Codie Sanchez was walking alone at night through Roma, a neighborhood in Mexico City, when she felt that familiar prickling at the back of her neck. Behind her, two men. Ahead, a locked-looking courtyard door she knew from experience was not actually locked. She ran for it, pulled it shut, and stood in the dark listening to them pass. In that moment of pure compression, something clarified. If she could solve this, she could solve business. Because business, she realized, was never actually going to kill her. That clarity took 39 years to arrive, and she wants to hand it to you in about 14 minutes.
Sanchez has worked in politics, journalism, sales, finance, and startups, built an asset management firm in Mexico City to roughly a billion dollars under management, and eventually pivoted to buying and scaling small businesses. She has been pushed out of companies, publicly attacked by people she considered friends, and found herself one night staring at a near-bankrupt business she had spent a decade building. The through-line across all of it is not a tidy formula. It is a set of hard-won observations she now considers the actual curriculum.
The nail you step on and what to do with it
When Sanchez was pushed out of her first company after making them millions, she spent months depressed before her father reframed the whole thing. His words were plain: life is often filled with nails we step on, and we can spend our time asking who left the nail there, or we can just pull it out and feel it hurt. She credits that single reframe with the decision to finally bet on herself, make her first independent dollar, and stop waiting for someone else to confirm she was good enough. The people-pleasing corollary arrived later when a former friend spent years attacking her online, and Sanchez eventually told him: ‘The only thing I regret in this conversation is apologizing to you because you should be doing it to me.’ She describes being genuinely proud of that moment, not because it was combative, but because it meant the boundary was real.
On the subject of who gets to be in the room with you, she is equally direct. Hanging around people who have never built anything is not neutral. It is a slow transfer of their ceiling onto your future. She lost an entire college friend group when her growing ambitions stopped aligning with weekend drinking plans. One close friend from Arizona State told her she was too focused on her ‘builder friends.’ Sanchez pauses on that: ‘I never thought that until right now.’
Getting into rooms where you are the dumbest person there
The counterweight to cutting people out is actively seeking the rooms where you have nothing to offer yet. Sanchez sat down once with a man named David, worth around a hundred million dollars at the time, asked him a sharp run of direct questions, and then ended with a simple one: how could she help him in return? That single instinct, to find a way to contribute rather than just extract, led to a business relationship, led to deals, and she says it permanently rewired how she thinks about money and proximity. The lesson is not about networking as a transactional sport. It is about having no ego when you have no leverage.
The Mexico City night ties back into this. After she stood in that courtyard, heartbeat loud, and heard the men talking as they passed, she felt something she did not expect: an adrenaline rush. ‘Winners love pressure,’ she says. ‘It’s like anticipation for the show.’ The vice grip is not the enemy. It is the signal that the stage is set.
A street in Roma, still quiet
The courtyard door in Mexico City. Unlocked, as she gambled it would be.
Sanchez walked back out of it that night with her business still technically collapsing, her biggest client about to be absorbed by a competitor, and her entire decade of work in that country suddenly in question. She kept walking anyway.
