The Mothers with Sara Brown

Editor’s note: We’re revisiting some of our favorite conversations from the archive this summer . Enjoy! Drumroll for greatness – Lexi Reese joins the pod this week! Lexi is the co-founder and CEO of Lanai , an AI Empowerment Platform that helps enterprises transform AI experiments into systematic success. Before Lanai, she led the Global Programmatic Ad Business at Google and then jumped to be th...

Patrice Meagher is the founder and CEO of MilkMate and a former Executive Vice President at CBRE, where she spent nearly 15 years shaping the commercial real estate landscape in Manhattan – while becoming a mother of four. She was, by almost any measure, succeeding. And she was also, by her own account, quietly losing the plot. Not because she wasn't capable. But because the system around her...

What happens when motherhood asks you to do work you never imagined? For Nasha Fitter, it meant stepping into a world of rare disease, medical research, caregiving, and advocacy – not because she chose it, but because her daughter needed her to. After her daughter Amara was diagnosed with FOXG1 syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that affects brain development, movement, speech, and cognition,...

What happens when toxic productivity reaches childhood? As parents, many of us feel pressure to enrich, entertain, supervise, and optimize every moment of our children's lives – all while navigating the demands of work, family, and everything else competing for our attention. In this episode, Sara sits down with parenting coach, educator, founder of The Workspace for Children , and writer behi...

After leaving a 12-year career at Google, Sara Brown became fascinated by two questions: Who are mothers when nobody is asking about their children? And who are successful women when nobody is asking about their success? On her new podcast, Sara sits down with influential women shaping industries, institutions, communities, and culture (while raising kids!) to explore the person behind the titles,...

Dana Haimoff is a Managing Director in the Private Equity Group at JPMorgan Asset Management in London, where she has spent more than two decades investing on behalf of institutional clients. She is also the co-founder of Level 20 , an organization dedicated to increasing the representation of women in private equity across Europe. In this episode, Dana shares what it was like to build a career in...

Dr. Robyn Riseberg didn't set out to become an entrepreneur. She set out to become a pediatrician. But after years caring for children and families across Boston, she found herself increasingly frustrated by the limitations of the healthcare system around her. So frustrated, in fact, that her daughters eventually told her to stop complaining and build something better. That challenge led Dr. R...

For decades, Trish Walker operated at the highest levels of corporate America – first rising to Senior Managing Director at Accenture, then as President of Home & Services at Best Buy. But beneath the executive titles was a more personal set of questions: What kind of life actually feels sustainable? How do you know when something is no longer working? And how do you separate what you truly wa...

Many high-achieving women believe that if they prepare well enough, work hard enough, and become competent enough, they can prevent things from falling apart. Then they become mothers. Emily Greenberg spent her career working across nearly every layer of the modern childhood ecosystem – from teaching sixth grade to building parenting products and family platforms at companies including Lovevery, A...

Sara Holcomb spent 16 years inside Google before leaving for senior roles at Dentsu and Criteo, where she's now SVP of Strategy. But the more interesting story isn't the resume – it's what happens when the thing you've built your entire identity around is suddenly gone. And then, on top of that: her younger son August started losing his hearing. We talk about the months-long diagno...

Miki Agrawal has built four companies. She has disrupted pizza, periods, bathrooms, and diapers. She has written two books, raised millions, and scaled brands that changed how people think about the most intimate parts of daily life. And she has no interest in building that way again. Miki is the founder of WILD , THINX , TUSHY and most recently HIRO Technologies . She is a serial entrepreneur who...

What does it actually mean to “be yourself” at work – especially as a parent? And is “authenticity” even the right goal anymore? Because for many mothers, the question isn’t just who am I at work? It’s: Which version of me is allowed here? What do I keep in? What do I edit out? And what does it cost to keep performing? Claude Silver has built her career around these questions. As Chief Heart Offic...

What does it mean to live through grief and uncertainty, and still choose joy? In this BEST OF episode, Sara sits down with Marisa Renee Lee (www.marisareneelee.com) – author, advocate, entrepreneur, grief expert, and the brilliant mind behind Grief Is Love and her new book Waiting for Dawn . From Wall Street to the Obama White House, from profound personal loss to becoming a Mother through persis...

