Without Permission

In Part 2, Arundhati Sridhar and Vaish talk about building community in a world where power is never evenly spread. Aru grew up being raised by a village in Gujarat, and she says her life has been leading to one thing: building community. We talk about why you have to be a villager to have a village, how the lens of power changes who gets heard, and what it takes to stay in community through loss...

Arundhati, feminist movement-builder, participatory facilitator, researcher, and fellow podcaster, grew up in a family that had already broken the rules. Her parents were doctors doing pro bono work in the middle of nowhere. Her grandmother lived her entire life seeking permission from the men in her life, and only in her twilight years began to discover what she liked to cook, where she wanted to...

Before she was a software engineer, Stephanie Page was a model, in retail, and a business grad still figuring out what she wanted to be. In this episode, we talk about what it actually takes to keep reinventing yourself, what she carried with her from every chapter before this one, and how a community built for people breaking into tech helped her find her footing. Stephanie's story is proof that...

Jaime Waterfield spent years building at the highest levels of tech: leading teams, driving results, and checking every box that was supposed to mean success. Then she hit burnout. Not once. Three times. In this episode, Jaime and I get into the conversation a lot of women are having quietly: that the skills that got us here won't always get us there. That being good at something doesn't...

Nisha has been in my corner for almost 18 years, through cross-continent moves, career pivots, and the kind of life chapters that don't have clean endings. She's also the reason my husband and I found each other in the first place. In this episode, we talk about what it means to question the systems we take for granted. Nisha has spent her career at the intersection of tech and regulatio...

She was sitting at home on a quiet evening. Husband out golfing. Kids away. And she had an idea: a supper club. A way to bring people together around a table. She sat with it for a moment. And then asked herself: what am I waiting for? This is the story of Radha, founder of Oakville Supper Club, and the moment she stopped waiting for permission to build something for herself. In this episode, we t...