Wings of Inspired Business

Madeleine Lambert is a co-founder of Originality.ai, a platform that provides a toolset to help content marketers, writers and publishers navigate the world of generative AI so they can publish with integrity. The company, which launched one week before ChatGPT, also specializes in AI detection technology, with solutions that help defend copyright, detect plagiarism, and beyond. Madeleine was also the co-founder of the marketing company Content Refined which was sold in 2022. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 📝✨Transparency & Integrity Matter More Than Ever: With the boom in AI-generated content, learn why it's important to use tools to detect AI involvement, plagiarism, and even fact-check information to maintain trust and credibility—plus the importance of transparency and responsible use, especially in academia and journalism. 🚀 🛠️ Navigating the Challenges of Innovation: Building solutions at the cutting edge comes with unique hurdles—from balancing ethical concerns to transparent communication about accuracy and the responsible use of AI detection tools. 🇨🇦 🤟 Canada's Leadership in Ethical AI: With its roots in Canada, Originality.AI stands out for its strong commitment to data privacy and security—an increasingly important advantage for international clients worried about data protection, plus why Canada is setting a different standard from the 'move fast and break things' approach elsewhere. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings975 More about Madeleine at Originality.AI originality.ai

Dr. Shannon Decker is the Founder and CEO of VBC One, a consulting firm that partners with physician groups, health plans and vendors to optimize value-based care performance. With over 25 years of experience, including 17 in risk adjustment, quality and Medicare, she brings deep expertise in healthcare strategy, analytics, and operations. A published author and national speaker, Dr. Decker currently serves as a RISE fellow and on the faculty at Capella University. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 💪❤️Proactive, Value-Based Healthcare: Learn about the shift in healthcare from a reactive "sickness" model to a proactive, preventative value-based care approach, and why this not only improves patient outcomes but also offers opportunities for innovation—especially as the industry rapidly changes. 🤔 🚀 Turning Challenges Into Opportunity: How a layoff became a launching pad for Dr. Shannon Decker, and why when doors close, it's a signal to bring your vision, expertise and unique approach to make an entrepreneurial leap. ✨💡 Embracing Innovation Amid Change: The American healthcare industry is in flux, from new government regulations to the rise of AI and startups innovating in access and personalization. Learn how these changes signal growth opportunities—plus strategy and insights on how small and midsize health plans and provider groups navigating the shift to proactive care can best operate. 🤝 🌱 The Power of Visibility and Relationships: How to build a successful business from your previous contacts and professional networks, and why podcasts and relationship building at conferences can work miracles for finding and keeping clients. "Never burn bridges," says Dr. Shannon, and continually share your expertise with the world. 🙏 🦄 Grace in Entrepreneurship: How to allow yourself grace when transitioning from a structured employee role to running your own business, plus the secrets of resilience, why you need to expect the unexpected, adapt to new tempos, and remember that not everything has to go as planned to be right. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings974 More about Shannon at VBC One https://vbcone.com/

Victoria Vaughan, an award-winning business leader and communication strategist, is the founder of B612, a New York–based PR agency serving high-growth technology companies. B612 clients are featured in top tier outlets such as NYT, WSJ, TechCrunch, Wired and have raised over $100m in funding in 2025. With over a decade in tech communications, Victoria previously served as CEO of the top-tier Web3 media company Cointelegraph, directly managing media strategy and operations. She was named a Best Business Owner by NYX awards'25. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 🤖 💖 AI for PR: Learn how AI can help your business monitor trends and spot newsjacking opportunities faster than ever—while avoiding the "over-automation" trap. "Human connection now is even more important," says Victoria, so avoid AI-generated emails and use AI instead for research and targeting, then switch to genuine, human connection for pitching journalists. 💡 🚀 Stand Out in a Noisy World: With tech giants dominating headlines, scrappy emerging tech companies can get noticed by offering authentic, data-driven stories and strong points of view. Focus on building your thought leadership with compelling narratives that highlight your expertise and unique market insights. 🎯🌍 Niche is the New Mainstream: Why the most effective PR moves isn't always chasing a big outlet—it's finding the right outlet. Newsletters and Substack's are on the rise, often delivering better, more targeted results than traditional media because those audiences are loyal and deeply engaged. 🔥🛠️Build Relationships That Last: Why the gold standard in PR remains relationships—getting to know journalists, engaging with their work well before you pitch, and offering expertise proactively (even when there's nothing in it for you). It's a long game, but it pays off in trust and coverage when you need it most. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings973 More about Victoria at b612pr.com