What if the real risk isn’t leaving – but staying too long? Christine May, PhD, trained as a psychologist focused on behavior change and was on a tenure-track path in academia when, in early motherhood, she started to question whether the life she’d spent years building still worked. She shares how and why she left academia and moved into industry through Noom, where she led behavioral science and...

After her grandmother passed away, Barrie Farivar found herself returning to something she couldn’t replace – recordings of her voice. Not photos. Not videos. Just her voice. Telling stories. Being herself. Still somehow present. That experience stayed with her. So much so that after a career at Google and YouTube and an MBA from Harvard Business School, Barrie left her “perfect on paper” job to b...

A lot of us are doing an extraordinary amount – at work, at home, emotionally, logistically – and still feel like it’s not enough. In this episode, I talk with clinical psychologist and executive coach Dr. Anne Welsh , who calls this the “ambition paradox” – the impossible standard modern mothers are trying to meet: to be exceptional at work, exceptional at home, and somehow never fall apart in th...

Sarah Kauss is the founder and former CEO of S’well, the category-defining brand she built from $30,000 of her own savings into a company generating over $100M in annual revenue and helping displace billions of single-use plastic bottles. Today, she is a Managing Partner at Avignon Partners and serves as an investor, advisor, and board member, working with leadership teams to build and scale compa...

Amy Reinert’s career in tech marketing was on a clear trajectory – until motherhood, layoffs, and the realities of raising a family reshaped the path entirely. After being laid off while pregnant and navigating the realities of childcare, commuting, and workplace culture, Amy stepped away from the fast track she had been on - a quiet trade-off many mothers make to keep life working for everyone el...

More and more women are leaving powerful institutions to build businesses and careers on their own terms. But many of those “choices” were shaped long before they ever made them. C. Nicole Mason, PhD is the founder and president of Future Forward Women, a policy network working to build women’s political and economic power in the United States and globally. She previously served as President and C...

You built the career. You earned the title. You became, fully and completely, the thing you worked so hard to be. Then you got pregnant — and felt something no one warned you about. Grief. Dr. Pria Anand is a Yale and Stanford-trained neurologist practicing at Boston Medical Center, Assistant Professor at Boston University School of Medicine, and author of the award-winning The Mind Electric — a P...

Amber Coleman-Mortley is a Culture, Community & Equity Leader, former Senior Director at The Female Quotient, longtime civic engagement strategist, and mother of three. A three-sport NCAA athlete turned educator and workplace equity leader, Amber has built her career at the intersection of justice, community and institutional change. But this conversation isn’t about titles. It’s about steadin...

What happens when the psychologist becomes the patient? Dr. Emily Guarnotta is a licensed psychologist, perinatal mental health specialist, co-founder of Phoenix Health , and mother of two. Early in her career, she focused on anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Maternal mental health wasn’t on her radar until she experienced postpartum depression herself and encountered just how hard it was...

What if the problem isn’t our ambition, resilience, or mindset, but a system rigged in ways mothers are taught to internalize as personal failure? Corinne Low, PhD – Wharton economics professor, author of Having It All , and mother of two – joins Sara to unpack how becoming a mother blew up the script she was following and exposed the gap between the lives women are promised and the ones they are...

Cindy Brown, CEO of the iconic Boston Duck Tours and Mother, joined the company more than 30 years ago after leaving a fast-track career in finance to take a chance on what she calls “the duck thing.”  She never looked back. In this conversation, Cindy reflects on building a deeply rooted, wildly successful business without chasing scale. And how designing her life around proximity, partnership, a...

Jennifer Breheny Wallace – NYT bestselling author of Never Enough and her new book Mattering (out today!), journalist, and Mother of three – joins The Mothers for a conversation about achievement, worth, identity, and what it really means to feel like you matter. Jennifer’s work explores a question many Mothers carry: how can we be doing essential, important, and meaningful work – at home, at the...