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Hi Reader,
The founder story that circulates has a leap in it. She quits the job and raises the money.
Four founders went through their numbers at Founder Spotlight this month, and the arithmetic looked different. Michele Williams pays her team and covers her pay with projects from her other lines of work. Noemi Reyes has a day job she intends to keep for another ten years, because she likes it and she likes her boss, and she builds Semestar in the evenings once her kids are into their video games. Vanessa Chang and two co-founders put hackathon winnings into Bernie, a tool that helps seniors spot text scams. Michelle Muncy-Silva is bootstrapping the legal groundwork her company needs before it can collect data.
Michele's platform still finished a two-month pilot with a client that has 80,000 volunteers, Bernie goes live this month, Noemi is repairing Semestar's syllabus import in public, and Michelle's grant goes to the National Institutes of Health in January.
Vanessa has a theory about why that arithmetic stays private. The journeys that get posted come from "some tech bro saying, oh, I built another Jarvis AI agentic system." Her company failed, in her words, "miserably" at telling anyone it existed. The founder story most of us are reading is a sampling problem.
If your company is running on a contract or a day job, reply and tell us what it is paying for.
Warmly,
Kate
She Leads AI
P.S. Meet Mini-Stanley. Give him five numbers from your business. He puts them on one page with a slider under each one so you can play with what happens when a number goes up or down. Then he gives you a few questions based on what he sees. Thatโs it. Use him in Claude or whatever AI youโre already using. Thereโs a little guide that goes with him.
Open Mini-Stanley โ https://sheleadsai.ai/mini-stanley/โ
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๐๏ธ Social Saturday
Free for all women. Hosted by Beth Lyons and Jen Schwartz.
๐ฆ๐๐โ๐ฆ ๐๐ข๐๐ก๐ ๐ช๐๐๐ง ๐ช๐๐ง๐ ๐๐?
The speaker lineup doesnโt tell the whole story.
Women are building businesses, challenging what AI gets wrong, and making things the people on stages havenโt even thought of yet!! Weโd like you to meet them. Weโd like them to meet you.
On September 19, Beth Lyons and Jen Schwartz host She Leads AI Social Saturday, featuring Bethโs signature guided deep networking: high on connection, low on overwhelm.
Weโre getting past job titles and into what youโre doing with AIโand what you think the rest of us should be paying attention to.
๐ช๐ต๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ผ๐โ๐น๐น ๐๐ฎ๐ธ๐ฒ ๐ฎ๐๐ฎ๐
Inspiration from the women beside you
A broader view of womenโs AI leadership
New connections with women working in AI
Social Saturday is the weekly gathering for human-centered AI practitioners โ two hours every Saturday morning where women come together to learn with AI. From seasoned practitioners to the newly curious, we gather on Zoom to make sense of our collective AI journey.
Social Saturday is made possible by the She Leads AI Society, our membership program for human-centered AI practitioners.
[Our Zoom Policies]
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๐ฅ Other Upcoming Events
โBuild, Launch, Scale Lab - Workshop 8
โBuild Relationships That Build Your Business
For Members of the She Leads AI Societyโ
โ
๐๏ธ Wednesday, September 23 from 11:00am-12:30pm Pacific
Businesses grow through relationships, and while technology can help us connect more efficiently, meaningful relationships are still built through curiosity, generosity, consistency, and trust.
In this workshop, participants will shift from thinking about networking as collecting contacts to building a relationship ecosystem that supports mutual growth, collaboration, and opportunity. They will identify the people and communities that matter most, develop a sustainable outreach rhythm, and learn how AI can help them stay organized and intentional without sacrificing authenticity.
By the end of the session, participants will have a practical relationship strategy that reflects who they are, who they hope to serve, and the kind of leader they want to become.
Learning Outcomes
Participants will be able to:
- Map their current relationship ecosystem and identify opportunities to strengthen it.
- Recognize different types of relationships that contribute to sustainable business growth.
- Create a realistic outreach and relationship-building rhythm.
- Identify five relationships to intentionally deepen over the next 90 days.
- Use AI to support preparation, research, follow-up, and relationship management while maintaining authentic human connection.
