moreno Cruz (Bogotá, 35 years old) is a Latin American leader in the fields of education and technology. He has been recognized multiple times by Andi, the Bogota Chamber of Commerce or CESA, as an entrepreneur who is transforming Colombia through the work he has done with his company Critertec, changing the way people learn, teach and develop through literacy and digital appropriation programs.
Moreno grew up in Sopó, Cundinamarca, and is the son of Tomás, a businessman, and Patricia, a teacher, deeply committed to his education and social work. After completing his studies, he studied business administration at CESA and did his professional internship at Adidas Colombia; learned business English in Boston, USA; and I went to live in a hacker house, in San Francisco, to discover the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley.
He learned great lessons from these experiences. For example, he declares himself against toxic entrepreneurship. “This whole Elon Musk model of working 19 hours, no social life and poor quality sleep is the most unnatural and harmful thing a person can have as a role model.” He believes that a businessman must learn to balance the dimensions that make up his life, to surround himself well, to judge people on their achievements and to move quickly and confidently from words to actions. This is not to say that his path has been easy. Quite the contrary.
His first company, Mett Colombia, was born in 2014 with the aim of creating technological solutions to centralize and streamline the processes involved in a sale: “To increase revenue, we became a ‘here we do everything the customer needs with data and technology,'” he recalls. By 2016, the company was unclear and far from breaking even. Moreno collapsed from stress and shut down Mett.
After attending the World Business Forum in New York, an opportunity presented itself that would change his course. “A cousin, Santiago Arreaza, was looking for a company to develop a project with the Ministry of Education in Bogota and we saw that we could do it together. The idea was to teach virtual reality to 80 public school children in vulnerable contexts. It turned out to be a spectacular experience,” Moreno recalls.
In a few months, he created a business model for the project. Along the way, he learned about teaching and hired a team of eight professionals from different disciplines to create an educational model. Together, they developed training paths that they believed could overcome “ten generations of mental blocks and limiting thoughts,” such as “I’m not capable” or “this is for people with better education.” This is how Critertec was born, a company that uses technology to redefine the role of students and teachers in the classroom, strengthening their abilities to build life projects.
In 2020, Critertec was already made up of 100 people, who taught 8,000 children and young people, from CP to 3rd grade, virtual reality, augmented reality, 360 content and programming. They do this with the “mindful experiential education” model, which promotes play and experimentation to then move on to understanding complex concepts. At the same time, they had programs with compensation funds across the country and with companies like Microsoft.
In other words, Moreno condensed into a single effort what he built as a person: his father’s business acumen, his mother’s love of education, the social work he did growing up with both of them, and even the escape rooms and board games which he says are his great passions and his inspiration for exploiting part of the gaming process, what is called gamification.
“What we learned from this process is that an inspired person, without “learned incompetence”, with active thinking and capacity for action, is capable of surpassing the World Bank figure which says that in Colombia it takes up to 11 generations for there to be social mobility in a family,” he emphasizes.
Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced all of Critertec’s customers to terminate their contracts, leading it to assume losses of nearly two million dollars and the inevitable obligation to reinvent itself. Moreno says this all happened on March 14, 2020: “My clients called me at 3 p.m. to cancel a deal and I got married at 5 p.m. Ana María, my wife, still makes fun of me because in all the wedding photos I look scared to death. That day, it also went from 100 to 14 employees.
The reinvention of Critertec
Oddly enough, the respite came from Microsoft and the needs that arose with the pandemic itself. Knowing Critertec’s work, they selected it to teach 100,000 teachers how to use Teams to deliver lessons. Moreno decided not to fall into the world of technological tutorials and to create transmedia narrative and educational experiences.
“We managed to navigate 2020 after a lot of upheaval, a lot of panic attacks and anxiety. For 2021, we started to be more strategic and formalize what we had learned,” he recalls. The company has changed its business model. It stopped working directly with schools and compensation funds and began creating programs and courses through alliances with companies and public entities in Mexico, Panama, Peru and Venezuela. It has become a creative studio that has changed the way people learn, teach and develop, through literacy and digital appropriation projects. Essentially, Moreno placed teachers at the center of the operation, transforming them from classroom dictators to designers of memorable educational experiences.
This change meets the needs of modern classrooms: to arouse curiosity so strong that the person cannot fall asleep without learning something new; learn to learn, so that the constant and accelerated evolution of technology is not an obstacle; encourage self-esteem so that the realities of the digital world, such as pornography or cyberbullyingdo not hinder the construction of life projects; and strengthen human relationships so that technology is an enrichment of experience and not its center.
Critertec has already reached more than 500,000 people in Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and Europe. And there is an alliance that they have already signed with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Dominican Institute of Communications to bring digital skills to an additional 100,000 people; another that they are about to launch with Canva, one of the most recognized online graphic design platforms in the world, to teach teachers across Latin America how to use the tool to create their own content; and one more with iGravity, a fund supported by the Swiss government, to develop artificial intelligence tools for teachers. To tackle these projects, it has 65 employees in Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Guatemala, Spain and Venezuela.
Moreno, who finds in his 3-year-old son Federico the motivation to continue working to transform education – to the point of writing four children’s books for him with the support of AI tools – speaks clearly about the future: “Critertec must continue to be that multinational company that manages to restore hope to Latin America. the future.
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