Female Founders Rise Show
Hosted by Emmie and Mae 11 episodes Nov 3, 2026
Each week, hosts Emmie Faust and Mae Yip have honest conversations with female founders about what it really takes to build a business. Topics include funding, growth, burnout, parenting, and everything in between. The show regularly features founders, investors, and operators who have raised or made significant money. It is brought to you by Female Founders Rise, a community of over 11,000 female entrepreneurs.
Episodes
Audience vs Community: What Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know with Frankie and Leah
Recorded at our live show, Emmie and Mae sat down with Frankie Bridge and Leah Meredith, the co-founders of Faves.It all started in 2017 with Frankie sharing her favourite high street finds on Instagram. Now it’s a 140,000-strong community, with a weekly mailer, sold-out events and its own runway show at London Fashion Week.We chat about how they built a real community and not just an audience, ho
1Million Members, £10M in Funding and a Make-or-Break Pivot with Pip Jamieson
Pip Jamieson built The Dots into a community of over a million members. It now powers 67 private social networks, including Soho House and UN Women UK. She raised just under £10M entirely from angels, with no VCs at all. In this episode she tells Emmie and Mae how she did it.The mistakes she made building her community, the COVID crash that wiped out 80% of her revenue in two weeks, and whether sh
The Family Business Behind Dior, Nike & Tesco’s Reusable Bags | Smruti Sriram OBE
How do you build a family-run business that stays profitable, grows in a sustainable way, and genuinely cares about people?In this conversation with Smruti we break down what that balance looks like in practice - employing hundreds of people, making long-term choices on materials and design, and protecting margin while leading with empathy.We cover second-generation entrepreneurship and joining a
Why Most B2C Brands Fail, Lessons From a £40M Exit | With Joanna Jenson
Why do most B2C brands fail and what does it actually take to build one to a £40M exit?In this conversation, hosts Emmie and Mae sit down with exit founder and angel investor Joanna Jensen to break down how a kids skincare brand for eczema (Childs Farm) went from kitchen-table idea to a £40M acquisition. We cover product sampling over paid ads, knowing your customer to lower acquisition costs, pac
How She Built a £1 billion Business with Mia Drennan
Mia Drennan got passed over for promotion, quit, then needed 400 meetings to land deal one. Ten years later she bootstrapped to profit, then scaled 10X in 3 years to a £1billion valuation.In this honest conversation we dig into bootstrapping vs private equity, the equity trap for women founders, referral-led growth, and building a team that shares in the win. Real tactics for funding, scaling, and
She Turned Her Personal Brand Into a £3M Business. Here's the Exact Playbook | Amelia Sordell
What if your personal brand & posts brought in clients instead of just likes? This is the playbook behind a £3M bootstrapped business founded by Amelia Sordell. Find out more about our upcoming personal branding challenge with Amelia here: https://femalefoundersrise.com/personal-branding-challengeIn this episode of the Female Founders Rise Show, we break down how to turn a personal brand into
Why you don’t always need VC Money | June Angelides MBE, founder and investor MBE
Do you actually need VC money to grow?In this conversation, investor and 2x founder June Angelides MBE breaks down bootstrap vs venture capital - when to raise, when to walk away, and what investors actually look for.Hosts Emmie & Mae dig into the funding questions every female founder asks: angel investing vs venture capital, founder-market fit, warm introductions, and why raising more than y
The Unsexy Product That Built a £8M+ Challenger Brand | Laura Harnett Founder of Seep
How do you turn an unsexy product into a successful challenger brand - without giving away all your equity?In this episode, Emmie & Mae sit down with Laura Harnett, founder of Seep - the plastic-free cleaning brand on a mission to wipe away microplastics from 10 million homes. Laura has made over £1M and raised over £1M for Seep, going from bootstrapped and customer-funded to stocked in Tesco,
The Truth About Being a Mum and an Entrepreneur
Balancing motherhood and business is unpredictable, so how do female founders actually do both without burning out?In this honest conversation, hosts Emmie & Mae talk openly about what it really takes to run a business while raising a family. Emmie shares what she learned juggling four kids as an entrepreneur while Mae prepares for motherhood, and together they unpack the reality behind matern
A Multi-Million Pound Events Empire, Survived COVID & Created Glastonbury of Business | Frankie James
Frankie James co-founded Ideas Community, the team behind the UK StartUp Awards, the Great British Entrepreneur Awards and Ideas Fest, now a multi-million-pound turnover business.This week Frankie sits down with Emmie and Mae to talk about building a portfolio of businesses without losing focus, closing an investment round three days before the world shut down, and the networking question that wil
The Entrepreneurial Mindset: What It Is & Do You Have It?
