About Me

I am Walter, Spanish, living between Zürich and Barcelona. I lead technology consulting at Merkle in Zürich, I write about the places I travel to and the ones I have lived in, and the restaurants in both, I buy and sell vintage watches with my brother, and I build AI agents that run parts of it. Those four things arrived roughly in that order, starting in 2013, and for most of that time they had nothing to do with each other.

The first version of this site went up in 2013 at walterponce.com. I was doing digital marketing in Barcelona: SEO, paid search, email. I wrote about it partly to think it through and partly because a blog was the fastest way to show I knew what I was talking about. It worked better than any CV I sent. A good share of the work I have had since started with somebody reading something I had written.

In 2018 I renamed it waltermitas.com and pointed it somewhere else entirely. I was moving a lot by then: Singapore, back to Barcelona, then Switzerland. What I wanted to write down was where I had eaten, where I had stayed, and which places were worth going back to. Less career, more world. It stayed that way for seven years and grew into a couple of hundred write-ups, nearly all of them from cities I was living in rather than passing through.

The watches go back furthest of all of it. I have been interested in them since long before it occurred to me they could be work. In 2018 they became work anyway: Calvin Klein Watches and Jewelry, then Swatch, a few years inside the industry learning how it actually trades. The buying and selling only started in 2024, with my brother. We find pre-owned and vintage pieces, photograph every one, write an honest report on it, and sell on the ones we are not keeping. That is Brothers in Watches, a shop and a YouTube channel, and the reason a travel blog now has a watch section.

What brought the halves back together is AI. For the past year I have been building AI agents that do real work on my own businesses: hunting for watches worth buying, pricing them, writing and publishing, handling the repetitive end of a side business that used to eat every evening. Thirteen of them run now. Some of them work well, several have failed in ways that were more instructive than the successes, and all of it is the third thread of this site.

So: the work, the places, the watches, and the machines I am teaching to help with all three, including what I get wrong, which is usually the part worth reading.