Arielle and I got together and after she left I didn’t write any of this down.  I could not get her out of my mind and asked her if we could speak again.  The programs she has created and the impact she has made in the world of the arts and theater is tremendous.

Arielle grew up in NYC.  She attended Dalton from the time she was 3 until graduation.  Her father was originally a commodities trader for himself after having gone to business and law school.  At one point he bought a printing press and began a magazine that competed with the Village Voice.  Then he got into real estate.  Her Mom was a painter.  She would go to her studio every day from 10am-8pm.  She would then come home to write, read and study between 10pm-1am.  She was always scared to sell her work but the walls of their homes were adorned with her paintings including their home in East Hampton.  Her mother opened an art gallery called East Hampton Center for Contemporary Art, a non-profit for emerging artists on New Town Lane in 1985 and closed it in 1990.  She had a good eye as many of the artists she chose have big careers now.

Arielle spent her summers in East Hampton.  At 12 years old after getting a subscription to National Geographic.  The world was her oyster.  She became obsessed with going on a cruise to Israel, Egypt and Jordan   Her Dad gave her the go-ahead and went with her for Xmas break in 1983.  Then went to to the Galapagos for Spring break in 1974.

At 8 years old she saw her first Broadway production, Annie, and was hooked.  She started dancing, acting and singing but she wasn’t that great at it so when she was at Dalton she got into lighting design and direction.   She did not have the time to prepare for an acting degree because her Mother was diagnosed with colon cancer when Arielle was in 9th grade.  She graduated high school and went to Syracuse University to major in Design and Technical Theater because there was a 45 minute flight from Syracuse to NYC and a great program.

Her freshman summer she worked for a theater producer, her sophomore summer she worked for a Broadway general manager and then one summer she worked at the Royal Opera House and spent her second semester of her junior year abroad there.  She learned the importance of bringing young blood into the opera just by being there every day.  She took that knowledge with her back to Syracuse.  Arielle became very close with the Chancellors wife who loved theater and Arielle pushed her to think about changing the curriculum.

After graduation Syracuse asked Arielle to sit on the board.   What Arielle did is so impressive.  She created a program called the Tepper Semester for Careers and Theater.  It is to help students make the transition from school to life.  The program is now in its 15th year.  If you want to be in the theater world not everyone will make it as an actor but there are so many options now so where you can stay in the arts in another role and that is what this program is all about.  So smart!

Arielle had worked for Kevin McCollum and Jeffrey Seller, top producers of musicals such as Rent and Hamilton after college.  She wanted to do what they did.  After 5 months she left.  It was Alan Wasser who told her to go produce something.  She memorized her contacts and took a bunch of odd jobs over the next two years.  One night she went to a reading of a show that she thought was super cute.  She decides to take this show to Chicago for a 5 week run.  It was insanely hard but now she can call herself a producer.

After returning to NYC she decides to meet one new person every day.  I love this.  It didn’t make a difference who they were but she figured it would help her figure out her career.  Through this someone introduced her to Gregory Mosher, a long time producer.  He asks her about a show he had seen.  He had coincidentally seen her show in Chicago.  He asks Arielle if she wants to get involved in taking the show he had seen to off-Broadway.  She did the numbers and decided if she could capitalize it for $50K it could make money.  She went for it.  The show was a huge hit and they brought it to Broadway for 6 months.  The show was called Freak.

After that she decided to step back for a bit and do a film.  She did an independent film went nowhere but then got offered a deal with October Films.  She returned to theater with the Sandra Bernhardt show but didn’t feel like she had the right team and wanted to figure out how to curate the right team to do other peoples shows.  Then she was introduced to DonMar warehouse in London where she signed a deal with them to bring their shows to the West End.  Somewhere in here she went to work for Alan Wasser, who told her to go produce, and worked on Les Mis and Phantom of the Opera.

Back in NYC she began an emerging playwrights summer program on 42nd Street called the Living Room for Artists.  She did this for 5 years.  22 plays in 28 days every summer.  It was a teaching event. They would choose the play, connect you with the director, and assign you a producer.  Every show got $10k and then they’d teach you how to put on a show.  $10 tickets that sold out nightly and employed 300 people a summer.  It was amazing.  Then everyone started to get into these summer teaching programs from MTC to Roundabout.  It was time for something new.

At this point Arielle became involved with the Public through her production company.  She had gotten married, had two kids, was producing plays for the Public and was diagnosed with breast cancer.  She took a big step back from commercial producing.  Once she was healthy again she came back and produced a play with Danielle Radcliffe and started to focus on the DonMar warehouse again bringing those productions to the Public.  Fast forward she is now the Chair of the Public Theater.

I know that I have left out many of the other things that Arielle has accomplished including many of her philanthropic activities and countless awards.  She is quite an impressive human.  Her mother never showed her work but Arielle made it a mission of hers to have the world see her paintings.  Her mom died at an early age of 47 almost 25 years ago but this weekend her art will be shown at the Tripoli Gallery in Southhampton.  Of all the things that Arielle can hang her hat on, I am pretty sure this is her number one.

Her new venture, What Should We Do, really gets her excited.  After all, she is quite the entrepreneur.  Arielle told me she is loving the start-up world.  Not surprising as start-up is her middle name.

