Women in Business · From the editor
What It Truly Takes
Women in Business begins today. Every piece starts with an hour of conversation with a woman who built something, and every one ends with the same question.
I.
It started as a conversation between two women in the same office.
Amanda Nagle and I had both built things. We had both left something steady to do it. And in 2026 we kept running into themes that were supposed to be settled a decade ago.
So we started asking other women what it truly takes.
That was the whole plan. It was a passion project, built on our own lived experience. Selfishly, it has been healing to listen.
II.
The format is simple. One hour, recorded, with both of us in the room. We ask for the sixty-second version first — who you are, how you got here — and then we go past it.
Walk me through yesterday, hour by hour. What has the business cost you that never shows up on a P&L? What pattern from your past are you trying to break with this business?
Every conversation ends the same way. Freedom, to me, looks like… Finish the sentence however you want.
Before we hang up, I say the same thing every time. If you are lying awake that night wishing you had said something, or wishing you hadn’t, send us a note. We will add it, cut it or change it.
Nothing runs until you have read it.
III.
The women have come from all over the world and every stage of life. First year. Third company. Back inside a corporation after years on their own.
Without prompting, they keep landing in the same place. Success looks different to a lot of them. The ambition is all there. It is scaled toward a family, a community and a life that works.
I recognize that one. I came out of corporate, built an agency, and two and a half years later looked around and realized I had built myself the same thing I left.
This is a pattern out of real conversations, and I hold it loosely. The series is where we test it.
IV.
Women in Business is the founding series of Bellwether, and it runs in every issue.
The first piece is Kaylee Williams, the Founding Director of Iowa Startup Week, who spent four years deciding which Iowa startups got public venture money. Her line is the one I keep coming back to.
“Each droplet, each founder is additive to the wave.”
There is so much power in telling your story as the person you actually are.
If you know a woman who should be next, or you are one, write to us.