Launch Story

Every entrepreneur has their own unique founding story.

Here's ours:

Setting the scene: It's a chilly SF morning in January 2013, we're both working 9 to 5 (er, more like 9 to 9) at Square -- Sarah as CFO, Kelly leading Global Events, and over the course of a random water cooler run-in, we dream up an idea to host a handful of our customers in celebration of International Women's Day that March.

So how did it go? Over strong coffee and under bad fluorescent office lighting, we gathered two dozen Bay Area based business owners together for an evening of community and education. Hearing the entrepreneurial stories, challenges and passions of our first event attendees sparked something in us and we knew we couldn't stop at just one. We knew we'd tapped into something special when every single one of those entrepreneurs followed up post event to ask: Is this going to be a monthly meetup?!

From that year on, we saw this fledgling event series of ours grow to unprecedented heights. We realized that these gatherings were actually an opportunity to affect change throughout the globe for an infinite number of women who had decided that entrepreneurship was their chosen journey.

Well, what happened next? In 2019, we decided to take this movement we'd built and strike out on our own, just as so many entrepreneurs we'd met had done before us, giving us the confidence to do the same. We put our stake in the ground as a 501c3 non-profit organization with a mission to inspire, empower and fund women and non-binary entrepreneurs globally.

We’ve hosted events in San Francisco, New York, Belfast, Toronto, Sydney, Denver, Dublin, St. Louis, Stockholm, London and beyond. We've given more than half a million dollars in grants to some seriously badass entrepreneurs and we've provided online business resources and assistance to 120,000 more. We cannot wait to see where the LWL journey will take us next.  

While our day jobs keep us busy, there's no other side hustle we’d rather spend our time on and we hope you’ll be inspired to come join the movement alongside us.

With Gratitude,

Kelly & Sarah