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Karen grew up in Stockton, CA.  Her father is an Ob-gyn and her mom is a self-starter entrepreneur.  At one point someone was stealing from her father’s office and Karen’s mom got in there and cleaned up the books.  She saw that they were spending a fortune on outsourcing the lab work and decided to bring it in house.  She bought a bunch of buildings across from the hospital, turned them into labs and changed their business model.  It was a time when healthcare was changing and her mom saw the writing on the wall.  That was 30 years ago.

Her mom also loved designed.  She worked with a designer to do the office with pink filing cabinets and pop-art.  This designer was super creative.  Karen met him when she was about 9 years old and he made an impact on her.  He took spaces and mixed then with old and new.  It inspired her to think about going in to design when she applied to UCLA.

Karen graduated from high school and went to UCLA where she majored in art history and business.  She became involved with Exposure Magazine while she was there which was a start-up mag in the design world.  It was eventually bought by Fairchild and everyone had to go get jobs elsewhere but she just continued on with school.  She found a program for her junior year abroad in Florence that was around Italian design.  She spent the summer there getting to visit every top designer.  It was eye opening.  Europeans were always design oriented connecting with the brand through and through.  There was also a separation there between creativity and business.   One of the studios that intrigued her was Antonio Citterio, of B&B Italia.  She got to know him and his wife.

After graduating UCLA she went back to Florence to do a bike trip with her parents.  She called Citterio’s wife and asked if she could stay and shadow her or be an intern.  She told her that she had no design degree but she said yes.  She let her do a color board and realized she had a nose for it and they offered her a job.  The advice Karen got was to apply to design school if she loved design and so she did.  She went to the Domus Academy in Milan. Every single big designer spoke to the students in this program.  She began speaking very broken Italian but by the end she was fluid and fully entrenched in the design world.

The program lasted a year and the majority of people in the program were architects.  Karen had no interest in being an architect.  She returned to Citterio and worked there for the next 3 years. His wife said to her “what are you going to do here?  There are 10 famous architects who are men and live a long time so think about what you want to do in design.”

Karen met David Kelly at Stanford who was good friends with many of the designers in Italy.  She started to look at programs there that were around manufacturing and engineering.  The collaboration between engineering and design really got Karen excited.  She applied to both the engineering and business school at Stanford and ended up at the engineering school.  It educated her to understand industrial manufacturing.  She did a project with Boeing while she was in school and realized what she had learned in Italy at Kartell made her think differently than everyone else.  She understood modular concepts that were the key to ventilation which is what she was working on.  At that time in the US nobody but Ideo was thinking about design differently.  She graduated from the program in 1998.

While she was in SF Karen had done an internship at Intel but did not find it creative enough so after graduation she moved to Austin, TX and took a job working for Trilogy.  It was the most creative culture she has ever worked in.  What she realized is regardless of technology and culture your biggest asset is the people.  She stayed for two years and at one point moved to Paris for the company.  Karen worked in operations and sales since she was not a developer.  Trilogy was an enterprise software company that went into different verticals like computers, and selling cars online.  After a year in Paris she shut down the operation there for them.

Still not figuring out her sweet spot in the world of design she kept getting pigeon holed into operations.  Karen realized she wanted to start her own business at one point but wasn’t exactly sure how so she decided to go to Insead, a business school in France.  One of her ideas while she was at the Domus was what she wrote her thesis on, selling home design products in a mail order catalog which was poo-poohed.  Reality is that was exactly what Design Within Reach did.  Her Mom had sent her the catalog while she was at Insead so when Karen graduated from school she returned to the US knowing she was ready now to start her own business.

Karen returned to SF where she ended up meeting with the founder of DWR.  He told her that she was definitely not a buyer and after their interview he called her back and said he wanted to hire her for product development.  It was finally the perfect fit.  The company had just gone public.  She stayed there for 5 years.  She also did some consulting on the side for some furniture companies who wanted to get into the consumer business.  Many of them were frustrated because DWR came out of nowhere and was killing them.

Karen burnt out on the business.  Instead of her annual trek to the furniture fair she went to a conference in Amsterdam called What Design Can Do.  The conversations were around agriculture, design and furniture.  A professor who she knew from the Domus was now running Benetton and it hit her straight between the eyes on the importance of asking what the client wants and creating a real space around that.

She had been living in NYC and decided to start Heartwork in Portland where it was less expensive to live.  She stayed for a year drilling down on the concept.  She went back to her modular days thinking about how to change the $4b storage market.  What happened was that architects and designers were knocking on her door forcing her to think about the market in reverse.  You meet the needs of the client, manufacture everything in the US and over time add materials to the supply chain to create personalization.  Working with businesses also had the long tail of consumers wanting to buy the product too.  Generic offices do not work anymore, one size all isn’t in and because manufacturing has changed Karen was able to provide the right product.

She launched Heartwork in 2012 and has been on a roll ever since.  I really love the product.  Very smart and simple too.  I wish Karen and I had been connected back in 2012.  It would have definitely invested in her company.  Her history couldn’t be more perfect for what she is doing today.  Her passion for design and her curiosity pushed her to figure out exactly how to bring that all into the company she had built today.

