Dr. Zanna van der Aa

I bought crypto in 2017 because a friend was playing with it, so I had no idea what I was doing. I took a little profit for a business-class trip to New York with my husband, and then promptly forgot all about it. Until the end of 2020, when another friend sent me a video, and over one Christmas holiday I fell all the way down the rabbit hole: a gazillion podcasts, a certification, and almost all of our savings moved into Bitcoin in the months after.

Then, in April 2021, I got hacked. A classic, stupid mistake (my seed phrase in a fake Trezor app). And here is the strange part: not being able to get it back is what made me even more convinced. I started saving in Bitcoin again a month later, and I decided I wanted to teach people the hope I had found in it, its potential to change the world on so many profound topics.

So in 2024 I built a free Bitcoin course and orange-pilled about fifty people. But I kept hitting the same wall: for most people, Bitcoin still sounds like some crypto scam. The gap between what I had seen and where most people stood was enormous.

Late in 2025, two things collided. I was finishing my book on human-centric transformation, and with thirty years in tech I was quietly annoyed by the AI hype, the same cycle I had watched companies fall for my whole career, rushing into AI without ever asking what it did for actual humans. So I wrote a chapter on AI's real promise: taking the draining, purposeless tasks off our plates so we get our time back for what matters. Around then I found OpenClaw. I ignored it twice as too risky. The third time, I couldn't resist it anymore. In a single weekend I built a Bitcoin app nicer than the one I had spent ages on before, and I realised I could build a whole platform.

But not a Bitcoin course. A bridge. Money first, because that is where people actually stand. Then AI, because money and AI together are what really set you free: they buy back your time for a more purposeful life. That combination is what it means to be your own CEO.

I had never been a "women-first" person, no separate communities, no glass-ceiling speeches. But talking to woman after woman, I kept hearing the same line: "I'm not a numbers person, but I know I should learn this." Something clicked. I think about Peter Diamandis and his moonshots, and I thought: what if I could help a billion women become more financially educated, more sovereign, more free? What if I could help them teach their children and grandchildren, too?

So in early 2026 I started building Be Your Own CEO. The first fifteen pioneers joined in April and May to do the Money journey, and I built the AI journey they are running now. Twenty-five years of leading transformation in big companies taught me the one thing underneath all of it: nothing ever transforms without the people inside it transforming first. My own life has been one long version of that. It's such a joy to get to impact these women on their own transformational journeys.