The Breadwinners Podcast

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...

The formula for women's success isn't what you've been told. It's not your title, your salary, or your track record. It's your status — how much others respect and value you. And the way women build it is completely different from what most of us have been taught. Alison Fragale is an organizational psychologist, tenured professor, former McKinsey consultant, and the author of the national bestsel...

What does it actually look like when two ambitious people are building a life together .... from both sides? In this episode, I hand the mic to my husband, Todd Grantham - entrepreneur, father of four, and the person who has seen me at my most magnetic and my most completely undone. No script, no canned questions. Just a real conversation about what modern marriage actually looks like when ambitio...

What does it actually look like to build something sustainable — in your body, your business, and your family — without burning everything down in the process? Juliet Starrett has done it. Three world championship titles in elite whitewater paddling. A law degree. Nearly a decade in Big Law. Co-founder of San Francisco CrossFit, one of the first 25 affiliates in the world. And today, co-leader of...

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 the fund ten times over. On paper, it was the m...

One year ago, we gathered a group of extraordinary women around a dinner table at SXSW — and The Breadwinners was born. In honor of our one-year anniversary, we're bringing back the episode that started it all for the listeners who've joined us since. "You're not hitting your skincare routine, being a great mom, crushing it at your job, putting dinner on the table, and having sex with your husband...

What does it take to walk away from 17 years of corporate security — stock options, healthcare, a VP title at Nike — and bet on yourself? In this episode, Alexis sits down with Mel Strong, co-founder of Next Ventures, a health and wellness-focused venture fund. Mel's path has been anything but linear: first-grade teacher, journalist, marketing executive, interim CMO of Oura Ring, and now fund mana...

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...

What does modern fatherhood really look like in 2025 - and why aren't more men talking about it? In this episode of The Breadwinners Podcast, host Alexis Contos sits down with Nick Firchau, creator and host of The Paternal Podcast, to have an honest conversation about the challenges fathers face today. From the crisis of male loneliness to the invisible labor dads carry, Nick shares insights from...

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. "Mothers don't grind, we create. We don't hustle, we...

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...

It started with a pinched sciatic nerve and a diet of dollar-slice pizza. In 2012, Sarah Levey was working in fashion on a $32,000 salary, desperate for physical recovery but completely alienated by the performative nature of traditional yoga. She didn't just want a workout; she wanted a sanctuary where she didn't have to look like the teacher or the person in the front row. So she built Y7 Studio...

In this episode, Alexis Contos sits down with Libby Leffler, tech executive turned founder of First, who is dismantling the stigma around prenups and reframing them as the ultimate act of partnership design. After spending nearly two decades building generation-defining companies like Google, Facebook, and SoFi, Libby noticed a glaring gap in how we handle our most significant personal "merger", m...