5 Lessons We Learned From These Female Tech Founders

Name: Alexandra Friedman

Founded: Lola in 2015, a no-B.S. D2C tampon delivery service—the country’s first—aimed at making the essential female products more convenient, cheaper, free of flowery packaging, and—most notably—healthier. Lola’s products are free of dyes and chemicals, with a transparent list of “ingredients” included. In most American tampons, cotton’s only a part of an otherwise synthetic blend, but these are made of 100 percent cotton. After all, it goes inside a body, too, just like food. It helps that the white box and pearlescent blue wrappers are chic and inconspicuous. Instead of a flashy marketing launch, the founders’ friends and Lola’s fans shared their love with #mylolashelfie on Instagram—where the target market’s hanging out anyway.

Lesson from Alexandra: “Everything is less scary than you think it will be,” via I Am That Girl.

Location: New York, NY

Followers: 510

Name: Jordana Kier

Founded: Lola. She and Alexandra were introduced by significant others in 2014.

Lesson from Jordana: “Take all the time you have to make a decision. It often feels very much like you have to make a call instantly and live with the decision. But at the end of the day, time can be an asset if you use it in the right way,” via Bird.

Location: New York, NY

Followers: 579

Name: Ayah Bdeir

Founded: littleBits, a library of open-source electronic modules that snap together like Legos and look even cooler. The goal: Making electronics accessible to students, makers, children, artists, and anyone who might’ve been intimidated by coding’s complexity. While Ayah was a fellow at research maker incubator Eyebeam, her creative side came out to play. An engineer by training but also an artist, Ayah started designing electronic “bits” that made the exposed wiring look like works of art themselves: elegant, not intimidating. First came prototypes, then came global orders, then came the TED Talk.

Lesson from Ayah: “You should be testing a lot along the way and making sure that you like the products you make. Once you roll into production…small mistakes multiply. Be thoughtful in what you do and be thoughtful in what you develop, and don’t just copy other people. You have to bring innovation to it,” via The Blueprint.

Location: New York, NY

Followers: 1,104

Name: Tiffany Pham

Founded: Mogul, a digital hub for women to share ideas, get advice from bona fide experts on their mentorship board, and discover trending content from around the web, curated by the community. It’s a little like Medium meets Reddit, to draw on two other recent upstarts.

Lesson from Tiffany: “Ultimately, by having users submit, interact with, and voice their opinion on each piece of content on the platform through up voting, commenting, and sharing, we are propagating the democratization of media,” via Forbes.

Location: New York, NY

Followers: 13.2k

Name: Kathryn Minshew

Founded: The Muse, a career site for the Snapchat generation, coupling indispensible free advice in an ever-evolving job market with a beautiful design that makes the content something people actually want to consume. It doesn’t feel like homework. The early days involved a lot of creative financing methods and undeterred pitching, which led to securing VC funding and very smart essential hires. The site passed the 4.5m monthly users mark last year and Kathryn’s sights are set on predictive job searching.

Lesson from Kathryn: “When I first started working in consulting, I had a boss who would coach me on how to present my ideas to senior management. We would record the conversation and listen to it later that day. He would point out when I sounded effective, when I sounded authoritative, and when I sounded uncertain or defensive. That sort of coaching was really incredible,” via Anthropologie.

Location: New York, NY

Followers: 1,863