4 Lessons I Learned From 8 Years of Backing Women Founders

The Women Presidents’ Organization, a peer advisory community for girls working multimillion-dollar corporations, introduced its nineteenth annual listing of the 50 Fastest Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies in May 2026. The honorees generated greater than $8.5 billion in mixed income and employed greater than 23,000 individuals in 2025.

WPO features as a peer group. Founders apply, get vetted by different founders and construct inside rooms designed particularly for that goal. Plenty of different components clarify why these explicit companies ended up on a listing like this, and the peer construction is just one piece of that image. Still, relationships exhibiting up this persistently within the background of sturdy, fast-growing companies is difficult to jot down off as coincidence.

I’ve spent eight years investing in and dealing alongside early-stage girls entrepreneurs, and the founders who make it hardly ever do it alone. The entrepreneurial journey is a relentless climb filled with sudden drops and sharp turns, and it could actually really feel isolating, particularly for girls navigating the added strain to show themselves.

The founders who battle are hardly ever brief on expertise or a robust product. More typically, they’re remoted on the precise second they want help essentially the most — making an attempt to resolve funding, advertising and marketing and manufacturing challenges all of sudden with nobody to name when issues go sideways. The ones who make it have mentors and peer networks to show to who’ve already walked a model of the highway forward.

An viewers watches a founder succeed. A group is invested in serving to her preserve going. Attention gathers across the seen wins, the launch, the press protection, the funding announcement. What’s tougher, and much more useful, is constructing a gaggle of people who find themselves current whereas a founder remains to be figuring issues out.

Sometimes that group is prospects who change into real believers. Sometimes it’s different founders who present up when issues are falling aside. Either means, it’s the group that refers others, rallies when it issues and comes again once more, and it produces one thing an advert finances can’t purchase: retention, actual word-of-mouth and long-term loyalty.

Here are 4 shifts I’ve watched outline the founders who construct it:

1. Build the room earlier than the viewers

One piece of recommendation founders hear consistently is to get in entrance of as many individuals as potential, as shortly as potential. It sounds proper, however attain with out belief is simply costly noise. I’d exchange it with one thing much less flashy. Go deep with a small circle of mentors and friends who perceive what’s being constructed and imagine in it, then go broad.

That sequencing is the thesis behind how we constructed the Enthuse Foundation: group, schooling and capital, in that order. Capital alone doesn’t remedy a progress downside if a founder hasn’t constructed the relationships and help system to make use of it nicely. I’d relatively see a founder spend a 12 months constructing 50 actual relationships than a 12 months shopping for attain from strangers.

In observe, that work is slower than most founders need, which is precisely why so many skip it. It begins with creating an area the place individuals may be sincere about setbacks as overtly as they rejoice wins. Some of essentially the most highly effective group moments I’ve watched occurred exterior formal programming, reminiscent of two founders genuinely connecting, or one founder calling a peer as an alternative of sitting alone with doubt.

2. Let group form the product

Beauty model Live Tinted is a well-documented instance of this. Founder Deepica Mutyala constructed a group platform round open conversations about colorism and sweetness requirements years earlier than Live Tinted offered a single product. By 2025, that model had grown its retail footprint to each Ulta Beauty location — 1,400 shops nationwide — and marked the milestone with its first nationwide TV marketing campaign, in line with commerce protection of the launch. Mutyala has described the expansion as pushed largely by phrase of mouth, a results of constructing the dialog house earlier than there was a product to promote.

That sequencing is the alternative of how most founders are advised to launch. Instead of constructing an viewers to ultimately promote to, construction the earliest model of the enterprise round a smaller group’s precise issues, then let the product observe.

3. Measure relationships, not attain

In 2023, a bracelet from Little Words Project’s Taylor Swift-referencing assortment went viral. Founder Adriana Carrig stored the gathering restricted, partially to guard the impartial retailer relationships the model had spent a decade constructing. According to Carrig’s account on the Modern Retail Podcast, the viral second added lower than 1% to gross sales, because the model’s group was already constructed earlier than Swift’s followers found it. Other manufacturers that leaned tougher into comparable viral moments noticed greater spikes, however much less endurance.

That’s the identical intuition that separates founders creating worth for his or her group from founders extracting it. Impressions and follower counts don’t seize that form of restraint, and neither does income if it comes on the group’s expense.

I ask founders to maintain checking an easier query: Are they creating worth for the individuals who belief them, or extracting it? The founders getting this proper deal with each viral second, product drop or partnership as yet one more probability to serve the individuals who already belief them.

4. Build techniques that scale past you

The different sample I’ve watched separate founders who final from founders who stall is what she does with the time her peer community buys her. Founder pondering runs on intestine intuition and private conviction, fixing issues solely the founder totally understands. CEO pondering builds techniques, reminiscent of delegation, institutional reminiscence and planning on an extended horizon, so the enterprise retains working when the founder isn’t within the room.

The stakes listed below are well-documented. A 2025 McKinsey evaluation discovered that 78% of corporations that construct a profitable product and attain product-market match nonetheless fail to scale, largely as a result of they by no means make the shift from founder-led, instinct-driven decision-making to a repeatable, systemized method.

In my expertise, founders who don’t make that transition are likely to hit the identical wall, normally proper across the level the place the enterprise outgrows what one individual can maintain collectively. The ones who make it intentionally, relatively than being compelled into it by a disaster, are virtually all the time those who had another person to name whereas they figured it out.

Reach nonetheless issues. A model must be discoverable. But discoverability and not using a group behind it tends to supply a spike relatively than lasting income. The founders on this 12 months’s WPO listing bought there by spending years investing in relationships, and even at 9 and 10 figures of income, these relationships are nonetheless what they name on when issues get onerous. That’s the expansion technique I preserve telling founders to run: fewer impressions, deeper rooms, longer relationships.

The Women Presidents’ Organization, a peer advisory community for girls working multimillion-dollar corporations, introduced its nineteenth annual listing of the 50 Fastest Growing Women-Owned/Led Companies in May 2026. The honorees generated greater than $8.5 billion in mixed income and employed greater than 23,000 individuals in 2025.

WPO features as a peer group. Founders apply, get vetted by different founders and construct inside rooms designed particularly for that goal. Plenty of different components clarify why these explicit companies ended up on a listing like this, and the peer construction is just one piece of that image. Still, relationships exhibiting up this persistently within the background of sturdy, fast-growing companies is difficult to jot down off as coincidence.

I’ve spent eight years investing in and dealing alongside early-stage girls entrepreneurs, and the founders who make it hardly ever do it alone. The entrepreneurial journey is a relentless climb filled with sudden drops and sharp turns, and it could actually really feel isolating, particularly for girls navigating the added strain to show themselves.