What Do You Build When It Isn't About You?

In April of 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, I helped start something I would never own.

I was one year out of my MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management, and I kept noticing the same absence. With COVID lockdowns in place, creating community had become a challenge.  The MBA students I connected with described something worse: they looked around their programs and saw no one who looked like them. People were trying to solve this on their own, quietly, in silos inside their individual schools. What I saw was the opportunity nobody was taking—to build community across every MBA program through multiple generations. That became the Latinx MBA Association.

I want to be honest about what building it has actually taken, because founders rarely are.

The founders & Board of Directors met almost every single weekend for five years—not out of obligation, but out of a shared belief that this organization had to exist. In addition, many of us gave zero-interest loans to finance operations, including the Leadership Summit, just to ensure it happened each year. The early days were challenging.

The hardest stretch came about three years in. Several of our board members were burning out, not from Latinx MBA, but from everything life was throwing at them, from brutal hours in investment banking to losing a family member to COVID. We had a choice about what kind of organization we wanted to be. We chose to listen. We let people step back when they needed to, and we let others step forward. That's the part I'm proudest of. Our success wasn't a growth metric. It was a board whose members held each other up.

Then there was the moment it all became real. At our 2023 Leadership Summit, we had Fidel Vargas of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund speak, and I looked out at a room where MBA students and alumni were finally standing together as one community. The vision I'd been carrying around in my head for four years was suddenly in front of me. I'll never forget it.

But if you ask me what this is really for, I'll point you to our prospective MBA Fellowship Program. More than ten fellows have come through it and gone on to graduate from prestigious MBA programs such as Harvard Business School, Chicago Booth, Dartmouth, and Michigan Ross. That program does something I can't overstate: it gives people permission to believe they belong in those rooms—and the support to actually get there.

Today, the Latinx MBA Association is over 2,600 members across more than 180 MBA programs, powered by 50-plus volunteers, our board of directors, and a CEO. And every year, we raise north of six figures—more than $100,000—through the give-or-get commitments of our board and associate board, and through organizations that have come to see us not as a charity, but as a talent pool worth investing in.

None of that is mine to keep. And that has completely rewired what leadership, success, and ownership mean to me.

When you own a business, success is what you retain. When you build for a community, success is what other people become, and the truest sign you've built something well is that it no longer needs you. That's where I've landed. I picture Latinx MBA thriving for decades, and in that picture, I'm not the president. I don't need to be. Because we didn't just build an organization. We built a community that understands what it means to pay it forward. Now, there are hundreds of us who want to reach back and pull the next generation up.

That's the return I care about. Not what I get to hold onto—but what I get to let go of, knowing it will keep growing without me.