You don't have to have it
figured out to belong.
The system spent decades teaching women to wait. To shrink. To perfect before they present. To earn their place in rooms they were always supposed to be in.
Build The Dream Collective was built in direct opposition to that.
This is a world at the intersection of community, capital, and culture. Where women who are still figuring it out and women who have figured out plenty come together, build alongside each other, and become something none of them could have become alone.
The only requirement is that you're done waiting for permission.
Women are not the problem.
The architecture is.
Everything here is built to correct it.
You were never too much. You were placed in structures too small to hold you.
✳
You were never too much. You were placed in structures too small to hold you. ✳
Vanessa Santos speaks on what the highlight reel leaves out — the structural barriers, the real cost of ambition for women of color, and what it looks like to build companies, communities, and cultural infrastructure that the system was never designed to provide.
She has done it at Mastercard, at Gilt, at the helm of the largest platform for Latina entrepreneurs in the world. She brings the receipts. And the framework that emerges from 20+ years of building things that didn't exist yet.
Her talks don't leave women inspired and alone. They leave women with language, clarity, and the specific kind of permission that comes from watching someone who looks like them do the thing. Even if they didn’t have the roadmap.
SPEAKING
-
Experiential Brand Building - How physical, felt brand worlds build the kind of trust that digital alone cannot reach and what it takes to design spaces where people know they belong before they understand why.
Community as Competitive Advantage - Culture is the operating system. What it actually looks like to build a brand, a business, or a movement that people feel before they understand.
The Future of Gathering - Why the IRL renaissance is a correction, not a trend and what the next generation of women's community looks like when it is built around collective power instead of inspiration consumption.
-
Women, Ambition & the System - Only 3% of Latino-owned businesses reach $1M in revenue. The gap is not talent. It is architecture. What changes when women stop internalizing the system's limits as their own.
The Science of Multidimensional Leadership: Why Women Don't Belong in Lanes
Building Without Self-Erasure - The hidden cost of conventional success for women executives and founders — and what it looks like to build at scale without paying for it with your health, your identity, or your relationships.
Formats: Keynote (30-60 min) | Workshop (90 min - half day) | Panel | Virtual
Limited engagements per year.
-
AI + Human Connection - Why the most transformative technology of our era becomes trustworthy only when the human infrastructure around it is designed deliberately and who gets left behind when it isn't.
Vanessa’s Talks are Perfect For: Fortune 500 leadership summits, entrepreneurship conferences, women's business events, diversity & inclusion gatherings, conscious capitalism forums, women's wellness retreats, healing and trauma recovery conferences, LGBTQIA+ summits, self-love and empowerment workshops, and industry-specific convenings seeking authentic, results-driven speakers who understand the intersection of personal healing and professional success.
Speaking Formats Available:
Keynote Presentations (30-60 minutes)
Interactive Workshops (90 minutes-half day)
Panel Discussions (Moderator or Panelist)
Virtual & Hybrid Experiences (Full engagement, global reach)
Topics:
Glow Up
Free · Monthly
A monthly gathering for women building the dream while honoring the human. Business talk meets life talk. Founders, leaders, creators — showing up as they are, without performance or pretense. Come as you are. Leave less alone.
The Table
Community · Monthly Cohort
Your thing stops living in your head rent-free and starts collecting rent in the world.
Eight women. Four hours. Real work. You bring what you're building: idea, stalled project, business that needs to go further. You leave with clarity, language, and a date on the calendar. Then we hold the line.
Strategic Partnership
Executive Advisory · Ongoing
For founders and executives navigating something significant — a pivot, a scale, a transition, a moment where the stakes are too high to figure out alone. I'm with you until it's built.
The Glow Up Hour
“The most powerful thing Vanessa has ever built is not a company. It is a room where women stop doubting the size of what they're capable of. That room is here.”
A gathering for women building the dream while honoring the human.
Business talk meets life talk. Founders, leaders, creators — showing up as they are.
I invest in founders building what they didn't see growing up.
Current portfolio: Bloomi, Nopalera, Lil' Libros, Agua Bonita, Earth Rides.
For brand partnerships, content, and appearances: jennifer@camilacreative.com
PARTNERSHIPS & INVESTMENT