Lena McDearmid is the founder and CEO of Wryver, a consultancy that helps leaders create company cultures where people and performance thrive together. Previously Lena co-founded the fintech company Momnt, where she served as COO and Chief Culture Officer. With Wryver, she's on a mission to create teams that trust each other and organizations that are future-ready in an AI world. With more than 20 years in leadership, consulting, and culture strategy, she focuses on strengthening the trust, rhythms, and structures that determine whether teams succeed or stall. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 ✨💡 Why Culture Isn't "Nice to Have"—It's Everything: Company culture spells the difference between success and failure. Study after study finds that 65% of business failures can be traced back to poor culture, not product or market missteps, but to things like leadership misalignment, weak communication, or lack of psychological safety. 🤝 🤎 Purpose Not Perks: Forget the ping pong tables and free snacks. Perks aren't culture. Culture is about how decisions get made, how disagreements are handled and how your company supports (or shames) failure. Are your team members confident to speak up and innovate or do they fear the consequences? 🌱🧠 Psychological Safety Is Non-Negotiable: To truly innovate, your team needs two big things: psychological safety and playfulness. Without trust and the freedom to fail, bold ideas won't surface. 🔥🛠️Leaders Go First (With Vulnerability): Learn why the best leaders model mistakes, hold themselves accountable, and invite feedback. It's not intuitive for everyone, and that's why not everyone who's good at their job should be leading people. You may be the CEO but you may need a Chief of Staff or a Chief People Officer. 🤖 ❤️AI Is Changing the Rules: New tools can make teams more efficient, but AI will never replace creativity, empathy, and thoughtful leadership. Now, more than ever, a people-first culture is critical to your success. 👩‍🔬 🤟 For Female Founders—A Competitive Edge: Women are naturally collaborative and are building some of today's most successful, high-ROAS teams. The data is in—female-led companies consistently deliver higher returns, and their focus on culture is a major driver. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings972 More about Lena at Wryver https://wryver.com/

Elizabeth Gore is the co-founder and president of Hello Alice, a technology company that provides access to capital, connections, and education to over 1.5 million entrepreneurs. In turn, Hello Alice's business health engine for banks and enterprise business services helps corporations increase engagement and transactions with small businesses. Hello Alice remains steadfast in its mission to ensure that every small business owner has the resources to thrive and live their dream. Elizabeth is the host of the Yahoo Finance show "The Big Idea," and is the small business columnist for Inc magazine. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 💰 📈 Financial Fitness for Female Founders: How to boost your financial fitness before seeking capital, and access some of the $60 million in small business grants and loans from 92 equitable lenders from Hello Alice. 🤖 🎯 AI Adoption Is Non-Negotiable: Whether you own a tech startup or a local bakery, integrating AI isn't just about innovation—it's about increasing efficiency, improving financial fitness, and staying competitive. Elizabeth says, "You can't operate a business today without it." 💪 🦄 Resilience in the Face of "No": Elizabeth and her co-founder had over 200 rejections on their funding journey, but perseverance paid off: after some lean early rounds, Hello Alice is now profitable and thriving. The lesson? Stay frugal, be capital-efficient, and build your network before you need it. 👩‍🔬 🚀 Why Women Make Outstanding Investors (and Need to Do It More!): It's not just about receiving capital—it's time for women to step up as investors, fund managers, and decision-makers. 🌐✨Building Resilience, Mindset & Community: How athletics helps shape the mindset of the best entrepreneurs. Learn how to "fail forward" with the grit of a top athlete. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings971 More about Elizabeth at Hello Alice https://helloalice.com

