Des Moines, Iowa · September 2026
An interview series with women who built the companies they run. What they made, what it cost, and what they would do differently. There is no pitch at the end, and that is the whole point.
What this is
Most people who ask a founder for her time want something at the end of it. A subscription, a discovery call, a logo on a sponsor page. She has learned to listen for the turn, and she is usually right to.
This is forty minutes with no turn in it. One conversation, recorded, about how the business actually got built — the year that nearly ended it, the thing nobody tells you, the part that never showed up on a profit and loss.
What comes back is a written piece she can send to anyone: a bank, a board, her mother. Two introductions, made by name within a week. And one honest read on the business from someone who has just spent forty minutes inside it.
All of it arrives whether or not there is ever any work between us. Most of the time there is not, and the series is built on the assumption that there will not be.
What she leaves with
Her story, reported properly, with her photograph and her own words kept as she said them. Hers to send anywhere.
Named, warm, and made within the week. Actual emails to actual people, rather than an offer to help if she ever needs it.
The thing about the business she is too close to see, written down and sent after. No invoice follows it.
How it works
Why bother
Share of United States venture capital that went to all-women founding teams last year, down from 2.1 per cent the year before. Of the new American companies that passed a billion dollars in valuation that year, not one had an all-women founding team.
PitchBook, 2025 US All In: Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem
The funding cost of a single question. Across 189 startup pitches, investors asked men how they would win and women how they would avoid losing. Founders raised $3.8 million less for every one of those questions. Male and female investors both did it.
Kanze, Huang, Conley & Higgins, Academy of Management Journal
Share of American businesses owned by women, against 6.2 per cent of the revenue. The gap between those two numbers is the thing this series keeps running into from the inside.
Wells Fargo, Impact of Women-Owned Businesses
None of which is the reason the interviews happen. The reason is that the same story keeps arriving from women who have never met each other, in different industries, on different continents, and almost none of it has been written down.
Findings published as the series runs
Sit for one
The only qualification is that the company is yours and you can talk about how it actually went. Early, established, or sold and on to the next thing — all of it is interesting, and the ones who think their story is too ordinary are usually wrong about that.
Say hello and we will find forty minutes.