The Breadwinners Podcast

**This is a replay from a previous episode** What does it feel like to reach the pinnacle of your career — and realize it no longer fits? Devon McDonald spent 17 years in venture capital, rising to General Partner at OpenView Ventures while raising three kids and serving as the financial anchor for her family. In March 2020, OpenView had its largest exit ever when Datadog went public, returning th...

Everyone is calling everything a community right now. Marika Frumes has spent six years building the real thing, and she knows the difference. Alexis sits down with Marika, founder of Mysha, the morning after the two co-hosted a dinner in Austin. Marika shares how a WhatsApp group of 18 expecting moms in January 2020 became a lifeline during the pandemic and grew into Mysha. She also opens up, for...

In this episode, Alexis Contos sits down with Patrice Meagher, a 20-year Commercial Real Estate veteran turned Founder and CEO of MilkMate. After spending two decades leasing millions of square feet in Manhattan , Patrice realized that while we can fly to space, the most "innovative" solution for pumping at work was still a storage closet or a bathroom stall. Patrice shares her journey of leaving...

Most of us are told to chase the title, the house, the marriage that looks good from the outside. Keren Eldad had all of it, and it nearly broke her. In this episode, executive coach and bestselling author Keren Eldad (Gilded, Gilt Free) sits down with Alexis to unpack what happens when your ambition outruns your actual self. Keren shares the exact moment her life "came crashing down" in the showe...

You're expected to work like you don't have kids and parent like you don't work. Kelly Hubbell, founder of Sage Haus, looked at this impossible equation and decided to build the solution herself. In this episode, Kelly shares her journey from corporate tech sales to launching Sage Haus—a company that provides house managers and holistic family support for busy working parents. After her second chi...

Postpartum is not a diagnosis. It's an experience every mother has, whatever form it takes. What determines whether you need support is severity and how long it lasts, and most of us were never taught the difference. In this episode, Alexis sits down with Sonny Williams, a perinatal mental health certified counselor and clinician with BetterHelp, to break down the real spectrum of maternal mental...

WeNatal co-founders Ronit Menashe and Vida Delrahim explain trimester zero: the three months before conception when both partners can improve egg and sperm quality through targeted nutrition, bioavailable supplements, and cutting alcohol, smoking, and vaping. Male factor influences roughly half of miscarriage and infertility outcomes, and men regenerate sperm continuously, which means the window t...

*This is a replayed episode from earlier in Season 1* The first man to sit at the Breadwinners table. We're bringing back this conversation with Nick Firchau, host of the Paternal podcast, because the questions it raises haven't gone anywhere. Nick has interviewed more than 130 men about fatherhood, and this episode gets into what those conversations reveal: men parenting without a model, the frie...

Melanie Kaplan is the founder and CEO of oPPal, a peer support platform for postpartum moms that matches new and expecting mothers, called Little oPPals, with trained, experienced mothers, called Big oPPals. She built it after her own experience with severe postpartum depression and anxiety, and she joined host Alexis Contos the same week oPPal launched nationally in May 2026. In this conversation...

This is a replay of an earlier episode. Alexis reunites with Julie Cordua, CEO of Thorn, the organization building technology to defend children from online sexual exploitation. The two worked together 15 years ago on Thorn's launch, and Alexis has watched Julie turn that early mission into her life's work while raising three kids of her own. **Content warning: This episode discusses child sexual...

Jaclyn Johnson built Create and Cultivate from a blog into a multi-million dollar company, sold it, watched it fall apart under new ownership, and bought it back. In this episode, Create and Cultivate founder Jaclyn Johnson breaks down what it actually costs to build a company: a $75 million acquisition deal that collapsed because of COVID, a private equity sale two years later, a stage zero breas...

In this episode, Alexis Contos sits down with Morgan Zanotti, the founder behind Waay and former leader at Primal Kitchen, to discuss what it really takes to build wellness brands while being a breadwinner mother. From navigating the competitive CPG industry to creating products that align with her values as a parent, Morgan shares the unfiltered reality of startup life, financial responsibility,...

