I’m Rafa Ballestiero. Mindful cyborg, entrepreneur and writer.

I'm extremely lucky to consider myself native to many cultures. Born to a Uruguayo-Brazilian family, I was given the opportunity to call many places home: Boston during in my teenage years, London for university, Paris at the onset of my career and, after 555 days as a digital nomad, I have planted my flag in Barcelona.

Ever since I can remember, I've been fascinated by technology, philosophy and the human mind.

During my teenage years, I stumbled upon meditation through Headspace. Little did I know that this introduction to mindfulness would become a guiding light in my lifelong journey of self-discovery. Over the past decade, my mindfulness practice has evolved, yet I still consider myself a novice, continuously learning and growing.

At university, I discovered my passion for human-computer interaction while writing my Master's thesis on User Engagement. This ignited a fire within me to explore the intersection of technology and behavior science. A short year later, I co-founded Behale to help everyone build a fitness habit.

As a true technologist by both nature and nurture, I believe in the immense positive impact technology can have on our lives. Ever since university, I've been drawn to HCI — and always wanted to apply it for good. For a long time, I believed engagement was that good: a product worth building was a product people came back to. I now see it as the harm at the heart of the attention economy — the design outcome that ties our wanting to whatever happens to feel good in the moment, whether or not it serves us.

In early 2026, I sat my first ten-day Vipassana retreat. I came home with the first experiential understanding I've had of equanimity — and within hours, my phone began to undo the work. The platforms I'd spent a decade helping build don't merely fail to support equanimity; they are designed to close the very gap between sensation and reaction in which our agency lives.

That tension is what defines my work today. I call the response equanimitech: a design discipline for technology in which equanimity can survive contact with the digital world. It is not a meditation app, nor mindful technology rebranded — it is a specific stack, sovereignty before awareness before equanimity, that builders can apply to real products.