Womansplain

Season 6 is here, and we're opening with someone who walked away from 21 years of white-glove finance to help everyone else get in the game. Stephanie Guild, CFA, spent two decades at JPMorgan, most recently as a Managing Director at the Private Bank, building portfolios for the kind of clients who can always find help. Then she left to become Chief Investment Officer of Robinhood, the mobile-firs...

Season 5 is officially a wrap, and we're closing it out the only way that felt right: by going back to the moments that stuck with us. This compilation pulls together the founders who defined the season. The ones building real, durable businesses in categories most people overlook, dismiss, or assume could never be made desirable. Listening back, a throughline emerged that we did not plan for: ove...

Libie Motchan grew up in New York City, studied math and psychology at a tiny Minnesota liberal arts college with no business major, and spent her early career in consumer marketing, first at an agency, then at IBM running digital media and brand health. What she learned there was that she could not survive bureaucracy and red tape. What she also developed, hunched at a desk in unsupportive shoes,...

Dr. Chrystle Cu went from running a fully booked Bay Area dental practice (patients waiting four to six months for an appointment) to co-founding COCOLAB, the oral care brand that's making flossing something people actually want to do. Her co-founder and little sister Cat Cu pivoted from a failed San Francisco art marketplace (one painting sold, and her dad bought it) to becoming the creative forc...

Saher Hussaini is the founder and acupuncturist of Set Your Intention Acupuncture (SYI Acupuncture), a New York-based wellness studio reshaping the modern acupuncture experience through intentional healing, considered design, and personalized care. A licensed acupuncturist and herbalist, Saher blends the ancient wisdoms of Traditional Chinese Medicine with an integrative approach to treatment, sup...

Lulu Ge came to this country at four and a half not speaking a word of English, internalized the immigrant instinct to shed everything different about her, and spent her 20s in fashion corporate strategy running a $300M budget at Saks. Hormonal acne, hair falling out, periods so unpredictable she bled through her white French lace wedding dress during cocktail hour at her Tuscan wedding. Park Aven...

Samantha Diamond was diagnosed with PCOS in her mid-20s by her then-boyfriend, a Toronto OBGYN resident who happened to be living with her. Most women wait years for that diagnosis. 70% never get it at all. That asymmetry, the unfair advantage of having a doctor at home, became the founding insight for Bird&Be: what if everyone could walk into a fertility appointment already armed with the inf...

Alissa Miky moved to LA at 21 with two suitcases, no English fluency, no U.S. degree, no family or friends, and built a seaweed empire anyway. Her first U.S. company, Misaki Tokyo, turned luxury seaweed candy into a 1.4M-follower TikTok phenomenon with Kim Kardashian collabs and Oscars and Emmys pre-event placements. Now she's the founder and CEO of OoMee, the first marine plant beverage brand in...

Charlotte Cruze went from producing Willard Scott's 100-year-old birthday segment at NBC, to running branded content for luxury men's publishers, to an NYU Master's in Food Studies, all before co-founding Alice Mushrooms, the functional mushroom chocolate brand now sold in Target, Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Erewhon. Named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2025, Alice has made funct...

Hailey Yaffa spent years doing what looked right on paper: investment banking, finance at a luxury fashion house, the whole thing. But underneath the polished resume was a woman quietly battling disordered eating and wondering if this was really it. So she quit. And then she built DateWorthy, a frozen dessert brand made from dates and real ingredients that's rewriting what "treating yourself" actu...

Mallory Jones Oniki studied finance, graduated into a pandemic, and started posting cookie videos on an app she barely understood. Five years and over 6,000 test cookies later, she's ⁠ @thepalatablelife ⁠ ; a recipe developer and content creator with over a million followers on TikTok, and now a debut cookbook author. Cookie Club is 80 recipes, nine custom paintings, and two years of baking from h...

Erin Barrett was a systems engineering major who pivoted into consulting for the free Starbucks, landed at McKinsey during the 2020 food tech boom, and then got so sick from COVID that it completely rewired her relationship with food and health. By the time she got to Stanford GSB, she was serving experimental cocktails out of mason jars through her dorm room window, and Goldilocks was born. In th...