Kristin Thomas is the Founder of Marble Collective, an AI-powered platform transforming how women's leadership is preserved, amplified, and discovered to make remarkable women easier to find, follow, and book, ensuring their legacies endure. Backed by 300+ women leaders, including more than 70 founding investors, Marble centralizes each leader's media, milestones, and body of work into a living digital portfolio, redefining visibility and legacy for women everywhere. Kristin's two-decade career in real estate and her board roles at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and YFCA shape her mission to elevate women's impact at scale. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 💰 📈 Women Investing in Women: Learn how Kristin built an entire community of women who became Marble's first investors, and why funding models for women-founded businesses must break traditional models. ✨ 🚀 Legacy Amplification Matters: Women have been "succeeding in silence" for too long. Now, a centralized and searchable place for all the digital assets and media coverage of accomplished women, ensuring their stories and expertise don't get lost in the social media noise or buried in forgotten press releases. 🤝 👩‍💻 A New Era of Protected Networking: How Marble allows users to follow and engage with women at the forefront of industries—from science to entrepreneurship to leadership—without relying on algorithms, intrusive sales pitches, or unsolicited DMs—making meaningful connections possible while respecting time and boundaries. 📚🤖 AI-Driven Knowledge Sharing: By curating podcasts, articles, books, and lectures recommended by featured leaders, Marble isn't just celebrating achievements—it's creating a rich resource for inspiration and education, in turn shaping future AI training to better represent women. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings970 More about Kristin at Marble Collective https://www.marblecollective.com/

Swati Vauthrin is the Co-Founder and CEO of Recess, the parenting platform redefining how families connect, learn, and shop through community and circular commerce. A seasoned engineering leader turned mission-driven founder, Swati spent over 15 years as an engineer building and scaling products at Instagram, BuzzFeed, ESPN, and Disney—most notably leading global growth for Instagram Reels. Her inspiration for Recess came directly from her own motherhood journey. As a mom of three, Swati experienced firsthand how isolating, overwhelming, and expensive parenting can be so she's building Recess to create the trusted, spam-free, AI-powered space she wished existed when she became a parent—where families can get real advice, find community, and shop high-quality secondhand gear safely and affordably. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 🤝🌐 Why Purpose-Built Communities Are the Future: Why it's time to move on from the toxicity of social media, and build community around shared interests. Recess was born from real-life parenting challenges—aiming to combine trusted advice, local connections, and sustainable recommerce in one supportive digital village. 🤖💪 Women in Tech: What's the secret of successful women in tech? For Swati it started with curiosity and a Commodore 64, and it led her to become one of the few women innovating in engineering—the "0.1% of the 0.1%" as she puts it. ❤️ 🛠️Empathy Drives Product Success: Women engineers bring empathy as a differentiating superpower to all things code, often outperforming male counterparts by understanding the "why," not just the "what," leading to products that genuinely help people and foster strong communities. 👩‍🍼 🚀 Motherhood and Entrepreneurship: Learn what motherhood teaches about leadership, time management, personal identity, and what real work-life integration looks like—and why no two journeys as a mom or a founder are exactly alike. 🦄✨ What Makes Recess Different: Built to be "a village", Recess focuses on community matched to your circumstances and interests, with advice, tips, and an innovative "re-commerce" feature that makes it easy to save money by passing along used products with a story, so every transaction is infused with warmth and meaning. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings969 More about Swati at RecessParenting.App https://recessparenting.app/

Marcia Dawood is an early-stage investor and author of Do Good While Doing Well, TEDx speaker and host of The Angel Next Door podcast, with a new book debuting next month called Unapologetic Wealth. Marcia serves as the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission's Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee. She is a venture partner with Mindshift Capital and the chair emeritus of the Angel Capital Association (ACA), a global professional society for angel investors. She is also an associate producer on the award-winning documentary Show Her the Money. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 💰 🌐 The Current Investment Landscape: Learn why raising capital has become tougher than ever, especially for women and underrepresented founders. After the capital boom of 2020-2021, liquidity dried up, uncertainty spiked, and exit timelines stretched—all making it harder for startups to survive, let alone thrive. 👩‍🔬 💡 The Female Founder Advantage: Did you know women return up to 72 cents more on every invested dollar compared to men? So, what will it take for female-founded companies to overcome all the funding barriers and extra scrutiny—even though the data's on our side? 🌱 🤝 Why Women Must Start Investing in Startups: High net worth women can change the game, but what does it take for them to shift from charity donations to funding their mission-driven sister entrepreneurs? Hint: Women need to get more comfortable talking about money, deals, and investments, and learn about the benefits of angel and venture investing. 📈 💸 Generational Wealth Transfer: Women will have more money than ever to invest. Learn about the risks of underinvestment, the need for education about wealth stewardship, and how to move from a scarcity to an abundance mindset. 🔥 🚀 Boldness Wins: Women founders often pitch conservatively, while many male counterparts swing for the fences with confidence. The message? Don't underplay your vision or undervalue your business—be bold, ask for what you need, and own your big goals, because you are worth investing in. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings968 More about Marcia at Marcia Dawood 📚 Resources for Action Unapologetic Wealth: Pre-order Marcia's new book The Angel Next Door Podcast: Listen in for real stories and advice on angel investing and how to get started. Show Her the Money: Keep an eye out for this inspiring documentary coming to streaming in March 2026

