It takes audacity to start a company, grit to grow it, and community to survive the ordeal. Join Inc. Executive Editor Diana Ransom and Editor-at-Large Christin...
Former finance executive Cate Luzio founded and self-funded the professional-network platform Luminary in late 2018 with the mission to uplift, upskill, and propel women and allies forward through all phases of their professional journeys. Luminary is a gender inclusive B2C and B2B global professional education and networking platform. Today the company has more than 15,000 members globally across 30 countries and leads more than 20 workshops, programs and events each month in person and virtually.
Not only did Cate appear on our Female Founders list in 2019 and 2021, but in 2024 and this year she also joined our Female Founders board of advisers and helped review the 2025 list.
Our hosts, Inc. executive editor Diana Ransom and Inc. editor-at-large Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, sit down with Cate in a special roundtable discussion to wrap up our Female Founders 2025 series. They chat about the state of women in entrepreneurship, why women are the masters of bootstrapping, and how founders–and we as a culture–can look beyond funding for metrics of success.
During the roundtable chat, Cate highlights some of the founders who stood out to her this year, including LTK’s Amber Venz Box, Chelsea Hirschhorn of Frida Baby, Rosanna Berardi of her eponymous immigration law firm, and Beleaf Medical’s Mitch Meyers. Cate shares some of their inspiring stories, which cross many business sectors in historically male-dominated industries such as tech, engineering, and climate. She says these women entrepreneurs are changing the pattern, and are “saying, ‘No, I'm in this, and I'm building amazing companies to change the world.’”
Additional research and information: Inc.’s 2025 Female Founder List
Read more about Cate at Inc.com: There’s a boom in female founders right now
Cate Luzio on the Female Founders 2021 List of 100
Visit: Luminary
**and a correction at minute 32:34 Cate says LTK's cofounder and president's name is Amber Benz Vox. Her name is Amber Venz Box.
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45:32
Creating Your Own Category, With Babba Rivera
Babba Rivera, the founder and CEO of clean-beauty company Ceremonia, is a cover subject of Inc. magazine’s 2025 Female Founder issue. Her heritage is both an inspiration and a driving force for her brand.
When Babba Rivera was growing up, her Chilean family moved to Sweden to escape the brutal Pinochet dictatorship. She spent her early career working at startups in both Sweden and the U.S., at Uber and at the luggage upstart Away, where she was director of marketing. During that time, Babba was spending an hour every morning styling her hair with really “toxic, unhelpful products.” As a Latinx woman, she didn’t see any products that were designed with her heritage or type of hair in mind. So, in 2020, she founded Ceremonia, an aspirational natural-ingredient brand that seeks to fill a void in the beauty market for her fellow Latinx consumers.
For Inc. magazine’s Female Founders 2025 series, Inc. executive editor Diana Ransom sat down with Babba to chat about her background and where the seeds for Ceremonia took root. They discussed how Babba felt that working at Uber in her 20s was like getting paid to go to business school, how she created a knowledge exchange with another founder to learn about the beauty business, and how her company’s product development is constantly evolving with the help of customer feedback. Joining Diana is Inc. editor-at-large Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, as well as special guest Cate Luzio, founder and CEO of Luminary.
Additional research and information:
Inc.’s 2025 Female Founder List
Read more about Babba and Ceremonia at Inc.
Visit: Ceremonia
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45:13
Build Your Own Door, With Reshma Saujani
Half of Americans live in child care deserts. For many more, child care is unaffordable. Paid leave for parents is far from universal. Reshma Saujani is on a mission to change all this.
Reshma is best known for having founded Girls Who Code in 2012 during her run for the U.S. Congress. She has raised $100 million and taught 670,000 girls programming skills over the past decade. Now, Reshma has turned her sights on building her second nonprofit, Moms First, which focuses on making women’s lives better in the workplace through paid family leave, improved child care, and pay equity for moms. Today, Moms First is a community of 1.1 million.
