Invisible Ink

How do you take your skills from a traditional career and transform them into the core of a monetizable business? How do you mine the experience, contacts and the tacit knowledge you’ve built up over years into value-adding assets Day One? And how do you find creative and enterprising ways to take care of important parts of the business, but that you really hate or aren’t good at? In this episode,...

If you’re a woman in STEM trying to establish yourself, it can feel almost impossible to get your foot in the door. Double that if you’re also a person of color. And once you’re in the door, you’re only starting - you still have to deliver, get paid, get new business, find and keep great people, and have the means to pay them. Feels like an impossible task, that is, unless you’re Kimberly Moore, f...

How do you go from a pure social services background to founding a financial services company? How do you run that while staying true to mission? What is a certified B Corp and why would you choose that route? How do you learn everything you need to learn while bootstrapping your business from scratch ? In this episode, SpringFour founder Rochelle Nawrocki Gorey talks about her journey from grassr...

You’ve seen the numbers - the minuscule amount of funding that goes to women-founded businesses, the uphill battles, the struggle. What if you could turn the whole conventional model on its head and making fundraising less like the hunger games and more like getting an unexpected banquet? In this episode, Vicki Saunders, activator and founder of She-EO, now Coralus, talks about the inspiration beh...

Have you ever been frustrated by how much money we spend on healthcare and yet how bureaucratic and inefficient the system is? Or wondered why nobody’s fixing it? The good news is somebody already is! And it’s an amazing woman, no less, who’s also an accomplished doctor In this episode, radiologist and tech entrepreneur Dr. Aneesa Majid talks about how her frustrations with an antiquated healthcar...

How do you translate a burning social purpose into a functioning real-life organization? How do you make the biggest dent you can with the limited resources you have? How do you do all this while knowing nothing about your subject or the business when you start out? In this episode, neuroscientist turned social entrepreneur Tina Tang describes how she founded Debtless and canceled crushing debt to...

What do you do when you’re forced to shut down a business you’ve poured everything into? How do you break past the isolation of fighting your entrepreneurial battles alone? How is fundraising different for you as a woman than it is for your male peers? And what does it mean for your venture? Should you go it alone? Or get a cofounder? What are the two things women founders must do to do better at...

You became an entrepreneur because of an idea that grabbed you and wouldn’t let you rest. But with the thrill of that pursuit came some hard stuff you’d rather not deal with, but that you can’t neglect either. Like insurance Dealing with these matters doesn’t have to feel like getting a root canal. And you don’t have to shove it under the rug only to have it come back and bite you later. In today’...

How do you make it in a new country when you don’t know the first thing about surviving, let alone thriving, when your peers are already miles ahead of you. How do you reverse-engineer problems so you can break through brick walls to accomplish what you want? And how do you do all this in a completely homogenous , male dominated field? In today’s episode, entrepreneur and B2B venture capitalist Sh...

Do you believe in any of these? That building a bankable brand is all about smart marketing? That legalese is for later, when you’re bigger and making lots of money? That once you snag the domain name of your choice, your brand is safe? If you do, you just might be setting your business for a lot of pain later. In today’s episode, Shireen Smith, author of Brand Tuned, and IP and branding expert ,...

Imagine you’re now in a high-stakes situation in your business. It’s that moment when you KNOW you need more than just your hard work and expertise to tackle. Can you rise to the occasion? Can you build your risk-taking muscle so you prevail? How do you overcome fear, emotion and the inner voice that’s harshly negative so you make the right move and not the easy move more often? In this episode, p...

What do you do when your dream career slips out of grasp? And a global pandemic hits just as you’re trying to change course? How do you take a boring, male-dominated business by the horns as a young, untested entrepreneur through guts, discipline and tenacity? How do you stay true to your inner calling while still being financially viable? In this episode, entrepreneur Juliana Scheidhauer talks ab...

What is intellectual property? Why should you care, especially as an entrepreneur just starting out? How can you protect your hard work and investment in your business from undue risk? What can you do right now to get a head start? How should you select a good IP attorney? In this episode, business attorney Lisanne Butterfield discusses her views on all these questions and more. Please note that t...

How can you tell if YOUR burning problem is a good candidate for a startup? How do you know when it’s time to quit your job and jump in full time? What do you do when you’ve poured years into your startup and there’s still no traction? How do you get angel investors to open their checkbooks for a category-defying business? In today’s episode, engineer-turned-entrepreneur Reetu Gupta answers all th...

Are you switching to entrepreneurship from a corporate career? Feeling isolated and alone? Confused about startup financing and unsure what to do next? In this episode, Renata Merino, LatinX serial entrepreneur, 20 yr operator, Chicago Booth merit scholar and former investment banker turned investor, talks about her accidental entry into entrepreneurship, succeeding as a single mom, secrets to sma...

Feyi Ayodele is the CoFounder and CEO of CancerIQ, a startup that uses genetic information to predict, preempt and prevent cancer. Feyi started her career in finance but switched to healthcare to fulfill her desire to build a company that made a tangible difference in people’s lives.  Feyi Ayodele started off her career as a promising star in finance, but soon realized she wanted to do something m...

What’s different when you’re an underrepresented entrepreneur? Why create a new podcast? In this inaugural episode, advertising executive Susie Steinberg interviews podcast host Shubha Chakravarthy about becoming an entrepreneur. Learn about the 2 AM test, growing up Indian, fear, risk, the motivation to create this podcast, and more.