The design of this blog is intentional; as most of our choices can be. I’ve often said: “life is meaningless, we give meaning to it.”
I’ve been in a land far from home for shy of two years. I’ve been fortunate to be immersed in a city that sings the influence of Europe, mixed with the nature of South America, and with the fingerprint of colonialism and the Argentinian Gilded Age. It was inevitable that a unique chapter would emerge as an American expat.
Yellow is the color of Havanna (a typical coffee place here), the Buenos Aires subte (subway), and Mercado Pago (the PayPal of LATAM.) Argentina is also the place that brought the inner light 💡 into present day reality. Yellow is the color of joy, happiness, light, and the solar plexus chakra of our power.
During my sabbatical in 2025, I’ll be vulnerable to share that I felt powerless. My previous start-up that was ignited to unprecedented heights erupted in a village that was a 36 hour flight home. “You needed failure.” A mentor of mine in Boston proclaimed, “or as I call it, failing forward,” he elaborated.
When an entrepreneur attaches their self-worth and identity to their business, product, and/or their career, and then it is snatched away, it is the universe saying, “Pause. Take a moment to think and breathe. You are more than your profession. Your self worth is not tied to your performance and achievements.
100% of a persons self-worth has always resided within since birth.
Imposter syndrome began in 2022 with the acceptance into the MassChallenge IBM cohort. Ever since, I doubted myself, “do I belong on stage at MIT?” “Am I enough to be in a lineup with Google, BlackRock, and the director of MIT Design Lab?” “Do I deserve to have mentors from Harvard and the World Bank?”
Moving to Boston was the best decision I made for my profession. Living in Buenos Aires was the best thing that happened to my soul.
Whereas Boston led me to launch my career as a female entrepreneur in tech, Argentina led me to step out of the “Global North” bubble and into reality; the reality of the vast majority of the world.
I went from St. Barths, meeting investors in Greenwich, living in Beacon Hill, Boston, and into a third world village by Northern Chile within the span of one year. When I said “I want to help humanity and change systems at scale,” life sent me to mount AI under the most extreme conditions.
Now, Buenos Aires is a city where despite the wealth that arose from when right wing politics reigned, poverty was inevitable due to its colonial foundations and economic instability.
I have a core memory that will be with me for the rest of my life: I saw an entire family dumpster diving to find food to eat. I witnessed this one month after arriving to Buenos Aires. I was standing inside my place in Palermo Chico (the crown 👑 jewel and an exclusive neighborhood), overlooking the French doors of the balcony and straight to the family. A child of about 6 years old was standing there, barefoot and with torn clothes, waiting for his father to find food for them.
Every time I think of this memory, tears come to my eyes. If I am in private, I do not hold back my tears. Their suffering, I feel it within, because I too lived on the streets and experienced hunger many years ago. Despite landing in rock bottom in my early 20’s, for the majority of my life, I was immersed in the top 1% of the world.
Heck as I grew up in Miami, went to university in New York, and move to Boston it was probably the top 1% of the 1%. “You were offered a seat at the table. What you do inside those rooms is grit.”
It was in South America that I realized my privilege and the opportunities I was granted. Despite my parents moving to Florida from Bogota when I was eight, I had not become aware what my parents were taking us away from. I went to private schools, parents had luxury cars, I was raised in Weston, Florida.
I held the American opportunity to be an entrepreneur, to move to Boston, partner with IBM, be on stage at MIT, and be interviewed in Davos by the US correspondent to the Obama administration.
I drove a BMW to Boston. The first car I bought myself at 27 was a Mercedes. As a child I had a chauffeur and was raised by a nanny in Colombia. Yes, I lived in a bubble.
And here I was after a failed start-up drove me to Argentina; a land where people lacked resources, opportunities, and an unstable economy.
But, I discovered something greater; despite Argentinians having a turmoil and unstable government and economy, they stuck together. Argentinians are humanitarian and compassionate for one another. Despite their hardships they laugh everyday and say things like “boludo,” in a singing tone of happiness.
Being American and living in Miami, New York, and Boston as an adult, I was used to the individualistic thinking, a “Global North” mindset of optimizing profits, and having a millennial “me, me, me” tenency.
In Argentina I found the concept of “we,” and how our individual choices affects others. I began to trust easily, as I intuitively could feel people held good intentions with their actions. Here, people help you from the goodness of their heart.
Not all. And that was the catalyst that ignited my evolution to the next level. There will always be exceptions to culture. Yet, cultural norms are norms, and in Argentina there is a deep machismo that exists in society, both at a level of personal relationships and in the corporate world.
I discovered that despite the humanitarian overall theme of Argentinians, there is gender inequality. In Boston as well; in the start-up tech world, statistics for venture capital funding for my demographics is 0.1%. In Argentina it reigns deeper; men in power will pass the efforts of females and credit their ideas under their names.
“That’s the norm. Women go along with it and don’t say much because they can’t. They simply accept and move on,” a native Argentinian once explained.
At the edge of the globe, over coffee in Havanna in Belgrano, an Argentine man said, “you have a lot of male energy,” he proclaimed. “I know.” I looked at him straight in the eyes, “And I love it.”
Being back in South America was never part of the plan. I have Colombian (and Dutch) DNA, while being American made. Yet, fate had plans to bring me to this land, to live firsthand the world of those humans who will benefit from my inventions.
Being in Buenos Aires was part of my fate once I decided to pursue destiny of helping humanity with AI.
The yellow sun at the center of the Argentine flag was an allude to the light I would find myself back to my soul during the pursuit of my destiny. The yellow of the Subte trains which I once asked, “is it safe to ride the subway?” To which he looked at me and said, “absolutamente.”
And so, yellow became part of my journey, part of my destiny, fated to appear when my soul was ready for a spiritual awakening to find the power that resides within all of us when we “simply remember to turn on the light,” as Dumbledore once said in the Prisoner of Azkaban. We are the prisoners of our own beliefs.
How silly we’ve been that all along, we held the keys our internal Kingdom that has always resided within us since the day we were born.
And so, yellow is the color of the chapter in Argentina. Likewise, yellow reminds me of the songs: Amber, Betty Davis Eyes, and Yellow from Coldplay.
So Y yellow? Because it is the color of joy and the eternal light within us.
🫶🏼🌻🌞🐥🇦🇷🕊️😊🌱
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