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Bettina grew up in Van Nuys first and then Westwood.  Her mother is a graphic designer that introduced her to a sensitive life.  Her father came to LA knowing nobody and built his own business as a land broker organizing sales of big properties for development.  Reality is both of her parents are entrepreneurs so it is not so surprising that Bettina ventured out on her own quite soon in her career.

Bettina had taken art history classes in high school and was very passionate about it but found herself at Princeton majoring in economics which she deemed sensible.  In high school she was also a serious volleyball player a sport that is big in LA.  My nieces, who are in LA, both play volleyball. Between her freshman and sophomore summer she took an internship at Bear Sterns.  She had never been in an environment like that and was struck by how narrow it felt.  It was definitely not for her.  The narrow range of individuality in a business that did not seem particularly female friendly was not an atmosphere she would thrive in.  She returned to Princeton and switched her major to art history.

Junior year she spent in Paris studying French and spending endless hours in museums and galleries.  She took to heart what Mary Weatherford says, “people don’t appreciate that galleries are a free way to see amazing art.”  She returned from Paris to finish school and write her thesis. Her advisor was super intense.  Bettina wanted to write about the connection between art and fashion but her advisor pushed her otherwise.  She ended up writing about Warhol and through that it became more clear to her how artists can become part of daily life.

After graduating she moved back to LA.  A smart move as the art culture was starting to change dramatically.  Bettina landed a job at LACMA working for Kevin Salatino. He encouraged her to experiment to the degree you can in a museum.  She learned how museums are supported and how people get involved in them.  Kevin had a desire to connect and share his knowledge with people and that influence was felt.

While she was at LACMA Bettina worked in the prints and drawings department and communications and development where she started the young patrons group.  She reached out to many people she had grown up with who did not even know where LACMA was.  She was exposed to corporate partners and how different departments interact with each other.  Those processes changed her career as she became to understand how to work with people on the other side of the table.

Bettina had informally started to talk to people about what was happening in LA with a weekly email.  It was generally about 2-3 openings worth seeing and then the email began to grow.  She wanted to combine her experience in the art world and access to information with others just like Salatino had done.  She never wanted to use her name but create something that could live on forever without her involvement.  It was about bringing access to writers, curators and collectors by communicating what people are looking at from galleries to artistic projects in garages.  The content really evolved organically.

She had been at LACMA for five years and felt it was time to take For Your Art to another level. She was hired as a consultant for a variety of different organizations from Getty to Google as a producer on several art projects.  The intension was always to be mobile and fluid in all the work she did with these companies.  She was making an impact in LA through her guidance and her email.  She is giving people a window into what is happening in the LA art community. For Your Art is giving artists a platform so they can part of society sharing her desire to provide access to others to have conversations around the art.

Bettina began working with LA tourism.  She says that LA’s sensibility is flat and non- hierarchical.  The city’s desire to bring in tourism through the arts is helping evolve the landscape for patrons and artists while supporting public projects and alike.  Art pushes endless curiosity.  The importance of art for society is becoming more apparent as we are seeing museums numbers grow in force and the landscape of collectors grow.  On the other hand it is becoming more difficult for artists to make an income. These artists are thinkers, strugglers and doers.  Bettina quoted Jonathan Lethem who says “context is half the work”.

I loved talking about where the art world is going with Bettina.  Her passion about the opportunity to be involved in cultural tourism projects in public places is powerful.  For Your Art has grown over the past ten years now with a staff of four.  Los Angeles is lucky to have her.  She is sitting behind the explosion of the art scene in LA sharing information, knowledge and thinking about how to connect people through art without anyone knowing it is Bettina Korek behind many of these projects.  Impressive entrepreneur.

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Jill Salzman of Founding Moms tells the world why women should value their work and raise their prices.
Amanda Hesser of Food52 tells us why you shouldn’t ask for permission to achieve your own goals.

Corie Hardee of Union Station talks about how to demonstrate external ambition and why you don’t have to be “the entrepreneur who takes no prisoners” to be motivated.

The post Women entrepreneurs telling it like it is appeared first on Gotham Gal.

Amanda Steinberg

I invested in DailyWorth and joined the board.  DailyWorth gave financial and career advice to women.  We learned a lot about these women.  They were looking to educate themselves around their finances.  There was no doubt that Amanda was on to something.  She was quite early to this game as we are right smack in the middle of the next generation of women wanting to own their own financial lives.

Amanda is passionate about gaining control of her own finances and helping other women be empowered too.  There is an audience of millennials, there is an audience of women who are bread winners who want to own their personal family finances, there are women who have lost their spouse and find themselves unknowledgeable about their financial state, there are women who find themselves divorced and completely unaware of their financials.  The market is growing daily.

What if there was a platform for all these women where they could get the financial education, services and advice that they are craving?  What if with that information they could actually save, invest in their future with personal advice that is geared towards their own unique circumstances?  That was that Amanda and Source Financial Advisors Michelle Smith began to think about.  They looked at the past 7 years of behavioral financial data of over 1 million women on DailyWorth and launched WorthFm.

WorthFm is designed to answer women’s 5 top questions about money giving step-by-step financial guidance with a bit of humor tossed in.  The idea is to break down the sense of loss many women feel around finances.   To get rid of the complexity and jargon so commonplace in financial services today.  The platform educates women to move seamlessly from financial chaos to clarity by giving her straightforward savings and investment accounts as well as the tools to build up her knowledge and in turn build her net worth.  Essentially WorthFM is helping women become secure and confident financial stewards poised to make wise decisions for themselves, their families and the world.

