Is the Celeb-Founder Era Over? Plus, the Women Back in Charge

02/17/25 • 50 min

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

Also: The challenges—and remarkable innovations—of women-founded companies in health care.

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

Previous Episode

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

Next Episode

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