Participants leave with:
- A Relationship Ecosystem Map
- A 90-day Relationship Strategy
- Five intentional next steps
- Outreach conversation prompts
- A lightweight relationship management workflow
The Build, Launch, Scale Lab is a benefit of membership in She Leads AI. We recommend the full arc โ the workshops build on one another. And the curriculum is built to be joined as your time allows, with every replay and resource waiting in the learning management system.
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๐ข She Leads AI Society Members Making an Impact
Sallie-Grace Tate is executive director of Women & Philanthropy at UC Davis, responsible for the design and management of the program and for the advisory council behind it. She describes her work as "growing women's philanthropy," and she is blunt about the stakes. "Women's philanthropy is not a supporting role. It is leadership, vision, influence, and legacy." In May 2026 Women & Philanthropy hosted Bold. Brilliant. Building the Future., a day that gathered her advisory council with "extraordinary women leaders, advocates, philanthropists, and community members." Her program also awards a $25,000 Women & Philanthropy Impact Award, and its recipients direct the prize to funds benefiting students. She joined UC Davis in 2012 as assistant dean for advancement, after two years at the University of Rochester building a donor portfolio out of what she calls "undeveloped territory" across four states. More than twenty-two years in, here is what she took from that May workshop. "When women are invited into meaningful conversation and co-creation, they do not think small. They think expansively. Collectively. Generously." She closes with three instructions. "Be Curious. Be Kind. Be Generous."
Bettina Mason, MSEd., SHRM-CP, is an assistant principal at Lucy Addison Middle School in Roanoke, Virginia, and she calls herself an "AI Change Agent, Strategist & Certified Consultant." In April 2024 she co-founded the AI Educator Network to help teachers bring AI into their classrooms "in ways that are ethical, impactful, and forward-thinking." In July 2025 she took the assistant principal job with Roanoke City Public Schools. Since then she has been revising the teacher handbook and the schoolwide safety protocols, and coordinating literacy work under the Virginia Literacy Act. She is also helping develop the walkthrough observation protocols the building uses to give teachers feedback. She describes a twenty-year history before that, across government agencies and private enterprises, and says she is known for "critical thinking, empathy, and excellent communication." She gives her sessions titles with some humor in them โ one is "The Gift of 'NO': Unwrapping the Power Behind Rejection Using AI," another "Wisdom + Innovation: Using AI to Unite Generations for Meaningful Change." Of the network she co-founded, her line is to "revolutionize education, one innovative idea at a time."
Jen Frazier founded Firefly Partners in Boulder in 2007 and still runs it as CEO, a women-led, B Corp-certified digital agency for nonprofits. She calls her method Purpose-First AI โ "use a mission-centered approach to AI with your values leading the way, use the tools responsibly, bring equity and purpose into your adoption and roll-out, and keep re-evaluating as the landscape shifts." She hosts UnTangled, a seasonal weekly LinkedIn Live on AI in the social sector, and wrapped season two in June after seventeen episodes with seventeen guests. The word she kept returning to was intentional. "Not ethical (too paralyzing). Not careful (too passive). Intentional. You have a stance." She is unsentimental about the hype. "Nobody needs 200 AI agents running in the background," she wrote that same month. "Any tool promising you'll get 40% more done by next Tuesday is selling you a story." What she wants for the sector is plainer, and she put it in that same season-two recap. "The boring use cases are an amazing place to start. First drafts, meeting summaries, donor thank you letters. Time saved is not a luxury. It is sustainability."
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โ๏ธ Worth A Share
Bernie
Bernie is a scam-protection tool for the parent who answers unknown calls. It works over text message, on the phone she already uses. Forward a suspicious message and Bernie tells you whether it is a scam, then alerts the family when something turns serious.
The page makes the case better than we can. "Your mom gets scam texts every day. Your dad answers unknown calls. You can't be there for every suspicious message โ and honestly, you shouldn't have to be. That's Bernie's job."
Vanessa Chang and Danielle LaFleur, both She Leads AI members, founded it with their colleague Dan, and they are building it in the open. Vanessa puts elder fraud at $26 billion a year.
Join the waitlist โ Bernieโ
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CREATE Conference 2026 is three days in Salt Lake City built for women in AI leadership โ October 16โ18. Strategy, hands-on sessions, and peers who understand the challenges you're facing. Gather with us โโ
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