By Jon Swartz

When the tech landscape was barren, and long before Hurricane Maria shifted the economic axis in late 2017, Christian Gonzales, Carlos Menendez and Alberto Lugo III were Puerto Rico’s tech scene.

“A gruff American military guy [named Phillip Mumford] changed my life,” Lugo, president of software firm INVID, said in an interview. In the mid-1990s, “I was 15 years old in a high school computer class. He got me into programming.”