The transcript did not make obvious sense at the time. Modern Languages, then Business Administration with a concentration in Hospitality and Tourism, then technical coursework in digital tools. Read in sequence, it looks like a young man in Santiago who could not settle on a direction.
Jonathan Sterlin Tejada has since described that stretch as fundamental rather than scattered, on the grounds that it taught him to see both the creative and the business dimension of a project at once. It is a generous reading of one’s own past. It also happens to be accurate, though nothing available at the time would have predicted why.
His first appearances came through RD Fashion Week, and then through the television program UP No Te Caigas. It was enough to confirm the pull was real, and he responded by going back to school again, this time for acting and film production. The work followed steadily. Roles in Ponchao, Luz Roja, and La Tragedia del Río Verde, then a place on the production team of El Plan, a credit documented on his IMDb page alongside later projects including In a Hail of Bullets.
This was a working film career in a small national industry. It was also, though nobody could have known it, an apprenticeship for a job that did not exist.
The shift arrived from outside. Somewhere between 2020 and 2024, the economics underneath advertising reorganized around a format that had barely existed a decade earlier. Audiences moved to vertical feeds where the skip is permanent and instantaneous, and where the production gloss that once signalled a serious brand began reading as a warning that a sales pitch was coming. Brands with generations of institutional knowledge about buying thirty second spots found that knowledge had quietly stopped applying.
What those brands needed was not more advertising. It was people who could make something worth watching that carried a brand inside it. And the people best equipped to do that turned out to be people who had learned to direct.
Tejada saw the overlap before most did. Scripting, blocking, coverage, knowing where a cut lands emotionally: these are film disciplines, and they were largely missing from short-form content because most short-form creators had never needed them. Compressed into a nine second vertical placement, they produce something that does not resemble a phone video with a product in frame.
He specialized in commercial content for national and international companies, and the volume came quickly. More than 150 campaigns for globally recognized brands, developed largely through TikTok One. Over one twelve month window the work drew more than 52 million views.
His public reaction to that number is notable mostly for what it lacks. He has framed it as motivation to keep growing, and as confirmation that the confidence brands placed in his work was warranted, which is a strikingly unromantic way to describe a figure most creators would build an identity around.
The popular account of the creator economy says it flattened the industry and let anyone with a phone compete. His path suggests something closer to the opposite. The barrier moved rather than disappeared. Distribution stopped being scarce and craft became scarce, and the people who had spent years acquiring craft in an older industry found themselves abruptly competitive against agencies with a hundred times their headcount.
He built the business structure to hold it, presiding over Tejada Capital Group MG, S.R.L. in the Dominican Republic and expanding into the United States through Tejada Capital Group MG LLC.
The detail that resists a tidy summary is where he spends some of his remaining time. Tejada sits on the Technical Commission on Regional Economy, Employment and Territorial Brand within the Council for Strategic Development of Santiago, working alongside representatives from across sectors on regional employment and territorial branding.
A creator with 52 million views has every incentive to stop attending those meetings. That he is still in the room, arguing about the economic future of the city he started in, says more about the shape of the ambition than the view count does.
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