Juan Pablo Pietrini, MBA ’26, Bringing Structure to Latin America’s Informal Construction Sector

For Juan Pablo Pietrini, MBA ‘26, the path to where he is today began when a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck Mexico City in September 2017. Thousands of people were injured and hundreds died that day, and scores of buildings collapsed. The disaster exposed the fragility of the city’s infrastructure, but also revealed something else: an extraordinary wave of civic solidarity.

Before the dust settled, Pietrini, then an undergraduate at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, organized fellow students to transform their university parking lot into a relief center, collecting and distributing food, medicine, and supplies, working 20 hours a day for three weeks. Across a city of more than 9 million people, residents mobilized to help one another.

“I saw people willing to risk their lives,” he recalls. “It was an immense effort that taught me something fundamental: Empathy comes from understanding your role in society.”

Yet even as he appreciated the groundswell of volunteerism, a key question kept arising as Pietrini assessed the earthquake’s damage: Why had some homes and buildings collapsed while others remained intact? Much of the answer pointed to a widespread reality across Latin America: informal construction. The damage was overwhelmingly concentrated in self-produced housing, which tended to be more vulnerable to disasters.

Pietrini decided to tackle this problem with a venture that brings more information and transparency to construction, harnessing the power of community connection but formalizing it with a layer of trust. Today, Pietrini is the co-founder of TrustMe, a platform that connects construction workers, plumbers, electricians, painters, and other tradespeople, with homeowners seeking reliable services. He’s also the recipient of a Stanford Impact Founder Fellowship, which helps Pietrini grow and scale his new venture through financial support, leadership coaching, and access to workshops and a community of peer impact entrepreneurs.

Bringing Order to Construction and Home Repair

The idea for the company responds to a structural challenge across the region. Roughly 6 out of every 10 homes in Latin America are built without professional assistance. In Mexico alone, an estimated 8.4 million people work in construction and related trades, and around 85% of them operate informally.

Informality, which includes lack of work contracts, formal banking, and labor protection, shapes the lives of low-income families in the region as a whole. On average, 42.5% of the population in Latin America lives in households that depend solely on informal employment. This is often associated with poverty and precarious working conditions. And the construction sector is one of the areas where informality is most common. It’s also an industry with huge potential, as it constitutes 6.6% of Mexico’s GDP.

For families in Latin America, homebuilding is often incremental, shaped by necessity and limited resources. Most families do not hire an engineer or architect; instead, they go directly to skilled trades workers. But the process can come at a cost. In many cases, families invest their savings in repairs, only to spend more later fixing poor work.

“The problem we’re trying to solve is simple,” Pietrini says. “How do you find someone you can trust to work on your home?”

Finding Answers at Stanford GSB

Even before graduate school, Pietrini was interested in a solution that would support both customers and workers in the informal construction market, but he did not know where to start.

“The GSB gave me structure, proven theory, an innovation process, time to ideate, test and iterate, opportunities to learn from the experiences of other entrepreneurs, a knowledgeable network, and time and support to validate my purpose and goal,” Pietrini explains.

It was in Stanford GSB courses like Social Innovation Practicum and Startup Garage, an intensive, hands-on, project-based course in which student teams design and test new business concepts that address real-world needs, where he learned how to approach the problem and refine his ideas with professors, staff, and classmates.

“They questioned my idea and solutions, reviewed my presentations and documents, provided me feedback and guidance, and introduced me to key mentors and industry leaders,” Pietrini says of the Stanford GSB community. For example, his Startup Garage advisor, lecturer Sara Thomas Deshpande, MBA ‘09, introduced Pietrini to Stacy Brown, the former CEO of Taskrabbit, who gave him useful feedback.

And then, through the summer Botha-Chan Innovation Program, Pietrini, together with classmate Adolfo Valdivieso, MBA ‘24, conducted more than 140 interviews across Mexico and Brazil, speaking with workers, families, and local officials. Valdivieso, who was raised in a self-built home in Cajamarca, Peru, knew firsthand the issues they were researching.

Through those conversations with families in Mexico and Brazil, Pietrini and Valdivieso learned that the people hired to build or repair homes were often neighbors. Other times, workers were completely unknown to the homeowners and could disappear prior to completion, even after receiving large initial deposits. Or the job would be finished, “but later, some hidden issues emerged,” Pietrini says.

Initially, Pietrini and Valdivieso focused their venture on improving construction quality. They developed a WhatsApp-based AI tool that helped workers generate project plans, budgets, and visualizations. But as they tested the idea with homeowners in Latin America, the feedback was clear: This wasn’t what people needed. The main issue lay elsewhere, not in skills or design, but in the relationship between both sides.

“We realized that the core issue wasn’t how people build,” Pietrini says. “It was how they find each other.”

That insight led to a pivot. Across Mexico, Pietrini observed how the market actually worked. Tradesmen often gathered outside churches or on street corners, waiting for hours for someone who might need their services. Income was irregular, and opportunities were uncertain.

Online alternatives can’t do what TrustMe aims to do, he argues. “Craigslist, Marketplace, and WhatsApp groups… solve the problem of ‘finding someone,’ but not of ‘finding someone I will trust,’ which is the real pressure point,” Pietrini says. “We are trying to build a layer of trust that those platforms don’t want to build because it’s expensive and operationally complex.”

The inefficiency that they are working against impacts both sides of the deal. In addition to homeowner complaints, contractors spoke about delayed payments, disputes, and a constant struggle to secure steady work.

After his initial partner, Valdivieso, left to pursue other professional endeavors, Pietrini invited Mexican labor lawyer Alejandro Olivares del Castillo to be a co-founder. The attorney provides not only his legal expertise but also his understanding of what workers need.

Indeed, TrustMe ultimately benefits both sides of the relationship. It verifies workers through background checks, references, and partnerships with training organizations that assess skills. Tradespeople build profiles showcasing their work and customer reviews, while homeowners can browse options, compare professionals, and communicate through the platform. Payments are also structured to protect both sides.

Turning Trust Into Economic Impact and Social Change

Now, after more than six months of testing the app and receiving positive feedback, the team is working to secure funding to get the product ready to go to market in Mexico City, as well as doing a new government pilot in the city of Mérida.

They are also looking for beta testers willing to try the platform and hoping to establish more organizational collaborations and partnerships. The aim is to have a thousand active contractors on the platform in two or three years.

But for Pietrini, the goal extends beyond scaling a platform.

Improving how homes are built could help families avoid costly mistakes and redirect resources toward other priorities, such as investing in education for social mobility. “If families can build the first time correctly, we’re freeing up billions of dollars across the region for other productive spending,” he says.

There are also longer-term social impacts. In communities where formal economic opportunities are limited, young people are often left facing alternatives like crime or drug dealing.

“A formalized trades sector, characterized by a steady workflow and recognition, is one of the most underestimated tools for social prevention. [TrustMe] won’t solve this alone, but we want to make a contribution,” says Pietrini. “We want to dignify this kind of work. We want contracting to be a career seen with pride, with proper certifications, stable incomes, and growth.”

In that sense, TrustMe is more than a marketplace. It is an attempt to reshape how an essential sector functions, reducing risk for homeowners while expanding opportunity for workers.

“If, ten years from now, a family decides to build their home and their first intuition is to log into TrustMe, instead of asking a relative for a recommendation, we have already changed something,” Pietrini concludes. “And if a young man in the neighborhood of Iztapalapa decides to learn the trades because he sees in TrustMe a career, we’ll know we changed even more.”