She Left Microsoft, Amazon & AWS to Fix What's Broken | CEO, Darshana.ai - Natalie Gil

Most founders build a company and then go looking for the problem it solves. Natalie Gil did the opposite — and said so out loud: she went looking for a good problem to fit the solution she already knew how to build. That solution is Darshana, a platform tackling something almost nobody talks about but everybody is affected by: how we actually prove who we are and what we can do. Verified. Portable. Private by default. Built on blockchain and AI. Natalie spent more than two decades at the frontier of deep tech — inside Microsoft, Amazon and AWS, as a CTO in healthcare, and doing serious blockchain work long before the rest of the market caught up. She's an MIT Sloan Fellow, a Carnegie Mellon grad, a co-founder of the MIT Enterprise Forum in Spain, and one of the leaders behind LATINITY, the largest Latin American women in technology conference. She's also an angel investor. In this conversation with host Brandi Kolosky, Founder and General Partner of Sacral Capital, Natalie covers: → Why she describes her life not in terms of obstacles but readiness — and how growing up in Peru shaped what she thought was possible → How her definition of prosperity evolved from collecting titles, to proving value, to amplifying impact → The three pieces that came together to make Darshana possible: women's empowerment work, borderless identity systems, and a world drowning in untrustworthy data → Why private-by-default isn't just a technical choice — and why half of Darshana's work is teaching people to take care of their own data → What made her walk away from the safety of a corporate career, and the conflict-of-interest problem nobody talks about → Why she builds for healthy growth over fast growth, and designs culture deliberately → Who she bets on as an angel: technical, underrepresented women who are too busy building to do everything at once → The exact psychographic of the investor she's looking for — and why deep tech R&D needs patient capital → The question she turned around and asked Brandi about what fulfillment really looks like for founders Only 1.1 percent of global capital flows to women-led companies, down from 2.3 percent. At Sacral Capital, the thesis is that we heal broken systems by redirecting capital toward the people already building the fixes. Natalie is exactly that person. Find Natalie at https://darshana.ai and on https://www.linkedin.com/in/nataliegil/, where she publishes weekly. Ready to find out if you're investor-ready? Take the Capital Readiness Scorecard at https://PlungeIntoProsperity.com.