Elizabeth Gore is the co-founder and president of Hello Alice, a technology company that provides access to capital, connections, and education to over 1.5 million entrepreneurs. In turn, Hello Alice's business health engine for banks and enterprise business services helps corporations increase engagement and transactions with small businesses. Hello Alice remains steadfast in its mission to ensure that every small business owner has the resources to thrive and live their dream. Elizabeth is the host of the Yahoo Finance show "The Big Idea," and is the small business columnist for Inc magazine.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

💰 📈 Financial Fitness for Female Founders: How to boost your financial fitness before seeking capital, and access some of the $60 million in small business grants and loans from 92 equitable lenders from Hello Alice.

🤖 🎯 AI Adoption Is Non-Negotiable: Whether you own a tech startup or a local bakery, integrating AI isn't just about innovation—it's about increasing efficiency, improving financial fitness, and staying competitive. Elizabeth says, "You can't operate a business today without it."

💪 🦄 Resilience in the Face of "No": Elizabeth and her co-founder had over 200 rejections on their funding journey, but perseverance paid off: after some lean early rounds, Hello Alice is now profitable and thriving. The lesson? Stay frugal, be capital-efficient, and build your network before you need it.

👩‍🔬 🚀 Why Women Make Outstanding Investors (and Need to Do It More!): It's not just about receiving capital—it's time for women to step up as investors, fund managers, and decision-makers.

🌐✨Building Resilience, Mindset & Community: How athletics helps shape the mindset of the best entrepreneurs. Learn how to "fail forward" with the grit of a top athlete.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings971

More about Elizabeth at Hello Alice

https://helloalice.com

Kristin Thomas is the Founder of Marble Collective, an AI-powered platform transforming how women's leadership is preserved, amplified, and discovered to make remarkable women easier to find, follow, and book, ensuring their legacies endure. Backed by 300+ women leaders, including more than 70 founding investors, Marble centralizes each leader's media, milestones, and body of work into a living digital portfolio, redefining visibility and legacy for women everywhere. Kristin's two-decade career in real estate and her board roles at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and YFCA shape her mission to elevate women's impact at scale.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

💰 📈 Women Investing in Women: Learn how Kristin built an entire community of women who became Marble's first investors, and why funding models for women-founded businesses must break traditional models.

✨ 🚀 Legacy Amplification Matters: Women have been "succeeding in silence" for too long. Now, a centralized and searchable place for all the digital assets and media coverage of accomplished women, ensuring their stories and expertise don't get lost in the social media noise or buried in forgotten press releases.

🤝 👩‍💻 A New Era of Protected Networking: How Marble allows users to follow and engage with women at the forefront of industries—from science to entrepreneurship to leadership—without relying on algorithms, intrusive sales pitches, or unsolicited DMs—making meaningful connections possible while respecting time and boundaries.

📚🤖 AI-Driven Knowledge Sharing: By curating podcasts, articles, books, and lectures recommended by featured leaders, Marble isn't just celebrating achievements—it's creating a rich resource for inspiration and education, in turn shaping future AI training to better represent women.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings970

More about Kristin at Marble Collective

https://www.marblecollective.com/

Swati Vauthrin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Recess, the parenting platform redefining how families connect, learn, and shop through community and circular commerce. A seasoned engineering leader turned mission-driven founder, Swati spent over 15 years as an engineer building and scaling products at Instagram, BuzzFeed, ESPN, and Disney—most notably leading global growth for Instagram Reels. Her inspiration for Recess came directly from her own motherhood journey. As a mom of three, Swati experienced firsthand how isolating, overwhelming, and expensive parenting can be so she's building Recess to create the trusted, spam-free, AI-powered space she wished existed when she became a parent—where families can get real advice, find community, and shop high-quality secondhand gear safely and affordably.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

🤝🌐 Why Purpose-Built Communities Are the Future: Why it's time to move on from the toxicity of social media, and build community around shared interests. Recess was born from real-life parenting challenges—aiming to combine trusted advice, local connections, and sustainable recommerce in one supportive digital village.

🤖💪 Women in Tech: What's the secret of successful women in tech? For Swati it started with curiosity and a Commodore 64, and it led her to become one of the few women innovating in engineering—the "0.1% of the 0.1%" as she puts it.

❤️ 🛠️Empathy Drives Product Success: Women engineers bring empathy as a differentiating superpower to all things code, often outperforming male counterparts by understanding the "why," not just the "what," leading to products that genuinely help people and foster strong communities.

👩‍🍼 🚀 Motherhood and Entrepreneurship: Learn what motherhood teaches about leadership, time management, personal identity, and what real work-life integration looks like—and why no two journeys as a mom or a founder are exactly alike.

