Women Who Lead
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
Women Who Lead
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
Women Who Lead
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
Women Who Lead
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
Next Gen Founders
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
Next Gen Founders
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
Women Who Lead
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
Unfiltered Wisdom from Women Leading with Purpose
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
When Stephanie Cartin and her co-founder Courtney Spitzer launched their social media agency Socialfly, they had no playbook. What they had was a habit of asking questions, admitting what they didn't know, and joining a networking group on day one. That habit became the foundation of Entreprenista,
Portia Allen grew up understanding visibility before she had a word for it. Her father was Fred "Rerun" Berry of What's Happening!!, and she later built an identity of her own in entertainment as Lady Rerun. She learned early what it means for people to know
Anita Lamb did not arrive in entrepreneurship through business school, investment or a polished start-up plan. She came from care work, and from a demanding period of family life that made her think seriously about building something of her own. Care taught her that service is personal: reliability, dignity,
Some communities begin with a business plan. Sisters In Strength began with a simple question: what if women had a place to connect without pressure, competition, or expectations? Co-founders Czha and Linz launched Sisters In Strength in Cebu, Philippines, in April 2026, building on a women's community
Padel is booming, but one basic problem still holds the game back. Every good match needs four players of similar ability, yet there is no shared way to describe how good a player really is. Levels are self-declared, calculated differently by each platform, and understood differently from one country
Lucy Clifton's path to the top of Spotlight Communications began in 1998, when she joined the then Prince of Wales's International Hotels Environment Initiative, an early introduction to luxury travel. It was there that she met the long-term business partner with whom she later founded
Access to AI tools does not automatically change how people work. That is the lesson Tina Saul took from her time at Meta, where early access to AI came without the practical training, visible sponsorship or protected time that teams needed to actually learn. It was only after she did
Francesca Rahimi grew up watching her mum work as a cleaner, and she saw how physically demanding the job could be and how much the right tools matter. That early view of everyday effort became the seed of FancysOfficial, a brand built around a simple idea: cleaning should be easier,