We are proud to announce the Q3 2026 FBW Quarterly Awards winners and honorees. This quarter's cohort spans cross-border payments, battery technology, labor and employment law, marketing and communications, sustainability consulting, and independent publishing, brought together by founders and leaders who built their work around trust, access,
Women Who Lead
Adhira Tippur grew up in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, where her mom runs four dental practices, and spent much of her childhood after school answering phones and checking patients in at the front desk. She noticed that the team was always busy, yet follow-up calls to
Women Who Lead
Do Mai Anh went to study in Singapore from Vietnam and found herself in the middle of a real culture shock, with a completely different way of learning, constant deadlines and a language gap with her lecturers. She realised that many Vietnamese students abroad struggle not because they lack ability,
Women Who Lead
Helen Si and Vanessa Gao are the co-founders of Tripals, a travel platform helping people plan less and travel better. The idea came from their own trips, both just the two of them and with friends. Planning meant juggling fragmented tools, group chats, spreadsheets, saved posts and booking confirmations,
Women Who Lead
Christine Jones founded Sirenxyz after years as Global Executive Creative Director at Ridley Scott Creative Group, where she led the creative division. Brands such as Avon were asking for more honest storytelling aimed at women, and the women on her creative team wanted to get to the heart of those
Women Who Lead
Keldamuzik works across music and television, and she started TAMZ, a beret collection, as another way to express the same creativity and confidence she brings to her performances. For her, a beret has personality: it can be dressed up or kept casual, and one piece can give a whole look
Women Who Lead
Alison Ryan started her career in executive search 25 years ago as a consultant and became a founding Director of Executive Headhunters EMA Partners in 2005. Today she is the firm’s Chief Customer Officer and, for the past 12 months, EMEA Chair for EMA Partners, working with colleagues across
Unfiltered Wisdom from Women Leading with Purpose
Join us for a workshop: Everyday Leadership: Finding Your Voice, Ready or Not Sometimes leadership starts without a title. Our community needs a voice, our work needs a change, our family needs support. Every time we speak, we are leading, ready or not. Founded by Women is hosting a live
Molly Liu’s path to founding MAVI started long before she became the third product manager at Ramp. Born in Nanning, China, she moved to Ohio at age four, shared an apartment with three other families, and watched her parents work restaurant shifts while studying. That upbringing shaped her drive
Katie Herron spent almost four years on Mattel’s Barbie Global Brand team, a role she calls her dream job. She grew through successful projects, promotions, and global travel, and when she felt she had achieved what she set out to do, she knew it was time to start her
Fintech spent two decades digitizing money. Now AI is starting to digitize something far more complicated: judgment. For Arina Anapolskaya, a Ukrainian-born fintech entrepreneur and advisor based in San Francisco, that shift raises a question the industry has barely begun to answer: when AI starts interpreting regulation and recommending
Most growing businesses solve a finance bottleneck the same way: they hire more people to do things exactly as they have always been done. Lara, founder of ACE-XL, saw that this is an expensive way to grow. After 15 years working inside scaling companies, she knew that highly trained
Most students spend their senior year thinking about college applications. Dev Srivastava and Deborah Torrico-Pardo, both seniors at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, spent their summer building something they wished had existed when they were younger: a free research mentorship for middle schoolers. Starting with mentoring
At nine years old, Elaine Elizabeth Jinto handed her parents a folder of handwritten poems and stories and told them she wanted to be published. Her mother searched for places that accept student writing, and the first result was Stone Soup. That online community stayed with her for years. Now
Soho Francotte did not plan to become a bag designer. After years of touring Europe with a Belgian music project, she and her partner moved to the Belgian countryside in 2020, hoping for a quieter rhythm between tours. Then Covid ended touring overnight. The first lockdown gave her the time
Elizabeth Maruyama arrived in the US from Thailand in 2017 on a temporary work visa, with a finance background and a lifelong love of coding. The immigration system still felt like a maze. It took her two years to navigate the EB-3 skilled worker green card largely alone, and
Most art mediums are built on plastic, and most wall compounds contain crystalline silica. Alicia Garcia-Romero spent eighteen years working with these materials as an artist, an architectural designer and a furniture maker before she started questioning them. The turning point came while she was designing furniture, pregnant, with
Most founders do not ignore the warning signs. They see them, name them privately, and keep going. In a CEREVITY review of 307 executives who sought therapy, the median gap between recognizing serious strain and a first session was 21 months, and 58% waited until a crisis forced the decision.
Long before longevity became a mainstream conversation, Michal Cohen-Sagi was already thinking about how early choices shape a long, independent life. At twelve, she watched her father lose his eyesight to diabetes, an experience that taught her how deeply health can affect freedom. Her own journey through endometriosis and