Most parents think entertaining their kids is the job. Lizzie Assa says the real job is stepping back enough for kids to build the skill of playing independently. Lizzie Assa, founder of The Workspace for Children and author of But I'm Bored, joins The Breadwinners to break down what independent play actually is and why it's disappearing from modern childhood. Alexis and Lizzie get into the differ...

Ali Tate Cutler⁠ gets brutally honest about what nobody tells you: how to build a business while grieving the version of yourself you once were. Less than 1% of guests on major business podcasts are mothers. The rest? Childless men teaching strategies that don't work when you're building while celebrating your own transformation as a working mom. Ali (former supermodel turned social media strategi...

Twenty years ago, Neha Ruch and I were colleagues at an ad agency in Boston. Two twenty-somethings staying late, expensing cab rides home, measuring our worth by how hard we hustled. Today, between us, we have six kids, two platforms, and a completely different definition of what it means to be ambitious. Neha is the founder of The Power Pause and the author of the book by the same name. For a dec...

Most working mothers have never been asked what they actually carry, and what they bring. At our Los Angeles dinner, we pulled women aside and asked. In Confidence is a five-part documentary series filmed at The Breadwinners' inaugural Los Angeles dinner. Eight women stepped away from the table and into something rarer: unfiltered truth. What came out wasn't curated. It was real. Over five episode...

This is a replay of an earlier episode with Libby Leffler of First. Libby Leffler built an entire company around the conversation most couples never have. As founder and CEO of First, a platform making prenuptial agreements accessible to modern couples, she's reframing the prenup not as a divorce document but as a partnership design tool - the first legal agreement a couple makes, not the last res...

Jeni Britton built Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams from a $30,000 SBA loan into a $175 million company. She is doing it again with Floura, her next-generation fiber company turning produce trimmings like watermelon rinds and apple cores into nutrient-dense bars. This episode is not a business case study. Alexis Contos sits down with Jeni for an interior conversation about the person underneath both com...

Most women have been sold self-care as a product. Dr. Pooja Lakshmin is here to tell you it's infrastructure. Pooja is a board-certified psychiatrist, New York Times contributor, and author of the national bestseller Real Self-Care: Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included. In this episode, she breaks down the four principles of real self-care (boundaries, compassion, values, power), the...

School is out 46% of the year. After you subtract PTO and federal holidays, working parents are left covering 99 days with no formal childcare — and no amount of workplace flexibility closes that gap. Molly Morse isn't just naming the problem. She built the solution. Molly Morse is the co-founder of Recess, a marketplace that connects parents to afterschool programs, camps, and kids' classes - wit...

Iskra Lawrence built one of the fastest-growing body care brands in America,  ⁨Saltair , without paying herself a salary. That's not the beginning of the story. It's barely the middle. This episode traces one of the most honest founder journeys in beauty: a girl from Kidderminster UK told that she was too curvy for straight-size modeling and too small for plus-size. A model who cold-called brands...

The aesthetics industry is largely run by marketing. Adriana Culling built her practice to be the exception. Adriana is the founder of Maeva Aesthetics in Austin - a nurse injector with a background in clinical research and a near-complete second degree in chemistry who chose building her own aesthetics business specifically so she would never feel pressure to upsell a patient or inject something...

The tests exist. The science has been here for decades. The only thing that's ever been missing is access. Pranitha Patil co-founded Function Health because she lived the gap herself. Diagnosed with PCOS at 16, pre-diabetes and high cholesterol in her 20s, she spent years running experiments on her own body, tracking her biomarkers in a spreadsheet before she had the language for what she was actu...

Your body isn't broken. You just haven't had the right person in your corner. Dr. Alexis Griffin is a Doctor of Physical Therapy, a board-certified sports clinical specialist, and the woman who has kept NFL players, NBA athletes, and Olympic competitors performing at the top of their game. She has also navigated four pregnancies, four unmedicated deliveries, and four postpartum recoveries — each t...

*THIS IS A REPLAY FROM AN EARLIER EPISODE IN SEASON 1* Aileen Fitzgerald left a nearly decade-long nursing career, ended a long-term relationship, and moved into a new home the night before the Austin snow apocalypse, with four weeks of rent money and a set of paint brushes. This episode is about what it looks like to burn your life down in order to build one that is actually yours. Aileen Fitzger...