Amanda is the perfect person to lead this effort.  WorthFm already had 23,000 women on the waitlist.  Their average age is 43 and 25% are over the page of 55.  These women will inherit the majority of wealth in the next 15 years totaling $8 trillion.  Her timing is right, her knowledge is deep and her passion to change the world for women one retirement account at a time is contagious.

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She grew up in Warwick, Rhode Island.  Her step-father was an entrepreneur.  He ran a series of side businesses from an electronics business to a record store in town to the concession stand at the local bingo hall and then a business that removed all the garbage from the local beach.  He made an impact on her growing up.  Her parents had divorced when she was 5 and he was a major part of her life.  Her Mom was a teacher in the local elementary focusing mostly on reading recovery and literacy.

Allyson’s first business was when she was 8.  She had gone to a festival and saw people painting faces and was blown away.  She started a face painting business for kids birthday parties.  She created a book, like the person at the festival, with pictures of all the different faces she could create.  She used her cousin as the guinea pig.  She advertised herself at the local health club with a sheet of paper and a phone number at the bottom that you could tear off to call her.  She said it is amazing thinking back on that experience that people actually hired her to paint 5-6 year olds faces at their bday parties.

She graduated high school and went to Colby where she majored in English.  She spent her junior year in Cork Ireland for one semester.  She had a good friend in Edinburgh that same semester so they traveled for a month afterward.  In the summers she worked even selling Cutco knives at one point.  She also taught creative writing classes at the Kemp school for junior high school kids and went on to run it one summer.

After graduating Colby she moved to NYC.  She had a boyfriend there who had graduated a year earlier and so she like so many other women I know followed him.  The economy was terrible and jobs were scarce.  Her thesis advisor suggested she go get her MFA and so she did.  She got into Columbia and although she wasn’t sure this is what she wanted to do the timing was right. She moved in with three other women who were in the publishing world and quickly realized her heart was not in it.  She was going to school and working for a literary agent part time because she was strapped for cash.  Full time in school, 25 hours a week for a literary agent and 10 hours a week tutoring too was insanely stressful.

Even though it was a tough road she landed her dream job as the editorial assistant for the cookbook editor at Doubleday.  She saw it as a way to be in publishing without having to interrupt her own writing.  Low and behold she never wrote a word of fiction but she did get to work on Jean George’s and Mark Bittman’s book.  She was 23 and life seemed kind of glamorous.

It was 2004 and she got bit by the political bug.  She did not understand why people her age were not voting and began organizing cocktail parties for her peers to hear people speak about politics and register to vote.  After 5 of them she got an offer to be a fundraiser for a campaign in upstate NY.  She called her parents to see if she could come home, get her high school car and live in upstate NY for 6 months.  They thought she was insane but supported her decision.

Allyson went to work for a 26 year old Democrat woman who was running for Congress in a Republican district.   Despite the fact that this woman loss significantly Allyson got noticed. She was offered 5 job opportunities for major campaigns.  She took a job with the Spitzer campaign and become number 3 in the fundraising group.  Over the next two years she worked her ass off trying to build up her own profile without stepping on anyone’s toes.  She was to raise money from the women’s movement for Spitzer which in hindsight is hilarious.  It isn’t easy getting $250 from a woman (it is consistent in start-up fundraising too) but Allyson targeted upstate where the other two fundraisers were in the city.  She raised $5m over a year and a half.

Not surprising she kept on taking on more and more responsibility.  When it was time for Spitzer’s NY convention she rented out the baseball field in Buffalo bringing on Jimmy Fallon as the emcee with a line-up of Natalie Merchant and James Taylor put together in a mere 8 weeks with a $1.5m budget.   What she loved about the political world is that there were zero constraints on your age, if you could get shit done you were given responsibility.  While Spitzer was just entering the office the conversations began around the post campaign and they asked Allyson to run his re-election campaign.  She took it on with the goal of raising $6-8m the first two years he was in office and $12-15 the next two years and then there was the spectacular downfall.

Allyson was so stressed that she was having novocaine shot into her teeth because she was mashing them at night during that time.  The downfall was in many ways a massive weight off her shoulders.  She went out and had 75 interviews in a month to see if anyone was interested in her.  Her question was consistent to everyone…if you were in my shoes what would you do next?  The common response among women were get a MBA which she found surprising but realized that these women needed outside validation that men did not.

She applied to Columbia, got in and went in thinking it was necessary medicine but discovered she loved it.  She said when she was in the MFA program she would always get hit on by the MBA assholes and now she was one.

After graduating she went to Credit Suisse because many fundraisers easily transitioned into wealth management and she did too but then she got pregnant.  Twenty weeks into her pregnancy she had complications and the doctors order was go home and directly to bed with the order to stay off her feet for the rest of your pregnancy.  She called the team leader wanting to know who she should talk to about working remotely from home.  She heard nothing.  Then she emailed and heard nothing.  She couldn’t believe it.  She had this rocket ship career where she had always excelled and now she was being treated like shit.

