Osvaldo Guzman Ayala

I studied Computer Science & Digital Media Design at Lake Forest College, and kept freelancing the whole way through — landing my first big client, a full custom e-commerce build, while I was still a student. An internship at a creative agency had me shipping large-scale event microsites on Vue, and after graduating I spent years as a full-stack developer and designer at a marketing agency, building sites for everyone from home inspectors to industrial chemical companies.

From there I spent over five years at a large Chicago non-profit serving individual investors — with a detour to a California startup in between before I came back home. Somewhere in those years, I started taking on consulting work for AI tech startups outside of my day job, building custom AI software for the dental industry. That was the first time I saw, up close, how much leverage AI could give a small, local business.

I come from a family of small business owners, so none of this was abstract to me. I've watched what it costs when a business is running on manual systems — the missed calls, the late nights, the growth that stalls out not from lack of demand but from lack of time.

I still hold a full-time engineering role at my primary employer — I'm not going anywhere, and I want to be upfront about that. Base64 is the second full commitment I've built alongside it, not a side hustle I squeeze in when I have a spare hour. I hold myself to the same standard on both: full-stack engineering, design, and AI automation, applied directly to Chicago's local service businesses.