🦄✨ What Makes Recess Different: Built to be "a village", Recess focuses on community matched to your circumstances and interests, with advice, tips, and an innovative "re-commerce" feature that makes it easy to save money by passing along used products with a story, so every transaction is infused with warmth and meaning.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings969

More about Swati at RecessParenting.App

https://recessparenting.app/

Marcia Dawood is an early-stage investor and author of Do Good While Doing Well, TEDx speaker and host of The Angel Next Door podcast, with a new book debuting next month called Unapologetic Wealth. Marcia serves as the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission's Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee. She is a venture partner with Mindshift Capital and the chair emeritus of the Angel Capital Association (ACA), a global professional society for angel investors. She is also an associate producer on the award-winning documentary Show Her the Money.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

💰 🌐 The Current Investment Landscape: Learn why raising capital has become tougher than ever, especially for women and underrepresented founders. After the capital boom of 2020-2021, liquidity dried up, uncertainty spiked, and exit timelines stretched—all making it harder for startups to survive, let alone thrive.

👩‍🔬 💡 The Female Founder Advantage: Did you know women return up to 72 cents more on every invested dollar compared to men? So, what will it take for female-founded companies to overcome all the funding barriers and extra scrutiny—even though the data's on our side?

🌱 🤝 Why Women Must Start Investing in Startups: High net worth women can change the game, but what does it take for them to shift from charity donations to funding their mission-driven sister entrepreneurs? Hint: Women need to get more comfortable talking about money, deals, and investments, and learn about the benefits of angel and venture investing.

🔥 🚀 Boldness Wins: Women founders often pitch conservatively, while many male counterparts swing for the fences with confidence. The message? Don't underplay your vision or undervalue your business—be bold, ask for what you need, and own your big goals, because you are worth investing in.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings968

More about Marcia at Marcia Dawood

📚 Resources for Action

• Unapologetic Wealth: Pre-order Marcia's new book

• The Angel Next Door Podcast: Listen in for real stories and advice on angel investing and how to get started.

Show Her the Money: Keep an eye out for this inspiring documentary coming to streaming in March 2026

Jamie Pastrano, Rebecca Matchett and Brittany Moser are the co-founders of Symphony, a platform pairing AI-powered social coaching with intentional interest-based matching, in a safe, simple, and supportive space for the neurodivergent. Jamie, inspired to build the new app by her son's autism, joined with serial entrepreneur Rebecca, COO, with a track record of building successful fashion companies, including alice+olivia and TrioFit, and Brittany Moser, an autism specialist and digital learning expert. The Synchrony app launches this month.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

🌱 🧠 Build from Real Need: Synchrony was born out of lived experience and genuine gaps in resources for neurodivergent adults—reminding us that the best business ideas solve real, personal problems.

🤝 🤟 Community Over Competition: Unlike mainstream social or dating apps, Synchrony is thoughtfully designed to foster authentic connection—one-on-one, interest-based, and with the unique needs of its community at the center.

🚀 🤖 AI for Good: By leveraging AI-driven social coaching, the platform empowers users with tailored, in-the-moment support—breaking down communication barriers in ways traditional groups can't.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings967

More about Jamie, Brittany and Rebecca at Join Synchrony

joinsynchrony.com

Erin Mills is a visionary serial entrepreneur, salon owner, and advocate for women's healing and empowerment, driven by a mission to create spaces where safety, growth, and authenticity thrive. From real estate to salon stylist, Erin built her salon business, Theory Salons, to challenge the male-dominated salon industry and its often-unsafe environments, before walking away from all but one of her locations to reinvent herself as a software entrepreneur with a new technology, Flamingo Salon Software, launching later this year. Her journey of reinvention also inspired her to create the Be Brave Community and a new podcast, I Think You Should Be Brave.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

💼 🚀 Closing Chapters, Opening Doors: The power of reinvention, and how, after seven years as a multi-salon owner in the beauty industry, Erin Mills closed all but one of her locations—a process that forced real self-reflection about identity, ego, and the drive we attach to our businesses. Her story is a powerful reminder that "letting go" can feel like the ultimate failure but often brings new freedom and clarity.

🤝✨ Lessons in Leadership and Resilience: Learn about the psychological impact of shifting gears, and why our self-worth is not tied to the tangible money and success that comes from any one venture. Erin shares how even the best leader can't control every outcome—people leave, change happens, and that doesn't mean you failed.

🤖📈 A Tech-Driven Future: Learn about Erin's journey from service-based salon ownership to scalable software, and how she's building Flamingo Salon Software, a dynamic new platform designed for salons, spas, and service-based businesses, built on her real, lived experience in the industry. Beta testing is in full swing, and a launch is planned for Q3.