Her doctor suggested she email again and cc him on it.  She did and someone from HR finally called her back.  They gave her insurance info to fill out for medical disability.  She was scared and freaked knowing that her career at Credit Suisse was over.  She was home, depressed and couldn’t believe that she was being discriminated against for being pregnant and having to lie on the couch.

Allyson had a healthy baby and four months later she is wondering now what.  She begins to talk to non-profits and charter schools about raising money.  She gets 3 job offers and takes a job at New Leaders which is essentially Teach for America for principals.  She becomes the executive director of major gifts.  A head hunter told her she would be super bored if she wasn’t leading the charge.  She had figured that she had a baby, she did not want to be stressed and wanted to leave the office at 5pm every day.  Within four months she was bored out of her mind. I know that feeling because I did the same thing.  Just because you think that taking a back seat is the best thing to do at one point if you aren’t a back seat person it just doesn’t work.

It was being bored that the idea for Weespring started.  She began to jot down ideas.  Her husband was in business school at the time.  The two of them began to work on Weespring on nights and weekends.  Incorporated and up to her ears in the business she went to the annual business retreat with New Leaders.  She knew she’d never be happy there.  She went back to her hotel room, called her husband and said I have to quit.  She did and two weeks later they were accepted into Techstars.

It was 2013, she raised about $800K for the business.  She wasn’t sure what the model was quite yet and it was really hard to raise anymore money.  After two years of being scrappy and making that cash last the business began to make money.  2016 they were in the black and very mindful about how to build the business without needing to raise more cash.  Allyson is really glad that she raised only from angels.  They allowed her to figure it out.

In 2014 she decides to write the book.  She knows the publishing industry and she wanted to write about something that would help other women who have children during their careers.  As for Credit Suisse, they worked it out but she refused to not tell her story.  Hopefully they learned from their mistakes too.

I’d never count Allyson out.  I love that she figured out Weespring and continues to build the business.  She defines the multiple women who I have watched and invested in…essentially failure is just not an option.

The post Allyson Downey, Weespring, Entrepreneur appeared first on Gotham Gal.

The dinner party was a bit of a showcase on what Emily has built.  She is empowering young women to become the best they can be by getting rid of the noise in their head early on.  At the dinner everyone goes around the table and says a positive thing about themselves.  Not always easy.  Then each of us are supposed to talk about something in our lives that was hard and really molded us into who we are today.  Perhaps something that took us awhile to come to terms with.  Not that this was on the invitation but after the dinner I knew exactly why people wanted me to meet with Emily.  She is giving young girls the ability to rise to the top of their personal goals.  It is something that I care about in the way that I am a supporter of women entrepreneurs.

Emily was born in Boise Idaho.  Her parents had met in LA and wanted to go somewhere else but weren’t sure where.  They first went to Seattle and nixed that.  Her Mom had landed a job at Hewlett Packer and moved her to Boise.  After two years they saw a some anti-semitic behavior and her Mom said “we are outta here” and they moved to Coral Gables, Florida.  Her Mom sold computer software and her Dad was a hippie who had 50 careers.  One thing he did was help kids in foster homes.  He would take Emily to buy gifts for the holidays and then deliver them to impoverished neighborhoods.  She clearly remembers seeing kids get excited about opening up gifts of toothpaste or toilet paper and realizing that life was not fair.

Emily always worked.  At 14 she got a job at Dan’s pizza starting with answering the phones and got paid under the table.  Not long after they let her run the place.  She was really into student council.  Always more interested in the extra curricular vs the classroom.  Emily says she might not have been the prettiest or the skinniest but she was the most popular.  She had a confidence that people were attracted to.  In her head there was no room for insecurity if you are confident. Subconsciously she took note of all these things over time.

In 8th grade the entire family moved to England for a year for her Mom’s job.  It was dramatic and upsetting but in the end probably life changing to see the world at large.  They returned to Florida where Emily finished high school although almost got kicked out because she was always debunking the system.  After high school Emily went to Florida State where she studied communications and theater.  In her junior year she went abroad to Florence.  She graduated in 06, stayed home for 6 months working to put money in her pocket before going to LA to seek her fame and fortune.

Emily moved to LA, found a crazy roommate on Craigslist who cut herself, drank lots of alcohol and had a rifle.  Welcome to Los Angles.  She began waitressing in Century City across from CAA while going to acting classes and auditions in between.  She learned very quickly that talent plus hard work do not always equate success.  She began to get antsy and didn’t trust that her destiny was in other peoples hands.

She gets invited to a random party in downtown LA and meets Alexis Jones.  Alexis and her hit it off and Alexis begins to tell Emily about herself in a way that she had never experienced.  Alexis tells her about her life and inner thoughts in a very honest way and Emily is wowed.  The conversation is about passion and self-thinking.  They talk about what if girls lived in a world where they collaborated instead of competed.  That perhaps their generation is about addressing equal rights in a different way.  At 24 Emily did not feel unequal but she did see that girls could be mean to others and themselves and because of that they are not reaching their potential.  Alexis had this idea called I Am That Girl addressing these concerns.

The next day they meet again.  Alexis is ready to launch this in 3 weeks.  Emily jumps in and the game changes.  The first concept around this mission was an interactive magazine.  They put an add on Craigslist describing the concept and have 300 people in a few hours who want to be part of this.  They narrow it down to 23 women to start producing content on what it means to be a woman from fashion to their feelings.

