Sonia Couto — Breast Cancer, Breaking Into Tech, and Why "Work-Life Balance" Is a Lie

Sonia Couto is a tech entrepreneur, startup founder, and breast cancer survivor who spent 18 years navigating male-dominated industries before building and relaunching her own SaaS product from scratch.Most people treat a cancer diagnosis as the worst thing that can happen to them. Sonia treated it as data. When she was diagnosed with stage one breast cancer, she didn't just fight for her health — she used the experience to interrogate her entire life, confront the fact that she didn't know how to love herself, and make a decision about the kind of person she wanted to be remembered as. That forced clarity changed everything. Her career, her mindset, her approach to entrepreneurship, and even her rejection of the idea that work-life balance is something to strive for — all of it traces back to one of the hardest seasons of her life becoming her most honest teacher.Expect to learn why a breast cancer diagnosis became the catalyst for the deepest personal transformation of Sonia's life, how she entered tech completely by accident and turned curiosity into a full career, what it actually feels like to be a woman building in male-dominated spaces and how she learned to use the pushback as fuel, why she scrapped an entire tech product and rebuilt it from zero — and why that decision paid off, what self-awareness really looks like in entrepreneurship and when the most courageous move is to stop rather than push through, why Sonia completely rejects the concept of work-life balance and what she replaced it with, how women can stop playing small and start advocating for themselves without fear of the labels that follow, why the word "no" loses its power the moment you stop treating it as a verdict, and much more.This conversation will shift how you think about setbacks, self-advocacy, and what it means to build a life — and a business — on your own terms.