Why We’re Building in the Caribbean Instead of Silicon Valley
- Nikki Andrade
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Not a heartbeat of mine skips when I open my social media feed and see another kidnapping or act of violence somewhere in Latin America.
This particular incident happened on the complete other side of the country — roughly 1,000 kilometers away from where we are currently building.
And still, my heart doesn’t stop.
“Nikki, you’re delusional if you think you can create in the tropics,” my father tells me wholeheartedly. I know he worries about my safety.
But I wasn’t born in America to become a pretty princess pretending violence only exists somewhere else. Crime is everywhere. It doesn’t magically disappear because we cross a border or move into a more expensive zip code. Even if the news would like us to believe otherwise.
When I got on that plane five years ago — when I sold most of my things, left behind the corporate version of success, and started searching for… well, this — I knew I was doing it for a reason.
What we are building in the Caribbean is not simply a fellowship or a business. It is a place where worlds collide. Where peace can be practiced. Where love is Spanglish. Where artists, entrepreneurs, educators, fishermen, children, travelers, and dreamers all still believe life can become something more beautiful than what we inherited.
Not through fancy classrooms. Not through expensive conferences. Not through another app telling us how disconnected we all are. But through proximity. Through conversation. Through creating alongside one another.
It’s you. It’s me. It’s locals with enormous dreams to transform their communities and see the world — while also showing many of us an entirely different world Americans rarely have the privilege to experience themselves.
People who teach us how to dance barefoot at sunrise.
Silicon Valley can’t give me that.
I can’t sip overpriced lattes in yoga pants thousands of miles away and still expect to fully understand the opportunities, tensions, beauty, and contradictions living here.
Remote work can only take us so far.
Eventually our feet need to touch the sand.
We need to hear the music. Taste the salt in the air. Feel the complexity of a place for ourselves.
Because the opportunity hiding here is not just economic. It’s human.
And maybe that’s the thing no one seems to fully understand yet.
As artists and creative entrepreneurs, we do not only have the ability to embody the change we want to see in the world — we have the privilege and responsibility to attempt it.
We deserve to live creatively. To live courageously. To build communities rooted in something deeper than optimization and extraction.
And that’s what we are creating over here at Planting Good Seeds.
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