In their mutual interest in doing good while also doing well, Gabriela Berrospi and Anthony Delgado fell in love.
Mr. Delgado, 34, has the easygoing supportive spirit of a big brother, and the I-did-it-and-you-can-too unflappability of a true optimist. So Ms. Gabriela Berrospi, 30, was inspired when he described his entrepreneurial education effort in Puerto Rico at a leadership-development seminar both had attended in New York in 2018.
“I thought, wow, that sounds like something I would like to do,” she said.
A year or so later, when she was starting a Spanish-language online educational organization to help women learn the basics of investments, she asked if she could hire him, for $1,500. She needed someone to manage the technology-development aspects.
He remembered her well from their course together. “I’ve always been looking for a powerful woman who was motivated,” he said. “She’s so animated and energetic, so smart and sweet.”
She proposed a business meeting. “I said, ‘Great! Let’s go out to dinner, on Friday, at 7, at this romantic restaurant,’” he said. “I turned her business request into a date.”
At the dinner, Mr. Delgado suggested they target the world’s Spanish speakers, and call it Latino Wall Street. He said they should start it up right away.
Mr. Delgado assured her that any kinks in the system could be worked out on the fly. She trusted him.
Just a couple of weeks after their initial dinner “date,” the two began the company. And they commenced a romantic relationship too.
They were at her apartment in New York and tending to the final details of the company’s first online webinar, which was to take place the next day, on June 6, 2019. When they were finally done, they ordered in dinner and had a bottle of red wine. The couple had their first kiss that night.
The next day, Latino Wall Street’s first webinar was a success, too.
Ms. Berrospi, who now runs the company with Mr. Delgado from San Juan, Puerto Rico, where they both now live, says she likes to remind him, “I was with you before we made one dollar.”
Mr. Delgado was by that time already living in Puerto Rico, where his father’s family is from, and working on his own company, Disrupt Education Services, an effort to help Puerto Ricans learn to become successful entrepreneurs using the internet.
He had arrived in late 2017, as a Hurricane Maria volunteer, and moved to the island permanently in 2018, after the conclusion of the leadership-development seminar in New York.
With Ms. Berrospi’s vision, they realized, they could vastly increase the number of people their message might reach. She is originally from Peru, and graduated from N.Y.U.
“When I met her, my mission was to empower the three million people in Puerto Rico,” he said. “We expanded to 400 million people in Latin America and Latinos around the world.”
Business, though, was also an excuse for the two to align.
“She’s beautiful, but you can say that about any girl. She’s smart — she’s really, really, really smart — but you can say that about any girl,” he said. “The one thing I love about her so much is that she is powerful. She’s a woman that can move oceans. Super, super hard-working, and powerful, and inspiring.”
When the two launched the business, Ms. Berrospi had grown tired of the New York dating scene. “I was at a point in my life where I wanted to settle down,” she said. “When I found him, why would I even think about going out on dates? I was pretty much sure right away.”
The two were married Sept. 19 at Hacienda Campo Rico in Carolina, Puerto Rico, just outside San Juan. They had 20 guests, but invited, via email, 30,000 online acquaintances to attend their wedding on a livestream video link. The Rev. Pablo N. Aymat, a Lutheran minister, officiated.
