{"id":729771,"date":"2026-08-06T22:10:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-06T22:10:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/729771\/"},"modified":"2026-08-06T22:10:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-06T22:10:14","slug":"everything-i-learned-at-the-girlboss-convention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/729771\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything I Learned at the Girlboss Convention"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new rules of capital<\/p>\n

Three forces are reshaping the founder landscape: the rise of AI, the evolution of the creator economy, and a transformation in how consumer companies are scaled and distributed.<\/p>\n

\u201cWomen should absolutely be using these [AI] tools and thinking about how they fit into their professional lives every day,\u201d Duggal tells me over an iced coffee after field day. It\u2019s a big topic of conversation throughout the retreat, having sat in myself at the roundtable lunch hosted by Vita Mallela, founder of Flock AI, a generative AI platform helping brands rethink the way they create product imagery.<\/p>\n

Discourse around the \u201cgirlbossification of AI\u201d has become pointed, as figures including Reese Witherspoon encourage women to embrace AI tools, and Sheryl Sandberg \u2014 whose \u201clean in\u201d philosophy became synonymous with the original girlboss era \u2014 announces that her organization is now focusing on closing the AI gender gap. Critics are concerned whether a technology designed to increase efficiency could inadvertently create another era of individual pressure, where women are once again encouraged to solve structural challenges through personal productivity.<\/p>\n

For Duggal, however, the opportunity is clear: for founders who have traditionally faced barriers to capital, AI offers the possibility of building faster with fewer resources. \u201cYou don\u2019t need as much capital anymore,\u201d she says. \u201cI think it\u2019s going to unlock an entirely new generation of creative, talented founders.\u201d At the end of the panels, Duggal announced the launch of her newest business venture, Voices, a speakers bureau built exclusively for female founders and operators. \u201cI built the Voices website using Claude [AI]. We gave it to a designer afterwards to make it look beautiful, but I built the first version in about two hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

That shift has particular implications for female founders, many of whom have historically built businesses in consumer categories that were overlooked by traditional venture capital. Beauty, fashion, wellness and lifestyle companies were often dismissed as less scalable, despite their ability to create deep consumer loyalty and generate significant revenue.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpeaking specifically about consumer businesses, it\u2019s incredibly difficult to build a brand today purely by bootstrapping,\u201d says Gregg Renfrew<\/a>, founder and CEO of clean beauty brand Counter (formerly known as\u00a0Beautycounter), who delivered the summit\u2019s keynote panel on her experience buying back the company she founded after it entered foreclosure following its $1 billion acquisition by The Carlyle Group. \u201cThe stakes are high, competition is fierce, and consumers expect everything. They want incredible content, strong social channels, an outstanding customer experience, sustainable packaging, and high-performing products \u2014 they want all of it, and they want it immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

Gregg Renfrew delivered the summit\u2019s keynote panel.<\/p>\n

Photo: Courtesy of Camp FFF<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new rules of capital Three forces are reshaping the founder landscape: the rise of AI, the evolution…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":729772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[84,4203,1172,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-729771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-business","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-latest","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=729771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/729771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/729772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=729771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=729771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=729771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}