Dr. Mia Wiston is a licensed clinical psychologist, solo practice owner, and the creator behind @dishingdaily, a food and lifestyle account with 147K followers that she built while seeing patients from her Lower East Side apartment. This is her first podcast ever. In this episode, Mia gets real about what it's actually like to run two businesses from your living room, why she rebranded from her be...

Emily Steele went from running neighborhood revitalization projects in Des Moines, Iowa to building pop-up yoga brands, leading FemCity Des Moines into the most successful chapter in the U.S., and launching her own marketing agency, Love Local. Somewhere along the way, she realized the most powerful marketing tool wasn't a billboard — it was a neighbor telling a neighbor. Now she's the CEO and co-...

Kendall Kransdorf left her strategy career at Boston Consulting Group, detoured through the startup world, and bet everything on a hunch that cottage cheese deserved a glow-up. Now she's the founder and CEO of Cotto, a high-protein whipped cottage cheese dip brand she's building from the ground up in New York City — and we mean from the ground up . She's making every batch, hand-stickering every c...

Season 5 is here, and we're kicking off our health & wellness season with a bang! Samantha Mashaal went from McKinsey to Arianna Huffington's Chief of Staff to an existential career crisis to sliding into a fitness founder's Instagram DMs. Two and a half years later, she's the COO of Soto Method, the Tribeca-born workout brand expanding to Dallas this fall. In this episode, Sam gets real about...

Natalie Borowski is the founder and chef behind Sailor & Siren, a Brooklyn-based seafood brand bringing fresh Maine lobster to NYC. She is also the founder of OGC, a community for women in the venture ecosystem, and serves on the board of Naturally New York and the junior board of the Bronx Letters Foundation. Unable to find a lobster roll in NYC that met her standards after a decade of search...

From Finance to Food, Lily Rivkin Friend founded Rooted, a fast-casual NYC-based restaurant, ‘rooted’ in the values of simplicity and transparency. With every item on the menu crafted with 7 ingredients or less, Rooted instills confidence and trust in their consumers through ingredient transparency. Lily has gained over 40k+ followers on social by through filming BTS style content, giving consumer...

Bridgette Taylor is the Founder and CEO of Harridan Vodka. A whiskey and mezcal enthusiast, Bridgette sought to buck vodka's reputation as "neutral and flavorless", and instead create a spirit that captured the sweet and smoky tasting notes so celebrated in other categories. Since launching in 2020, Harridan has garnered accolades including "Best Vodka" honors from Rolling Stone, Robb Report, and...

Judy Thelen is the co-founder and CEO of Beli, a restaurant discovery app built around the joy of remembering where you’ve eaten and sharing it with others. What started as a personal habit of ranking restaurants with friends during business school at Harvard has grown into a beloved platform used by millions, especially among Gen Z diners. Drawing on her background in investment analysis at McKin...

Nirupa is the founder and chef behind Bazaar Supper Club, a monthly dinner series she runs out of her Brooklyn apartment. What began as a tiny communal dinner party in her studio apartment has turned into a sold-out supper club creating third spaces in New York. She has hosted 28 dinners to date, all built around a simple truth - food tastes better when it brings people together.

Gabriela Lawrence is the Cofounder and Chief Brand Officer at Doce Mezcal. Before launching the brand she ran a boutique public relations & talent consultancy in New York City working with companies across CPG, fashion, beauty, fitness & hospitality. As a self-identifying strategic and creative connector of the dots, Gabriela's range of PR experience has allowed her to create strategies fo...

Halli comes with over 10 years of experience working at some of NYC's fastest-growing startups. She started her career at Casper, where she worked on the Customer Experience Operations team, overseeing their 50-person call center. From there, she moved to Chief and supported the growth of their member base from 1,000 to 20,000 members. In her free time, you can find Halli strolling around her Broo...

Dabah was founded by mother and daughter team Marion Sultan and Noémi Moritz, two creatives whose lives have always been shaped by food, family, and storytelling. Born and raised in Paris, Marion moved to New York more than 30 years ago, where she quickly faced two challenges: finding work and finding good food. Far from home, she turned to the kitchen as her anchor, recreating the dishes her moth...

Ana Lander is the co-founder and CEO of Pikora, a food innovation company reimagining bone broth through Latin American flavors and traditions. Born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela, Ana grew up surrounded by food and hospitality, often watching her mother cook and bring people together through meals. Before launching Pikora, Ana spent nearly a decade working in media and hospitality, where she ho...