She Ventures Forward

Claudia Laurie spent two and a half years at Uber mastering the science behind pricing, incentives, and subscriptions before leaving to build Prive, a subscription billing platform for D2C brands. Four years later, she had raised $5M, processed half a billion dollars in GMV, and successfully exited through an acquisition. In this episode, Claudia breaks down how she and her co-founder pivoted from their original idea after customer feedback, built a sales motion from scratch, and fundraised pre-product as first-time founders. What does it actually feel like to go from LOI to close? How do you evaluate competing acquisition offers when your team already thinks they're moving over? Claudia pulls back the curtain on all of it. Honest, tactical, and full of hard-won pattern recognition, this episode is a masterclass in founder decision-making.

In this episode of She Ventures Forward, Natalie sits down with Kelly Lacob, CEO and co-founder of Xella Health, the first precision healthcare platform built specifically for women..Kelly opens up about the real mechanics behind her $3.7M pre-seed raise: why going straight to institutional investors was a costly mistake, how she built a proof of concept with almost no money, what it took to grow a 10,000-person waitlist before launch, and the bold move of setting her own terms when no one wanted to lead.

In this episode of She Ventures Forward, Natalie sits down with Audrey Wisch, founder and CEO of Curious Cardinals, a personalized learning platform helping students discover their purpose through mentorship.Audrey shares how Curious Cardinals began as a passion project while she was a student at Stanford and evolved into a venture-backed company serving thousands of students with a network of hundreds of mentors. She walks through her decision to pause her studies, build full time, and raise venture capital from early customers who deeply believed in the product.The conversation explores how Audrey thinks about building human-centered education in an AI-driven world, where technology is used to amplify mentorship rather than replace it. She also breaks down her approach to fundraising, choosing the right investors, staying close to the end user, and why venture capital should be treated as a tool rather than a requirement.This episode is a must-listen for founders, operators, and anyone thinking about education, AI, and how to scale impact without losing the mission.

Zinnie Zhang joins She Ventures Forward to share how she’s building Enttor, an AI marketing platform helping enterprise teams scale authentic social media engagement. From identifying gaps in marketing software to raising pre-seed funding , Zinnie’s story is inspiring in turning frustration into innovation.

Kate O'Keefe wants to end the era of building products nobody wants. In this episode, the Heat Seeker AI founder and former BCG and Cisco exec shares how market experiments, not surveys, are the key to finding product-market fit—and why marketers everywhere are rethinking their playbook.

Today, Powered by Hue co-founder and CEO Janvi Shah takes us inside her journey from solving her own pain point in beauty to building a platform used by major brands. In this episode, she shares how she turned personal experience into a powerful vision, the tactical steps behind raising $4.5M, and what it’s really like to fundraise. If you're building something from scratch or wondering how to stay resilient when the odds are stacked against you—this one’s for you.

In this episode of She Ventures Forward, Natalie sits down with Emma Bates, co-founder and CEO of Diem, a social search engine built to feel more like the girl’s bathroom at 1am than a Google rabbit hole. Emma shares the origin story of Diem, why traditional search fails women, and how she’s building an alternative front door to the internet. She opens up about raising $5 million, navigating bias in venture capital, and what it takes to be taken seriously as a non-technical female founder in tech

In this episode of She Ventures Forward, Ali Debow, co-founder of swsh, shares how she and her team pivoted multiple times before landing on an AI-powered shared photo album app. She talks about the early days of testing ideas on college campuses, dropping out of NYU to go all-in, and raising $2.4M to build the future of consumer social. Ali also shares insights from her experiences as a Z Fellow and Thiel Fellow, the power of warm intros in fundraising, and why relentless optimism is key to startup success.

In the latest episode of She Ventures Forward, Natalie sits down with Julia O'Mara, co-founder and COO of Pickle, a peer-to-peer rental marketplace that’s changing the way we think about fashion. Julia opens up about the unconventional path that led Pickle from a social polling app to a thriving community-driven rental platform. She shares insights on raising $8 million in seed funding, the challenges of building a dual-sided marketplace, and the scrappy, hands-on strategies that got Pickle off the ground. Listen in for Julia's advice on building a brand from the ground up and the power of community-driven growth

In the sixth episode of She Ventures Forward, Natalie sits down with Sophie Wyne, co - founder of Ariglad. Sophie shares lessons learned from pivoting Ariglad's product as well as her journey through YC and how that helped her build and raise what Ariglad is today.