👩‍🔬❤️ Balancing Marriage and Entrepreneurship: Working with a spouse? Erin shares honest thoughts on balancing roles, staying in their lanes, and cultivating strong boundaries at home and work.

🔥🦄 It's Time to Be Brave: Erin shares how she built the Be Brave Community to help women entrepreneurs with the unique pressures of comparison, judgment, the need to constantly prove "you're enough," and why vulnerability gives everyone permission to show up authentically.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings966

More about Erin at Theory Salons and Be Brave Community

http://www.theorysalons.com https://bebravecommunity.com

Arjita Sethi is a serial entrepreneur, physical therapist, certified yoga teacher, Ayurveda practitioner, and meditation expert, recognized as a leading voice at the intersection of AI and wellbeing. She is the founder of Shaanti, an AI-powered wellness platform creating personalized rituals rooted in Ayurveda, and New Founder School, which equips entrepreneurs with practical strategies to launch and grow sustainably. Arjita sits on the advisory board of the NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center, teaches entrepreneurship at San Francisco State University, and has impacted hundreds of thousands of people across 40 countries through her businesses, teaching, and advisory work. A TEDx speaker, angel investor, and advocate for women in technology, she brings her philosophy of life-synced success into her work as a partner and mother.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

📝 🤖 Ancient Meets AI: How AI enables highly personalized and holistic Ayurvedic wellness rituals, routines and practices to your unique body type and your current season of life. While Ayurveda teaches that every person is unique and needs personalized wellness routines, AI and data makes those customized health recommendations available 24/7.

🛠️🔥 Redefine Success by Your Own Metrics: After scaling then shutting down a venture-backed AI startup, Arjita made a conscious decision to bootstrap her businesses for more autonomy, sustainability, and alignment with her personal values. There is no "one size fits all" in entrepreneurship. Learn how she bootstrapped her virtual business school, grew it to $1 million in annual sales, and stayed true to her values (and wellbeing!).

❤️ 🤝 Transparency & Vulnerability Build Community: Learn how Arjita created a thriving support network for other entrepreneurs by openly sharing her struggles and learning from failure. She says: "99% of businesses might fail, but 99% of entrepreneurs don't."

🌱 ✨Entrepreneurship as a Spiritual Journey: Forget overnight success stories—real entrepreneurship involves failure, resilience, vulnerability, and growth. Learn the importance of self-awareness and sharing our journeys to support other women.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings965

More about Arjita at New Founder School

https://newfounderschool.com/

Special January Launch Offer: Start the year with intention! Visit findshanti.com to access Shanti at the launch price of $200/year. PLUS get access to Arjita Sethi's masterclass on the foundations of Ayurveda and how to build holistic habits.

Martine Cohen is a transformative coach and former corporate attorney dedicated to empowering individuals to lead themselves authentically, separate their identity from their emotions and thoughts, and make choices from a place of deep inner awareness and alignment. Author of No More Layers: Discover Your Inner Power and Reclaim True Freedom From the Inside Out, Martine believes that true success comes from within, and she is passionate about guiding others to find ease, joy, and fulfillment by removing the layers that obscure their inner light. As both a lawyer and corporate leadership consultant, Martine is known for her ability to help high-achieving professionals navigate personal and professional transitions.

🔑Key Takeaways🔑

📝✨How to be a Master Communicator: Why everything starts within you, and how to reframe your inner dialogue, show up to the person not conversation topic, and engage through active listening, negotiation, and compassion.

💬💪The Antidote to Fear is Curiosity: Why fear only exists in future; not in the present.

"When the brain gets curious, it forgets to be afraid. And when the brain gets curious, it leans into something rather than away from it…. fear does not exist in the present."

❤️ 🚀 Awareness, Adventure and Alignment Drive Growth: Learn Martine's 3-pillar process, starting each day with a check-in: get curious about your thoughts, notice what's driving your actions, and make decisions that feel truly aligned with who you are.

🧠 💡 Success Blocks Are Layered and Unique: How women entrepreneurs often grapple with both the fear of failure and the fear of success, usually rooted in early conditioning or societal expectations. Rather than adopting a "masculine" approach to leadership and business, Martine urges women to lean into their authentic strengths—intuition, communication, multitasking, and a creative vision—for sustainable success.

🛑🔥From Crisis to Calling: Martine's own journey was catalyzed by a traumatic brain injury. Losing her identity as a high-achieving strategist, she faced fear and darkness head-on. This led her to discover that "we're not our brains," and propelled her to help others transform from the inside out.

🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings964

More about Martine at Martine Cohen