Female Founders Rise Show

Hosts Mae & Emmie unpack the five mindset traits that separate those who think like an entrepreneur from those who don't. Not everyone is cut out for it and most people don't know which side they're on. Do you actually have the entrepreneurial mindset? And do you even know what it is? Drawing from their own journeys, from Emmie running a major Google event with zero prior experienc...

Emily Kucharski was a director at WPP and Publicis. Then she went on maternity leave, taught herself to code, and co-founded an AI company with her husband. They have since raised over $1.3 million for Wholesum, an AI-native enterprise platform that helps organisations make sense of unstructured text data. In this conversation, Emmie and Mae dug into the fundraising playbook Emily built over three...

Mae raised nearly £1M from over 15 angel investors and most of it came through cold outreach. One LinkedIn DM landed her £250,000. Another cold email brought in £75,000. In this episode, she walks Emmie through the exact six-step playbook founders ask her about the most: how she prepared, where she found angels, what she said, and the parts nobody posts on LinkedIn. If you're fundraising right...

Eshita Kabra is the founder and CEO of By Rotation, the world’s largest peer-to-peer fashion rental app. She built it as a side hustle while working in finance, strategically walked away when the numbers made sense, and has since raised over £5 million - all while navigating the venture capital world as a South Asian woman who was told to "stick to her roots." In this episode, Emmie and...

Solo founder. Self-funded. Three businesses. 10-month-old baby. Lottie built Brand Hackers, Upworld, and Up Talent without VC, without a co-founder - and without slowing down. Here's what the juggle actually looks like. In this episode of the Female Founders Rise Show, Emmie Faust and Mae Yip sit down with Lottie to get honest about building a business after a baby - the planning, the personal bra...

Emmie and Mae sit down with Rupa Popat - exited founder, angel investor, and VC fund manager with close to $70 million in assets under management. Rupa brings a rare perspective: she's been a founder who failed her first raise, went on to exit her first business to a listed company, backed over 30 companies as an angel, and now runs Arāya Ventures which includes the Arāya Sie Fund, backing onl...

Emmie Faust and Mae Yip tackle one of the most Googled questions in the founder world: how do you actually get to your first £100k? Drawing on Emmie's 20+ years in business and Mae's experience scaling her first company beyond that milestone, the conversation cuts through the vanity metrics and gets straight to what actually works. From pricing your services and building founder-led sales,...

Most founders think VC is the only path. It's not and it might not even be the right one for you. In this episode, Emmie and Mae get into one of the most misunderstood topics in the founder world: angel investment vs venture capital. Mae raised nearly £1M from angel investors after being rejected by hundreds of VC and it turned out to be exactly the right decision for her business. They break...

Welcome to the Female Founders Rise Show, the podcast for women building businesses, hosted by Emmie Faust (serial founder, angel investor, mum of four, founder of Female Founders Rise) and Mae Yip (founder, angel-backed, and expecting her first baby). Every week they get into the conversations female founders are actually having privately, about money, burnout, parenting, relationships, hiring, g...