They have the same type of dinner I went to with these 23 women.  First you intro yourself and then you celebrate yourself and then you share things with the group where you take all the walls down.  You can hear a pin drop in the room when you are opening up yourself to be vulnerable in front of strangers.  Each girl begins and the stories that are being told are amazing from bullying to abuse.  Each girl became more and more honest as they went around the room. It was one of those moments where they all realize that all the ads on TV, all the content that is being pushed to us in the media isn’t true. It was a wake up call that they were on to something. They thought we have to have this conversation with every girl we know.

Emily starts calling college campuses to pitch Alexis to come and speak on this topic.  The schools ask how much will it cost and they say $3K and the schools say yes they will pay that and put her and her manager (supposedly Emily) on a plane to get there.  At the end of three and a half years they have talked to 100,000 girls. and done the same thing with them in a larger scale.  After each event the girls would line up to talk to them.  It was an incredible success.  Everyone wanted to meet their ultimate potential.

These women were talking about their own fears, their struggles, their need to belong and it all fell under their own mental and physical well being.  Did you know that girls scan themselves every 30 seconds almost 7 times.  Where is the capacity to learn if you are constantly checking yourself?

The girls they spoke to said now what?  You can’t come here and just send us online afterward.  So Emily told each girl to run their own events, build a local chapter and do their own group therapies with the premise that when all the walls come down that we are not who we think we should be.  We all struggle and everything is possible with a support of other girls.

They end up launching a campaign with Summer’s Eve to donate $1 to their cause for every quiz that they want women to take.  Emily gets them to pony up $50k towards the organization and they launch a campaign around healthy media called Girls Rock.  Then the White House calls.  They go to the Roosevelt room and meet influential people who want to support what they are building.  Years in and I Am That Girl is now a real organization.

During those 3 years of talking to colleges Emily is still waitressing to pay for her life.  She is pitching CAA on I Am That Girl and then waitressing across the street.  It was a strange double life.  It was once she locked in that first $50k she knew she could do this and focus all her energies on this organization.

Fast forward I Am That Girl has a digital community of almost one million, 175 chapters in 18 countries (90% of them are in the US) and a team of 7.  They are starting to work on the financial piece to grow bigger.

I left the dinner at my sister-in-laws and sent a check the next day.   The dinner alone was pretty powerful.  Sitting down with Emily and hearing her story and just seeing her spirit and passion around this topic is infectious.  She has hit on a nerve that young women of her generation and the next need.  Women need a support system from other women.  To feel that we have each others backs and applaud all of our successes.  That camaraderie needs to start early on.  If it becomes part of a young women’s life at 8 or 15 vs 40 the impact will be huge.

I am beyond happy that I finally met Emily.  She has empowered me to think differently and she is changing the world one girl at a time.  Consider sponsoring a girl.  The reality is I Am That Girl and so is every woman I know.

The post Emily Greener, I Am That Girl, Entrepreneur appeared first on Gotham Gal.

One of the many amazing people I have met in LA happened to have invest in Tata so he put me in touch to hear her story.  Her energy and passion for the products she makes is impressive.  The reality is Tata Harper Skincare is an extension of how Tata believes one should live a healthy life.

Tata grew up in Columbia in a small industrial town on the Caribbean near Cartagena.  Her father was the President of Xerox in Columbia and traveled extensively.  Her Mom was an entrepreneur.  She had started a liquor company with her new husband when Tata was ten.  She was not only a distributor but she made her own stuff.  Her parents had divorced and she wanted to make sure that her daughters controlled their own destiny.  She put them to work and raised them to have zero sense of entitlement.  Tata would go from school to work where she would count boxes in the warehouse or whatever was needed of her.  Her mother has been a tremendous inspiration to Tata.

Tata’s Grandmother was really into beauty.  She would make her own facial scrubs and masks. Pampering extravaganza’s were memorable.  Her Grandma would have spa days and all her friends would come over and she would make them feel amazing.  Tata was part of those spa days.  Her Grandmother believed (and so did her Mom) that you should be the best you can be and look it too.  Sloppy was not ok.

Tata studied in an American high school in Columbia.  After high school she took a year off and first studied French in Canada and then went to Paris.  She started her college studies in Paris but moved back to Mexico for the majority of it.  She really wanted to do something in fashion but her Mom pushed her to come back to Latin America to go to the MIT of Mexico and study industrial engineering.  Her Mom wanted her to educate herself in something meaningful where she could be in charge of her own life.  Although in high school Tata was passionate about a fashion line that she created and sold, engineering was the way her Mom pushed her to go.  In the end, she really loved having that background in manufacturing.

After graduating college, her Mom says come back to Columbia and get a job.  Tata has other plans.  She wants to go to Paris and get a masters in fashion design.  Her Mom says, stay for 6 months and then go to Paris.  Tata lands a job as the Chief of Staff for the CEO of a cellular company in Columbia.  It was 1999 and times were changing.

In the meantime, she applies to go to Paris, gets accepted and finds an apartment.  During the transitional time in Columbia, before she takes off to Paris, she meets her husband.   She meets him at a party.  He is from Columbia but his Mother is an investment banker in NYC so that is where he grew up.  Six months later they move in together, he gets a job in Miami and Tata much to her Mother’s dismay goes with him.  She was 23.

