Vanessa is an award-winning consumer founder and leader proven to build brands that cut through the noise, inspire evangelism and loyalty, and scale from zero to national distribution. Her superpower lies at the intersection of highly strategic / analytically rigorous and deeply human / creative. She is an alumna of Bain & Co and Harvard, and the daughter of Vietnamese refugees.

Vanessa has been featured on CNN Primetime, CBS Mornings, The New York Times, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company. She is a keynote speaker at organizations like Nordstrom, Pepsi, and Anheuser-Busch. Select honors include Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient (2021) and judge (2023), "Viral startup star" in Fortune Magazine, Inc. Female Founders 250, and AdWeek Young Influential.

She is the co-founder and former CEO of Omsom, a proud + loud Asian food brand that launched nationwide in Whole Foods, Target and Sprouts, and sold 5M+ units before being acquired by a public company in June 2024. Having garnered 20B+ press impressions and built a ride-or-die community of 200K, Omsom has been named "Most Innovative Company" by Inc and "one of the best cooking products" by CNN. Vanessa is especially proud of the institutional change Omsom led — from helping remove MSG from Whole30’s “Restricted” list to advancing the conversation around the inequities of the “ethnic” aisle.