The Best Decision My Daughter Made Was Betting on Herself

My daughter bet on herself. That is the whole story, and it is the best decision she has made.

She is a computer science student. She had every safe option on the table, the ones you are supposed to take: internships, a recruiting pipeline, a title at a company someone else built. She looked at all of it and chose the harder thing. She started her own company.

She was worried, and then she wasn’t

Back in February I wrote a post for her. Her older brother is a lawyer, and I had written about what AI meant for his practice. She read it and pushed back over dinner, in When the Algorithm Hits Home, with the sharper question: “You told him the tools will not replace him. I am the one training to build the tools.”

That was a real worry, and it was the right one. A lot of her classmates are sitting in it right now.

She did not sit in it. She answered it the only way that actually resolves the question. She went and built something.

She chose the entrepreneurial route

Choosing to start a company while you are still in school is not the conventionally safe move, and I admire her for making it. I am not worried about her. If anything, I think she is at the best possible time in her life to pull this off: no mortgage, nobody depending on her income, energy to spare, and the freedom to take a real swing and learn from every bit of it. There is no salary. There is no manager telling you the work was good. There is just you, a market that does not know you exist yet, and the daily decision to keep going. She runs at exactly that.

Annette made that decision, and she has made it again every day since. She announced it publicly, which takes its own kind of nerve. Once you say it out loud, you have to show up.

She built it from scratch

The company is RSTS AI. She builds managed AI employees for small, service-based businesses: not a chat window, but a system that actually does a job, like answering the after-hours call or chasing the proposal nobody had time to follow up on.

My part in this is small and I want to be clear about it. I am a sounding board. I ask annoying questions, I get excited with her, I believe her when she says she can do it. That is the fun part, and it is the easy part. The company is hers. The architecture, the product, the writing, the client conversations, the late nights when something does not work, all of that is her.

The proof is in the shipping

Here is what convinced me this was not a phase. She ships.

Since June she has published more than twenty posts on her company blog, building in public the entire way. Not marketing fluff. Real case studies with the details filled in: the two hundred follow-up emails nobody wanted to send during tax season, the call that came in at 9:47 at night, the lead a firm never knew it lost. She measures success in hours recovered, not headcount cut, which tells me she actually understands who she is selling to.

That loop is the thing I am most proud of. She has a choice, she builds, she ships it, she looks honestly at the results, she learns, and she goes around again. Every lap she gets faster and the work gets better. I have spent my whole career trying to get teams to run that loop cleanly. She just does it, and she is learning an enormous amount on every turn.

What I actually did

Not much, and I want that on the record so nobody gives me credit that belongs to her.

I encouraged her. I believed her when she said she could do it. I asked questions; she made every call. Everything that is hard, she did herself. Mariela and I mostly get to stand back and watch, which is its own quiet privilege.

Bet on yourself

If there is a lesson here for anyone staring at the same crossroads my daughter stood at, it is this. In an era where the tools are getting cheaper and the safe paths are getting narrower, the highest-return move is often to bet on yourself and start doing the work in the open. When execution gets commoditized, the scarce thing is the judgment to pick the right problem and keep showing up, and you build that faster on your own than any job would teach you. The work speaks for itself.

She bet on herself. She is putting in the time and the effort, she is delivering real results, and she is learning a ton. As her dad, I could not be prouder of the person doing it.

Go see what she is building. She is just getting started.

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Companion piece: When the Algorithm Hits Home is the post where she first asked what the AI era meant for the people building the tools. Starting a company was her answer.

I write about AI-assisted development, enterprise architecture, and occasionally the family that keeps making my point for me. Follow along on X @orestesgarcia or connect on LinkedIn /in/setsero.