Tata lands a job in a club/restaurant that is opening where she learns about engineering, architecture, licenses and coordinating decorators.  Then her and her boyfriend (eventually husband) begin building buildings in Miami, even building a hotel in Aspen.  They become real estate developers.  They figured that eventually they would end up in NYC but during that time in Miami they would go to Vermont every weekend.  They bought a farm there because both of them loved the land.  They looked all over from Berkshires, Aspen, Hudson Valley, etc and landed in Vermont.  At this point they are also married.

Five and a half years after of being in Miami her step-father gets diagnosed with cancer.  Her Mother is beyond stressed and asks Tata to help because she will be calm.  It was through this that she started to look into the concept of you are what you eat.  She started looking into food, cleaning products, skincare, shampoo and everything she finds has some synthetic chemicals in it.  She was so angry and disappointed and decided that she was going to change that.

Tata hires a beauty consultant to help her think about how to start a skincare company.  She figured out really quickly that the advice she was getting was wrong.  Everything in beauty companies appears to be outsourced.  Looking behind the curtains she learned that many of the products use the same formulas but the brands just add filler and put their label on it.  She would have nothing to do with that.  The labs she talked to thought she was crazy.  That was how it was done and there was zero way she could make a 100% natural skincare product.

Tata hires 8 chemists to help her develop a line of 12 products with nothing synthetic.  It took 5 years to develop because the products were made from scratch.  They made everything on the farm in Vermont.  They had a big barn, were able to grow organic products that are native to the Northeast and it wasn’t near an industrial park.  Absolutely perfect.

5 years to develop, now 5 years on the market and in for ten years.  She sells on her own site including spas and high end stores such as Neimans, Saks etc.  She lives full time in Vermont with her 3 kids and couldn’t be happier.  She loves what she does and she now has 100 people working with her across the country.   Tata beat the system and is making a difference.

As far as Tata is concerned, she is part of a movement.  I couldn’t agree more.

The post Tata Harper, Tata Harper SkinCare, Entrepreneur appeared first on Gotham Gal.

There are only a handful of people that I meet and think to myself I wish I had met this person early on and been part of their ride.  Beatriz is one of them.  She is a just an amazing person with energy, smarts, passion and a personality that just jumps out at you.  She is also making an impact in her own community, the Latino community and that I applaud.  Mitu is the voice of young Latinos who are creating content geared towards them.  Latinos are the largest minority group in the United States representing about 17% of the population.  That is huge.

Beatriz’s parents were living comfortably in San Diego when she came into the world.  When her mother went into labor her father insisted that they get in the car and drive over the border to Tijuana to have the baby.  The reason is that he wanted to make sure his child had the opportunity to be President of Mexico one day and if Beatriz had been born in the US well then she would have lost out on that possibility.  It was the 1960s and her Mom needed a C-section so probably not the wisest decision but it all worked out fine and Beatriz is a proud Mexican.

They moved back to Mexico City when Beatriz was 3 years old.  Her father is an attorney who paid his way through law school cleaning apartments, participating in boxing matches and writing speeches for the President of Mexico.  He is a big believer in equality and would take the kids into underdeveloped areas to bring art, food and music there on weekends.  Her mom is a tremendously supportive human being.

At 8 years old Beatriz began to pursue her interests.  Her parents friends had a radio station and Beatriz would do the kids ads for them.  Then she began a daily kids radio station where she was the DJ.  It was called the Menudo hour.   She would ride her bike there after school and do the show.  At 12 she decided to change it to the Julio Iglesias hour and they said no so she moved on to other things.  At 15 she began doing a local tv show doing the news.

Beatriz wanted to go to film school but all the places she applied only had a few spots for foreigners.  In the end she went to college at UC San Diego where she majored in marketing and communications while continuing in the media world on the side.  She would go to school during the day, cross over the border after school and work at the local Latino radio station from 5-8 and then go to the TV station to do a show between 10-11 and come back across the border way past midnight every night.  She was making money, going to school and doing what she loved.

This was the time of Amnesty International.  Beatriz was given the opportunity to get on the Amnesty International plane and go to Chile to interview with the mothers of the disappeared.  She was 17.  The station she worked at spilled over into the US and she won an Emmy for this work.  The owner’s son of this radio station signed her up to then do an entertainment show where she won 2 more Emmy’s for that too.  She could hardly wait to graduate and move back to Mexico City to be on International TV and make more shows.  Yet at that time there were really no women in network television in Mexico and she wanted to write and executive produce her own shows.

In her 20’s she met the film maker Robert Rodriguez in an interview.  He was just becoming a big sensation after winning at Sundance. She thought he was a digital visionary.  He recommended she meet with people he knew at HBO who were trying to figure out Latin America. His recommendation was to sell her car, shoot some pilots on anything you want, bring your Emmy’s and meet these people and I guarantee you that you can do anything you want there.  She believed him and followed the plan which was to go to Las Vegas with all of this and set up a table at the Media convention.  Beatriz walked into the convention and almost cried.  It was overwhelming.  She set up her table with her VHS and the film running of what she shot, put her 3 Emmy’s on the table and hoped that someone would stop by.

