8 Women Founders on Building Their Startups in Podcasts

Entrepreneurs, especially woman entrepreneurs, looking for some inspirational and informative startup founders to share their unique perspectives and lessons learned, will find several success stories worth following in this selection of 30-minute podcasts.

Therese Tucker, Founder and CEO of BlackLine, is a very successful female entrepreneur who followed our core philosophy of bootstrap first, raise money later. When I first met her in 2009, her company was in the $10 million revenue range. Subsequently, it has continued to grow at 50% CAGR year over year, and Therese raised private equity funding in 2013 to take liquidity for herself and her team. The company has since gone public at a Unicorn valuation.

Stephanie Leffler, CEO of OneSpace, has done a prior successful, bootstrapped venture from St. Louis and exited it. This time round, she has bootstrapped to about $350k in revenue and then raised venture capital from Highland Capital and others. Stephanie is a damn compelling entrepreneur.

Sash Sunkara, Founder and CEO at RackWare, is a rare example of a female startup CEO who has built a sizable venture funded technology company in hardcore tech. She shared her journey and the discussion was enlightening.

Janet Kosloff, Co-Founder and CEO at InCrowd, has bootstrapped her company, then raised about $2.5 million in funding and hit $10 million in revenue in 2016. She shares insights from her journey.

Jana Francis, Founder and President of Steals.com, has experienced significant challenges in building her bootstrapped company from Utah. She candidly discussed these challenges, and her experiences are eye-opening and inspiring.

Heidi Jannenga, Co-founder and President at WebPT, yet another scrappy entrepreneur who managed to bootstrap to over $1M ARR and THEN raised the first million in angel funding. Heidi’s company has crossed $40 million in revenue and has sold a portion of its equity to private equity.

Betsy Corcoran, Founder and CEO of EdSurge, is an authority on the subject of educational technology.

JT O’Donnell, a top 20 LinkedIn Influencer, and CEO of Work It Daily (formerly Careerealism and CareerHMO), shares what she is seeing from the career coaching perspective. Our observations about this gigantic trend of people starting companies while holding onto their full-time jobs, is from the entrepreneurship perspective. J.T. is in the middle of the decision-making process as people are trying to decide how to play their careers and when to become entrepreneurs.

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