We have been here before.
LiquidBook has spent 25 years building systems through technology transitions — from the pre-browser internet to AI agents. We know what survives a paradigm shift and what does not. That is why organizations trust us to help them build what comes next.
The name was a thesis.
By the late 1990s, Felipe had already seen what most of publishing hadn’t. Working with Heriot-Watt University, he’d watched an entire distance-MBA’s worth of textbooks held in SGML — structured source that could be set to print, to screen, to any form you asked of it. The content was never the page. The page was only one output of something already fluid underneath.
He knew the object from both sides. He set type and designed books by hand for Ten Speed Press — he understood the fixed form the way a craftsman understands it. So when he saw the structured source beneath it, he didn’t read a threat to the book. He read the book about to change state.
In 1999, Ten Speed sent him to assess the industry’s digital strategy at BookExpo America. His conclusion was unambiguous: content was moving from fixed formats to fluid ones, and the industry would be disrupted by the shift.
Publishers resisted — afraid that to digitize their catalog was to lose control of what they owned. They were wrong.
The name LiquidBook was never marketing. It was that prediction, named: the moment something solid becomes fluid — when the old form gives way to a new one without losing what made it valuable.
That thesis has held through every transition since.
Every transition has the same pattern.
Before browsers existed, Felipe was running FidoNet email accounts and building connections on CompuServe, the WELL, and Gopher. That was the 1990s — the internet as infrastructure, not interface.
When the web arrived, he built one of the first educational portals, Degree.net, in 1996 — and helped grow International Business Education into one of the largest distance-MBA operations in the country, larger at its peak than the University of Phoenix, running across the Americas, the Middle East, and Africa. The company was acquired by Pearson and folded into Financial Times Education.
When video production went digital, he co-founded ObjectiveLens — creating documentary-style content for organizations using technology that cut cost without cutting quality.
When WordPress became a platform, he built custom themes, plugins, and integrations for clients ranging from HP and VMware to university systems and funded startups. He became the lead web developer for Agile Alliance — managing a 5,000-page site serving over 100,000 members for the organization founded by the authors of the Agile Manifesto.
Every transition followed the same arc: the technology arrived, the market overreacted, the organizations that survived were the ones who understood what was actually changing — and what was not.
AI agents are the current transition. The pattern is the same.
- 1990sPre-browser internet
- 1996Degree.net · distance education at scale
- 2000LiquidBook founded
- 2002ObjectiveLens / digital video
- 2010sWordPress platform era
- 2021Agile Alliance / enterprise web
- 2025AI agents & governance
Not one lane. All of them at once.
Most people who build technology come from technology. Most people who understand business operations come from business school. Most people who can tell a story come from creative backgrounds. The unusual thing about LiquidBook is that all of these arrived in the same person — and they compound.
Craft and Design
Typography, graphic design, art academy training. Visual communication understood at a pre-digital level — before screens, before pixels, in the language of ink and paper. He set type and designed books by hand for Ten Speed Press, before any of it went digital.
Full-Stack Development
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, WordPress custom themes and plugins. Back-end systems, APIs, database architecture. Not just the interface — the plumbing.
Business Operations
Ran a distance-education company end-to-end — one of the largest of its kind — through to its acquisition by Pearson: financials, legal and tax audits, the acquisition documentation, the chart of accounts that stitched into the buyer's. Not theory. Lived experience.
Institutional Knowledge
Universities, publishers, corporate divisions, funded startups. Decades of understanding how organizations actually buy, how decisions get stuck, and what it takes to move real projects through real bureaucracies.
Production and Storytelling
Video production, scripting, camera work, audio, post-production. Documentary-style work for nonprofits and institutions. Understanding how to move an audience — not just inform them.
AI and Agentic Systems
Model evaluation across providers, agentic workflow design, MCP integration, local model deployment, voice interfaces. Not just using AI tools — building the systems that orchestrate them.
Built for organizations that build things.
Over 25 years, LiquidBook has worked with organizations across technology, education, publishing, financial services, and the public sector. The common thread is not industry — it is complexity. These are organizations where the technology has to work, where the stakes are real, and where the people making decisions need a partner who understands both the system and the institution.
Lead Web Developer for Agile Alliance — the organization founded by the authors of the Agile Manifesto, serving a global community of over 100,000 members. A 5,000-page platform managed end-to-end, from infrastructure and security to front-end experience and content strategy.
The perspective is not only a vendor’s. Having built and sold a company at scale, LiquidBook reads a complex organization from the inside — as someone who has had to make the payroll, pass the audit, and answer for the system, not just ship it.
The person behind the pattern recognition.
There is a specific way of thinking that connects all of this — the design training, the type set by hand, the kitchen work, the code, the contracts, the institutional knowledge. It is the inability to look at a system and see only the system.
Felipe learned to play chess at five years old in New York City — the kind of city where a kid ends up in a park chess club before he ends up in Little League. He worked his way up to sous chef in an upscale Berkeley restaurant, trained under someone from Chez Panisse, and learned something that never left: when you are responsible for what people put in their bodies, you see contamination vectors in everything. Temperature, time, rotation, cross-contact. You cannot turn it off.
That same wiring runs through the technology work. Every line of code gets assessed not just for what it does, but for what it might break. Every system design gets stress-tested for the human who will misuse it, the edge case that will expose it, the downstream consequence no one asked about. Every contract gets read for the clause that protects you — and the one that doesn’t.
This is not caution. It is multi-dimensional awareness. It is the reason governance thinking comes naturally even without a governance title. And it is the reason clients trust LiquidBook not just to build the system, but to see the things they would miss.
The ground is still shifting. That has always been the opportunity.
If your organization is navigating the shift to AI — and looking for someone who has been through this before — we should talk.