My dad called me this week. I cried. 🥹

My dad called me this week and told me he was worried about me.

🎧 Listen on Spotify / Apple — reflection at the end.

He called to express what he sees from where he sits. And what he sees is his daughter alone in Phoenix, no family nearby, working 8-8 instead of 9-5, caring for her two boys, rebuilding a life that doesn't look like anything he has a map for.

His worry is made entirely of love. And that love speaks the language of proximity, of stability, of success that looks recognizable: a paycheck, a title, a life that fits a form that he was conditioned to believe determined success.

I tried to explain. And in our conversation I had the aha moment, the reality of building something new inside a family whose survival depended on something old.

You cannot explain a new world in the language of the old one.

So I stopped explaining and showed him instead. I pulled up the Build The Dream website, the one I built myself, over the weekend and I watched his face change.

He went quiet for a moment. Then he said: "Wow, mija. Esta heavy."

In Dominican, that means dope as hell. That means he saw my vision. 🥹

I cried after we hung up.

He doesn't have to understand everything I'm building to be proud of me. And I don't have to wait for his understanding to keep building it.

👉🏼 This is the thing nobody prepares you for when you are the first in your family to do something different.

The people who love you most will sometimes be the ones most unsettled by your becoming. I believe it’s because even though they believe in me, they are watching me in real time choose myself over and over again in a world that makes you feel like you have to be chosen to succeed. And watching me make choices that are unlike any they have made, will ask them to question their own choices as well.

Our parents survived so we could thrive.

They made choices that had nothing to do with what they wanted and everything to do with what we would need.

The least we can do with that inheritance is actually use it, to build the thing, to take the risk, to stop treating our dreams like a luxury we haven't earned yet.

🏆 That is why I built the F*ck Around and Find Out Challenge. Because the survival mentality that kept our families safe is the same mentality that keeps us from putting our needs first.

And somebody has to go first. It might as well be us, together, starting July 1st.

💸 WHAT’S MOVING 💸​
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​The women's economy, the data, and what I'm paying attention to so you can become lethal.

🖥️ I built my business website myself this weekend. This is why that matters.

I vibe coded the Build The Dream. I learned how to create with Claude Code thanks to the session I booked with the Claude Queen. We had no months of back and forth. Just one session where she walked me through how to write myown vision into the Claude machine.

I'm also telling you this because vibe coding - building software by describing what you want in plain language instead of writing code yourself, is now a $4.7 billion market, and 63% of active users are non-developers. Product managers, founders, designers, and domain experts are building full-stack applications using nothing but natural language. The barrier to building something real has never been lower than it is right now.

This is the ‘AI builds the business, the human builds the culture’ ethos I have been talking about. I am building the thing with the tools that exist right now. And so can you. (Speaking of tools, I get asked often, what tools I use for productivity, here it is.)

🎤 Thrive and Lead is officially announced, and we are building rooms where women move money.

Patty Arvielo and I announced Thrive and Lead publicly this week. September 14-16, at the Bellagio. A curated three-day experience for 200+ Latina executives, founders, creators, and corporate leaders, inside AVANCE Global. The largest Latino business conference in the country.

The women coming into that room are the ones brands say they want to reach, yet rarely sit across from at the moment she's actually making decisions.

If your brand wants to be in that room, reply to this email and I'll send you the sponsorship details.

🔥 The F*ck Around and Find Out Challenge is live. The cart is open.

This is the thing I built because I have seen it unlock so much power in the people who finally commit to keeping their own promise.

​Join here →​

My dad saw it this week. The website, the vision, the 50+ hours, my determination. Just because he doesn’t speak my language, doesn’t mean he can’t feel it.

Our parents had determination too, it’s just that what felt impossible for them is completely possible for us.

If you are proud of something and don’t have people around you who will get it, don’t forget that the only person whose approval matters, is your own. Clap for yourself. 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

Until the next letter.

Vanessa

P.S. Keeping it real with you, I have been living in the in-betweens this past week. So, when a friend said, “you are doing amazing things girl”, I said yes AND I also feel like this. 😅

​Vanessa Santos