Vanessa Santos Is Redefining What Success Looks Like for Latinas (Interview)

A cultural shift is underway among women in their mid-30s, 40s, and 50s: many are realizing the “script” they were handed doesn’t automatically lead to a fulfilling life. They’re processing it in essays, newsletters, and on TikTok and Instagram.

Reinvention is everywhere right now. Some pivots are economic—the job market is shaky, and AI is reshaping work. Others are deeply personal: quitting roles that burn you out, closing businesses that no longer make sense, leaving relationships, downsizing, or moving somewhere new.

One woman I’ve followed through her own year of reinvention is Vanessa Santos Leon, the former CEO of #WeAllGrow Latina and founder and CEO of Build The Dream, a syndicate at the intersection of culture, capital, and human connection. Build The Dream includes her newsletter and podcast, Letters From the In-Between; selective advisory work; investments in Latina-owned brands; coaching; and her role with the Wellness For the People Foundation.

After spending much of 2025 rebuilding, Santos Leon launched Build The Dream—and also co-launched Thrive & Lead with Patty Arvielo, CEO of New American Funding. The three-day, September gathering was designed for Latina founders, executives, and investors to talk candidly about leadership, money, AI, wellbeing, and personal branding—and to leave with relationships and resources, not just inspiration.

“Thrive and Lead was born out of a desire Patty and I both had after our experiences attending events. Last year, I went to a conference for female founders, and I experienced microaggressions that made me feel less than,” Santos Leon shares. “I’m a grown woman, and I went to the bathroom to cry. It felt like such an oxymoron to be at an event about women gathering and supporting one another as entrepreneurs and business owners, yet experience that.”

After leaving #WeAllGrow Latina, she attended that conference untethered to a company or title—and felt how quickly that can change how others treat you.

“I had to pull myself together and think, ‘Wow, if somebody considered a peer or a friend can treat me that way and speak to me that way just because I don’t have a title or anything categorizable—something that can be checked off in a box—imagine how many women feel that way?'” she says. “There are so many environments where the women on stage are there because of their social media following or how much venture capital they’ve raised. There’s always some stature that makes women seem complete. I’ve been sitting with that for a long time and started writing about it in my Letters From the In-Between.”

Soon after, Arvielo received an opportunity to build a women’s track through Avanse Global. Instead, they decided to create their own summit—one that makes room for the full reality of women’s lives.

“We had a deep conversation about what’s really missing: a place that isn’t just about business, which is at the core of what we’re trying to create with Thrive & Lead,” she says. “It’s about the whole woman. We experience perimenopause and menopause. We go through cycles; we have hormones. We’ll go through pivots. We’ll fall on our asses and get back up. Some days we feel great. Other days, we don’t know what the f*ck is going on. We’re caretakers, caregivers, spouses, friends, and partners. So much of life goes beyond being a founder, but we don’t talk about it on stage because it isn’t pretty enough for Instagram. We wanted to make room for all of it and honor both sides, because it’s a duality.”

For Santos Leon, the idea came alongside a more personal recalibration: after years of building for others, she began questioning what ambition and leadership actually mean in her life—and how much of that definition she inherited.

“Culturally, there’s a lot of deconditioning we need to do,” she says. “We’re raised to optimize ourselves for the male gaze, for extraction, for giving and self-sacrifice. When you look at that equation, we put ourselves on the back burner. We’re not even part of it.”

That conditioning, she says, can shape how Latinas move through work—grateful, overfunctioning, chasing the “right” title, and staying too long in systems that don’t serve us.

“We lose our way in corporate because we’re told we just need to be grateful, and we don’t know how to negotiate,” she says. “We lose our way in corporate through titles. We think that if we achieve the title, nothing else matters.”

Last year, she hit what she describes as a rock-bottom stretch—financially and emotionally—after her time with #WeAllGrow Latina ended and the sponsorship economy shifted.

“I really thought ambition meant I had to work hard,” she says. “I thought ambition was about how many hours I worked, how much I put in, and how much I gave. I also thought it meant how many people saw and recognized what I was doing.”

What came next was a different definition—one that makes room for release, not just endurance.

“Sometimes ambition also looks like letting it the fuck go, allowing the pieces to settle, and figuring out your place in the world so you can use that desire within you to create the thing that deserves to be out in the world,” she says.

Midlife can make that shift feel urgent: choices that once felt fixed start to feel renegotiable. Santos Leon wants women—especially Latinas—to permit themselves to change their minds, and to measure “thriving” by how they feel, not just what they’ve achieved.

“We don’t realize that as women, we can change our f*cking minds,” she says. “We’re allowed to change our minds.”

“Every Latina I have met wants so badly to create a better future for another Latina,” she says. “But there’s so much deconditioning that needs to happen because we’re raised to prioritize everyone and everything else. And in doing so, we lose our way.”

“Thrive isn’t actually about being successful for me,” she says. “Thrive is about figuring out what makes you feel good so you can show up as your best and lead from a place of power.”

“Part of growth is defining those words for yourself,” she says, referring to ambition, sacrifice, love, passion, and desire. “You need to come up with your own definitions for all of those words and how they apply in your life.”