Hosts Mae & Emmie unpack the five mindset traits that separate those who think like an entrepreneur from those who don't. Not everyone is cut out for it and most people don't know which side they're on.Do you actually have the entrepreneurial mindset? And do you even know what it is?Drawing from their own journeys, from Emmie running a major Google event with zero prior experience
Married Co-Founders, AI, and the Pivot That Raised £1m with Emily Kucharksi
Emily Kucharski was a director at WPP and Publicis. Then she went on maternity leave, taught herself to code, and co-founded an AI company with her husband. They have since raised over £1million for Wholesum, an AI-native enterprise platform that helps organisations make sense of unstructured text data.In this conversation, Emmie and Mae dug into the fundraising playbook Emily built over three yea
How I Raised £1M From Angel Investors: My Six-Step Playbook
Mae raised nearly £1M from over 15 angel investors and most of it came through cold outreach. One LinkedIn DM landed her £250,000. Another cold email brought in £75,000.In this episode, she walks Emmie through the exact six-step playbook founders ask her about the most: how she prepared, where she found angels, what she said, and the parts nobody posts on LinkedIn.If you're fundraising right n
From Side Hustle To Building A Fashion Empire w Eshita Kabra, Founder of By Rotation
Eshita Kabra is the founder and CEO of By Rotation, the world’s largest peer-to-peer fashion rental app. She built it as a side hustle while working in finance, strategically walked away when the numbers made sense, and has since raised over £5 million - all while navigating the venture capital world as a South Asian woman who was told to "stick to her roots."In this episode, Emmie and M
Having a Baby & Running 3 Businesses w Lottie Unwin
Solo founder. Self-funded. Three businesses. 10-month-old baby. Lottie built Brand Hackers, Upworld, and Up Talent without VC, without a co-founder - and without slowing down. Here's what the juggle actually looks like.In this episode of the Female Founders Rise Show, Emmie Faust and Mae Yip sit down with Lottie to get honest about building a business after a baby - the planning, the personal bran
VC Secrets Unlocked With Rupa Popat
Emmie and Mae sit down with Rupa Popat - exited founder, angel investor, and VC fund manager with close to $70 million in assets under management.Rupa brings a rare perspective: she's been a founder who failed her first raise, went on to exit her first business to a listed company, backed over 30 companies as an angel, and now runs Arāya Ventures which includes the Arāya Sie Fund, backing only
How To Get To Your First £100K
Emmie Faust and Mae Yip tackle one of the most Googled questions in the founder world: how do you actually get to your first £100k? Drawing on Emmie's 20+ years in business and Mae's experience scaling her first company beyond that milestone, the conversation cuts through the vanity metrics and gets straight to what actually works.From pricing your services and building founder-led sales,
Angel vs VC: Why I Chose Angel Investment (And Raised £1M)
Most founders think VC is the only path. It's not and it might not even be the right one for you.In this episode, Emmie and Mae get into one of the most misunderstood topics in the founder world: angel investment vs venture capital. Mae raised nearly £1M from angel investors after being rejected by hundreds of VC and it turned out to be exactly the right decision for her business.They break do
