Introducing phae Wonders, a series about the people rewriting their own rules. First up: Josh Laredo, who traded software sales in Boston for an underground taco tour company in Mexico City.

There is a version of this story that gets told badly all the time. Guy burns out. Guy quits. Guy moves somewhere warm and finds himself.

That is not what happened to Josh Laredo. The story took six years, and the difference is the whole point.

Josh spent years in SaaS sales. He got let go in 2024, took another job in Boston, and lasted until November, when he was fired again. His own account of it is unusually clean. "I just wasn't there mentally, and I'll own that piece."

What he did next was not an escape. It was more than a year of deliberate, unglamorous work: driving for Lyft in Boston to fund a business plan, pitching investors, pitching family, selling everything he owned, and moving to Mexico City to build a tour company from nothing. Fifty people have now taken his tours. Every review is five stars.

We are starting phae Wonders with him because his story contains the thing most advice about work leaves out. The hard part was never the leaving. It was knowing what he was actually carrying, and where it was worth more.

Why we are making this series

phae exists because the path most people were handed no longer holds up.

Kristen Beverage, phae's CEO and founder, names it directly in the conversation: "We need to get people out of the mindset of this is how the world works. Like you go to school, you major in this, you have a lifetime career in this."

That script is failing in public. New graduates are hitting one of the worst entry-level markets on record. People fifteen years into a working life are watching AI reshape their industry in real time and quietly wondering whether their next move exists yet. The advice available to all of them is still built for a world where you pick once and ride it out.

phae Wonders is our answer to a specific problem: most people cannot picture an alternative because they have never seen one up close. So we are going to show you. Real people, unexpected pivots, and points of view that make you rethink what a life of work can even look like.

Not as inspiration. As evidence.

The pivot was not a leap. It was a long look.

Josh first went to Mexico City in 2019 for his 30th birthday and did not stop going back. 2020. 2021. 2022. He learned that his father's family had spent time there, which explained something he had felt before he could name it. "There's something about this that like was pulling me."

In 2023, after a seven-year relationship ended, he moved there and worked remotely. Then came the layoff, the second job, the office he could not sit in, and the sentence that will land for anyone reading this from a desk they have outgrown: "I felt like I was wasting away knowing that I really had something that was pulling me back."

Six years of pull before he acted on it.

This is what almost every honest change looks like, and it is the part the industry does not serve. Indeed's research found that people who make a dramatic change deliberate for an average of eleven months before moving. Eighty-eight percent report being happier afterward. The decision works. The year of private, unsupported deliberation that precedes it is where people get stuck, talk themselves out of it, or wait until a layoff forces the question.

Josh had something most people do not. Not certainty. Reference points. "My mom started her own business. All of my family members don't really work for anybody." He grew up watching people build things, so building something was inside the range of what he could imagine for himself.

That is the gap phae was built to close. Not everyone has a family full of proof. Everyone deserves a guide who knows their whole picture and can help them see what is actually available to them.

He did not start over. He redeployed.

Here is the detail that reframes the entire story.

Before the pandemic, Josh was a concierge in Boston for three years, then spent three years in private tailor-made travel. Then software sales. Then Provecho Taco Tours.

Look at what carried. Reading what a stranger actually wants. Designing an experience around one person. Building repeat business instead of chasing the next transaction. He says it himself: he brings "the same idea of when I was in travel, providing a private experience for folks, tailoring it to them." And the sales years were not wasted either. Somebody had to build the website, learn the SEO, work the algorithms, and close the partnerships.

Nothing was discarded. Everything got pointed somewhere new.

This matters because changing direction is usually framed as demolition, and that framing scares people out of moves they are already qualified to make. phae never dismisses experience, skills, or a resume. It goes deeper than them, to find what you are carrying that you have stopped noticing.

The business is a taco tour. The product is connection.

Ask Josh what he is building and he does not lead with food.

The company is named for a word he had to explain, because English has no equivalent. At a taquería you eat, you settle up, and on the way out you say it to the strangers still eating: provecho. Roughly, "I hope you enjoy this moment as much as I did."

"If you walk in an elevator, people are like, oh, buenos días," he says. "And if I said hello to somebody in an elevator in Boston, they'd be like, why are you talking to me?"

That is the business. The tours go to canasta stands and corner spots that never make it to Instagram, but what he is selling is the thing underneath: good food, better company, and a reason to look up. His advice to anyone coming up behind him is the same idea, compressed. "Don't look down on your phone. Make real connections. Find real experiences. Put yourself out there."

His closing line is worth sitting with, and it is not really about Mexico. "Find those local off the beaten path. Don't go with the crowd, and I can guarantee you you're going to make moments that are more special than you could ever imagine from social media."

Apply that to a life of work and you have the argument for this entire series.

What is next

phae Wonders will keep going: more people, more pivots, more proof that the path you were handed is one option among many.

Josh's tours run across six Mexico City neighborhoods at provechotacotours.com. If you are headed there, go.

And if you are the one who feels something pulling and cannot yet name it, that is not a crisis. That is month three. It is the most common and least supported moment in a life of work, and it is exactly where phae starts.

phae™ is the guide that helps you flourish in a world that won't stop changing. Start with the Career Explorer, free, always.

Watch the full conversation with Josh Laredo on the phae channel.