A gentlemen walks by and says to Beatriz that he is looking to do travel for kids on the Discovery channel.  She ends up selling a pilot to Discovery and USA Networks because they are looking for original programming from the US for people who get the Latino cultural.  These were her first clients.  Beatriz begins producing cable programming in the US for people who speak Portuguese and Spanish.  The US consensus comes out and cable realizes the power of what Beatriz is creating.  There was a huge hole in this area.  She was smart and thrifty creating high quality programming and she continued doing this for almost a decade.  Then she got a call from Warner Brothers.

She created a show for Warner Bros. called HPlus that won awards and had millions of eyeballs.  The timing was right and this began to open her eyes to digital entertainment, the next frontier.   She had been living in Mexico City and realized that all her clients were in LA and so she made the move.  She does an experiment with ENetworks creating a show in multiple languages where they would split the revenue.  She is aggregating content using hosts from different countries.  Beatriz was seeing the next wave and trying to figure it out through this show.  HPlus gets picked up for digital programming and she gets to see the shift up close.

Beatriz pitches a show to MTV for scripted content.  She is seeing all these 20 year old kids come out of college in Chile who are making cool content because technology has given them easy access to do it.  She thought wow here is all this untapped creative talent that is going nowhere.  Beatriz wondered how could she build a community of like minded creators.  She also saw a disconnect between the digital boom explosion and the underserved Latinos in the US who speak English.  The 50 year old and plus demographics wants their programming in Spanish but not the younger kids.  The new generation wants their content in English because everything they consume is in English.  They would post the same video in English and Spanish and see the traction and that is how she figured it out.

With the Latino boom in the US population Beatriz set out to build Muni.  As Beatriz says when Mr. Smith dies there is one person left behind.  When one Latino dies there are 10 left behind.  She launched Muni four years ago and it exploded over night.  Latino creators are given an opportunity to build and post in their own channels on Muni for an audience desperate for content.  The people who are on Muni say someone finally gets me…and of course where have you been all my life.

Muni incubates ideas too.  They see individuals build audiences on Muni and they they reach out to them to help them become successful entrepreneurs.  For instance there was a kid posting a food show and his numbers were off the charts.  They got behind him, found partners, got a book deal done and a food show on cable and this kid was living in a car before this.  Life changing stuff.

Muni is empowering young Latinos to become creative entrepreneurs.  They are launching something similar to an accelerator program where they have a boot camp to train creative people how to make smart content.  They are giving them the tools to do it themselves with a backbone for partnership opportunities.  Beatriz says that entrepreneurship is not wide spread in the Latino community.  You can’t be what you can’t see and she is hoping to change that.

Beatriz has lots of energy and her mission is to truly empower Latinos through Muni and understand the power that they can bring to the table.  She also wants to start a campaign to get Latinos to vote too.  She might not be the President of Mexico (yet) but she is making an impact with her community that represents almost 20% of the United States.  That is powerful.

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Lucy grew up in the UK.  Her father was an executive for Shell Oil and her Mom was a stay-at-home Mom until she became a librarian.  She lived in Berkshire, a very rural upbringing where they had a garden and grew their own food.  They also had a close connection to animals including pets, ducks and ponies.

After graduating high school, Lucy went to the Agricultural College in Warwick.  She majored in equine (nutritional etc) and business studies figuring out how she could marry the two.  She had been riding since she was 5 so she had a huge passion for the animals but also had a nose for business.  The curriculum including that the third year of her schooling is to have a work/internship experience.  She worked in a motor school that worked with race car drivers and Lucy learned about selling sponsorships. It was there that she met her husband.

She graduated college and her then boyfriend, now husband, was an automotive sculpture by trade and he was offered a 3 month gig in San Diego.  She came along and that 3 month gig turned into a full time job.  She started to circulate her resume and landed a job at Solid Gold Health Products, a company that made pet food.  She started in the equine area and moved into dogs and cats.  She worked there for 5 years until a puppy came into her life.

Her puppy started getting ear infections and she began thinking about providing him with a raw food diet.  She wasn’t having any success with medications from the vet.  She began creating her own recipes while destroying her kitchen in the process.  The recipe took about ten months to figure out.  She started with the dehydration of human-grade products because nobody else was doing that.  Getting human-grade products Government approved was a whole other level of difficulty but she got there.

First she found a human food manufacturer who would make her products and ship them to her garage where she would pack and send to her customers from there.  Lucy wanted to sell these products online only not in stores.  That was the first business plan, all business to consumer not business to business.  She set up a website, got Paypal working and before she could make a purchase herself to make sure everything was working some one randomly beat her to the punch.  She realized she was definitely on to something.

Lucy is a pioneer in this space. She was the first to do dehydrated food that was nutritionally complete using human grade food approved by the FDA.  She self-funded for the first few years mortgaging her house several times until 2011 when they took on investors.

They now also sell to stores and are carried in the US, Canada and parts of Asia.  Honest Kitchen sources their vegetables from farmers and gives away a piece of each sale to non-profits that they support.  They are currently focused on cats and dogs and working on new diet plans.

Lucy figured out how to take her business head and marry it with her love of animals.  Super impressed what Lucy has built.  Her casual yet driven attitude with the British accent is kind of hard not to pay attention to.

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