For Inc. magazine’s Female Founders 2025 series, Inc. editor-at-large Christine Lagorio-Chafkin sits down with Reshma to chat about how she is bringing everything she learned from scaling Girls Who Code into her new venture, the potential lasting impact of the war on DEI programs, and the ongoing fight against the rising cost of child care in this country. Along with Inc. executive editor and co-host Diana Ransom, Luminary founder and CEO Cate Luzio joins the conversation as a special guest.
Additional research and information:
Inc.’s 2024 Female Founder’s list (2025 out soon!)
Read more about Reshma and Moms First (previously The Marshall Plan for Moms) at Inc.com: https://www.inc.com/rebecca-deczynski/marshall-plan-for-moms-mothers-day-ad-flexible-work-policies.html
Check out My So-Called Midlife with Reshma Saujani Podcast
Visit: Moms First
Visit: Girls Who Code
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42:33
Is the Celeb-Founder Era Over? Plus, the Women Back in Charge
In this episode, Inc. executive editor Diana Ransom and editor-at-large Christine Lagorio-Chafkin host a roundtable discussion with some of the reporters who contributed to Inc. magazine’s 2025 Female Founders issue. They are joined by freelancer writer Issie Lapowsky and senior editor Rebecca Deczynski to discuss how the state of female entrepreneurship is rapidly changing in this political moment.
In putting together the 2025 Female Founders issue of Inc., Diana noticed an interesting phenomenon: There were a significant number of women entrepreneurs who’d bought back their businesses or returned to the helm of their startups after having stepped away. What’s going on? We discuss.
Also: The challenges—and remarkable innovations—of women-founded companies in health care.
And finally! Celebrity business overload! Could 2025 see a shift in strategy, with brands leaning more on social media influencers and fans to reduce their reliance on costly A-list celebrities? What industries are still ripe for celebrity founders? Which are essentially over? And, the eternal question: What’s the real ROI for a brand when it enlists a celebrity co-founder or spokesperson?
Additional research and information:
Inc.’s 2024 Female Founder’s list (2025 out soon!)
Listen to Chrisitine’s interview with Anu Duggal about the state of female founders in 2024
To read more from Inc.com about embattled DEI: The Anti-DEI Lawsuit Against the Fearless Fund Was Just Settled
To find out more about Female Founder funding read: What Female Founders Can Do to Raise Money Right Now, Next Year, and Beyond, According to This VC
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50:21
Jumping Off the Shelf, with Jen Zeszut of Goodles
The serial founder says the legacy pasta brands have made their beds. So she made a new one.
Jen Zeszut’s mac and cheese brand, Goodles, is designed not just to stand out in the aisle—with rainbow-hued packaging amid a sea of beige and blue—but also to carve out a new customer for the classic pasta recipe: young adults who like convenience, but who aim to eat something healthier than your standard boxed fare.
This meant changing adopting new market strategies in addition to creating a nutrient-packed mac and cheese. Jen is not a first-time founder, nor is she a stranger to the consumer packaged goods landscape. She left her role as CEO of the baby food company Cerebelly to launch Goodles in 2021, and the brand has been on the rise ever since. Today, it’s the fastest-growing mac and cheese in the U.S. and the seventh-fastest-growing natural food brand in the U.S. grocery category.
For our mini-series highlighting Inc.’s 2025 Female Founders honorees, executive editor Diana Ransom sat down with Jen to discuss Goodles’s rapid growth, scrappy but innovative marketing, bringing in incremental customers, and how she raised $27 million for seed round funding.
Additional research and information:
Inc.’s 2024 Female Founder’s list (2025 out soon!)
Read more on Jen Zeszut and Goodles on Inc.com: If You Cannot Outspend Your Competition, Out-Weird Them
Visit: Goodles
Visit: Goodles’s bio
It takes audacity to start a company, grit to grow it, and community to survive the ordeal. Join Inc. Executive Editor Diana Ransom and Editor-at-Large Christine Lagorio-Chafkin as they host From the Ground Up, a new podcast from Inc. that features frank and unfiltered conversations—with some of the most successful founders in the world—about navigating the role of the founder, the tips and tricks entrepreneurs need to know to be successful, and the secrets that nobody really tells you before you start a business.
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