I have $412 in my savings account and a business plan that could work.

I have $412 in a savings account my father does not know about. I have a Notion doc with fourteen tabs. I have a supplier in Medellín who thinks I am twenty-three. I have not corrected her. I have a landing page. I have a waitlist of ninety-eight women, most of them my mother's friends. I have, in the specific and technical sense, a business.

What I do not have is a single person in my life who takes it seriously. My economics teacher told me it was 'sweet.' My best friend asked if I had considered TikTok instead. A cousin of mine — a lawyer — offered to look at my terms and conditions and then never opened the file.

Everybody's first pitch is bad. Mine is bad. But mine is also right, and that is a different thing.

“

Everybody's first pitch is bad. Mine is bad. But mine is also right, and that is a different thing.

— Sofía Restrepo

I keep thinking about the boys in Silicon Valley who raised eight million dollars at nineteen with a slide deck their roommate designed. I do not envy their money. I envy the room. The room where somebody, at some point, said: yes, kid, go. That room does not exist for me. I am building it out of $412 and a Notion doc and the specific stubbornness of a girl whose mother worked three jobs so she could sit in the library on a Saturday afternoon and think.

We will see if it works. If it doesn't, I will still have learned more this year than any of them. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, most of the game.