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Rebecca Minkoff and Alison Wyatt’s Fight to Power Women Founders in a Tougher Era

The co-founders of Female Founders Collective explain how they’re building a lasting support system for women-owned businesses.

Women founded nearly half of all new businesses in 2024, up from just 29 percent in 2019—a 69 percent jump that marks a five-year high, according to payroll platform Gusto. Over the past seven years, the Female Founders Collective has been working to meet this moment, with a mission to support, develop and elevate women-owned companies at every stage. Co-founded by fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff and Alison Wyatt, former Girlboss president and Goop’s chief revenue officer, the collective was built to offer what many women entrepreneurs say they lack: real community, practical education and access to capital.

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Part-membership network and part-impact organization, the collective connects female founders to each other while also offering more structured support through two key initiatives: the 10th House, an expert-led advisory and education platform, and the North, a foundation that provides cash grants alongside resources, tools and programming to help members grow and scale their businesses. Today, the FFC counts roughly 25,000 members, nearly half of whom are women of color.

Last week, Minkoff and Wyatt brought that community together at Industry City in Brooklyn for their annual Female Founders Day summit. This year’s theme, “Metamorphosis,” focused on how female founders move through three stages—Build, Become and Breakthrough—as they grow their companies and their leadership. More than 500 women entrepreneurs, operators and investors spent the day in sessions on funding, leadership and sustainable growth.

Observer spoke with Wyatt and Minkoff about their paths as founders, the challenges women entrepreneurs face today, how the FFC has evolved, and what it will take to get more women-led businesses past the million-dollar mark.

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you walk me through your journeys as founders and how those experiences have shaped how you build businesses today?

Wyatt: I grew up in the media world, working for Elle and InStyle magazines. When I went to Elle after InStyle, it was on the digital side—it’s like the age of A.I. for us now, where “digital” was this new thing and nobody knew quite what to do with it—so they gave it to me, this 24-year-old girl, to figure out how to monetize it. It ended up doing so well that it became a major revenue driver for the magazine. I kept getting elevated, which was exciting, but then we reached a point where we had no more inventory to sell, so I started building a network.

Long story short: I ended up at........

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