Jamie Pastrano, Rebecca Matchett and Brittany Moser are the co-founders of Symphony, a platform pairing AI-powered social coaching with intentional interest-based matching, in a safe, simple, and supportive space for the neurodivergent. Jamie, inspired to build the new app by her son's autism, joined with serial entrepreneur Rebecca, COO, with a track record of building successful fashion companies, including alice+olivia and TrioFit, and Brittany Moser, an autism specialist and digital learning expert. The Synchrony app launches this month. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 🌱 🧠 Build from Real Need: Synchrony was born out of lived experience and genuine gaps in resources for neurodivergent adults—reminding us that the best business ideas solve real, personal problems. 🤝 🤟 Community Over Competition: Unlike mainstream social or dating apps, Synchrony is thoughtfully designed to foster authentic connection—one-on-one, interest-based, and with the unique needs of its community at the center. 🚀 🤖 AI for Good: By leveraging AI-driven social coaching, the platform empowers users with tailored, in-the-moment support—breaking down communication barriers in ways traditional groups can't. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings967 More about Jamie, Brittany and Rebecca at Join Synchrony joinsynchrony.com

Erin Mills is a visionary serial entrepreneur, salon owner, and advocate for women's healing and empowerment, driven by a mission to create spaces where safety, growth, and authenticity thrive. From real estate to salon stylist, Erin built her salon business, Theory Salons, to challenge the male-dominated salon industry and its often-unsafe environments, before walking away from all but one of her locations to reinvent herself as a software entrepreneur with a new technology, Flamingo Salon Software, launching later this year. Her journey of reinvention also inspired her to create the Be Brave Community and a new podcast, I Think You Should Be Brave. 🔑Key Takeaways🔑 💼 🚀 Closing Chapters, Opening Doors: The power of reinvention, and how, after seven years as a multi-salon owner in the beauty industry, Erin Mills closed all but one of her locations—a process that forced real self-reflection about identity, ego, and the drive we attach to our businesses. Her story is a powerful reminder that "letting go" can feel like the ultimate failure but often brings new freedom and clarity. 🤝✨ Lessons in Leadership and Resilience: Learn about the psychological impact of shifting gears, and why our self-worth is not tied to the tangible money and success that comes from any one venture. Erin shares how even the best leader can't control every outcome—people leave, change happens, and that doesn't mean you failed. 🤖📈 A Tech-Driven Future: Learn about Erin's journey from service-based salon ownership to scalable software, and how she's building Flamingo Salon Software, a dynamic new platform designed for salons, spas, and service-based businesses, built on her real, lived experience in the industry. Beta testing is in full swing, and a launch is planned for Q3. 👩‍🔬❤️ Balancing Marriage and Entrepreneurship: Working with a spouse? Erin shares honest thoughts on balancing roles, staying in their lanes, and cultivating strong boundaries at home and work. 🔥🦄 It's Time to Be Brave: Erin shares how she built the Be Brave Community to help women entrepreneurs with the unique pressures of comparison, judgment, the need to constantly prove "you're enough," and why vulnerability gives everyone permission to show up authentically. 🎙️Subscribe to Wings and get the full Show Notes at https://bit.ly/Wings966 More about Erin at Theory Salons and Be Brave Community http://www.theorysalons.com https://bebravecommunity.com