Vanessa Santos

For twenty years she worked inside the rooms where money and power actually move. The deals, the capital, the introduction that changes a life a year before anyone else hears about it. Those rooms do not open for women who come from where she comes from. She got in anyway, learned exactly how they work, and started holding the door.

She scaled Gilt to more than 120 countries. She won the CES 2017 Innovation Award at Mastercard. She co-scaled #WeAllGrow Latina, the largest community of Latina entrepreneurs in the world, and carried it through its acquisition. She keynoted Forbes' Most Powerful Women of Latin America. She was named Inaugural Entrepreneur of the Year by the Hispanic Heritage Foundation and Nationwide, and they handed it to her at the Kennedy Center.

Build The Dream is the room rebuilt, this time for the women it was never built for. Women who are done performing the acceptable version of themselves, building the real thing together, with real capital and real receipts moving between them. What she does underneath all of it is close the gap between the woman you perform and the woman you already are.

Her attention now is on AI and what it is about to do to the women's economy. She teaches women to hand the busywork to the machine and keep what only they can do: the judgment, the taste, the relationships, and the gut that tells you when the smart move is the wrong one. Trusting that gut is the skill she cares about most. AI builds the business. The human builds the culture.™

She will tell you flatly that women are going to run what comes next. The fight was never only the men in the room. It is the voice that says wait, soften, want it more quietly, and it is the way women are taught to turn on each other instead of rewriting the whole thing. She is betting the company on the rewrite.