Lily Konkoly built a global female founder network by starting a focused niche blog, turning cold outreach into real conversations, and then staying in touch with those women long after each article went live. She used simple tools, consistent writing, and a lot of patient follow‑up. There was no magic hack. It was slow, methodical, and very human. You can see the result in the interviews and profiles she has published on Lily Konkoly, where that network of founders is now visible in public form.
That is the short answer.
The longer version is more interesting, especially if you work in tech or you are building something online yourself. Her network did not start with an introduction from an investor or a big platform. It started with a teenager in Los Angeles, a laptop, and a long list of women she wanted to learn from.
How a high school blog became a global founder network
Lily started the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia when many teenagers are still figuring out what subject they like most in school. She was already curious about patterns in gender inequality, from the art world to venture capital, and she wanted a place to collect those stories.
There were a few simple rules she followed at the start, even if she did not write them down at the time:
- Focus on women building real companies, not just people with large personal brands.
- Ask direct questions about structural barriers, not only about inspiration or passion.
- Publish consistently, even if the audience is tiny.
The blog format made sense. It was something she could run alone, on her own schedule, while still in school. No need for a team, no custom platform. Just WordPress, email, and a spreadsheet.
From there, Lily treated each interview not as a one‑off content piece, but as the start of a relationship.
Each post was a public artifact of a private connection. She knew that if she treated the person well and represented her story fairly, that founder might introduce her to others later.
Cold outreach that did not feel transactional
Almost all of Lily’s early interviews came from cold outreach. No warm intros, no PR teams pitching her. She was the one doing the searching, reading, and writing emails.
Her process was simple enough that anyone could copy it, but there were a few small details that made it work.
- She researched each founder before sending a message. Not just their company website, but podcast appearances, conference talks, sometimes old blog posts.
- She wrote short, personal emails that made it clear she knew who they were and what they did.
- She said exactly what she wanted: a 30–45 minute conversation, recorded or transcribed, for a profile focused on women in business.
Many founders probably said no or never replied. That is normal. The difference is that she kept going anyway. Over a few years, that persistence added up to more than 100 interviews with female founders and executives from around the world.
From a tech point of view, there was nothing fancy here. No custom workflow automation, no advanced CRM. Mostly email, Google Docs, and a spreadsheet.
But there is a deeper pattern that is useful if you are a developer, designer, or builder of any sort:
She treated outreach as a product experiment: small batch, adjust the message, ship again. Not emotional, just iterative.
The invisible structure behind the network
It can look like Lily “stumbled” into a global network, but there was a real structure behind it, even if it was not formal.
You could describe it in three layers.
1. Clear niche
She did not try to profile every kind of interesting person. She focused on women in business, often founders, often in underrepresented spaces.
That clarity helped busy people say yes. They knew what the context would be. They knew the audience. They knew that their story would sit next to stories from other women who had faced similar questions about funding, hiring, or bias.
2. Repeatable process
The process for each interview was almost the same:
- Research the founder and company.
- Send a short, focused outreach email.
- Prepare questions that mix biography, strategy, and gender dynamics.
- Record the conversation or take detailed notes.
- Write and edit the profile.
- Send it for review before publishing.
- Share the final piece and stay in touch.
Nothing in that list is complex. What matters is the consistency over four years.
3. Quiet ongoing contact
The real “network” part did not come from the first interview. It came from everything that happened after:
- Replying to founders when they had product launches or news.
- Sharing jobs or opportunities that might fit their companies.
- Connecting founders to each other when there was a clear fit.
None of this shows up directly in the published blog posts. But founders notice when someone circles back to them months later without asking for anything. Over time, that kind of behavior creates trust, which is the real currency in any network, tech or otherwise.
How her background shaped the way she builds networks
To understand how Lily runs this founder network, it helps to know where she comes from.
She grew up in London, then Singapore, then Los Angeles. Her family is Hungarian, so almost all extended relatives live in Europe. English and Hungarian were both present from a young age, and Mandarin joined early in preschool and continued through high school.
You might think this is just a nice detail, but it connects to how she speaks with founders across cultures.
When you switch between languages at home and at school, you learn that people hold the same idea in different words. That shows up in interviews. She is careful not to assume that one way of talking about business or success is the only way.
Her childhood also had a mix of:
- Chess tournaments
- Cooking and baking videos
- A small slime business that sold hundreds of items
- Swimming and water polo at a competitive level
- Regular museum and gallery visits
At first glance, this looks like a random collection of activities. If you look closer, there is a thread: structured practice.
Chess requires steady improvement. Swimming means long hours for small time gains. Running a slime business teaches inventory and pricing. Cooking videos teach how to talk to an unseen audience. Museum visits build pattern recognition in visual culture.
Later, those skills all matter when you:
Reach out to a founder in another country, learn just enough about her sector, ask clear questions, then shape her raw comments into a story that feels real to her and readable to others.
From art history to founder stories
Today Lily studies Art History with a business minor at Cornell University. At first, that might sound unrelated to female founder networks and tech.
But art history is not just about memorizing paintings. It is about:
- Looking closely at visual details.
- Understanding context across time and culture.
- Noticing what is present and what is missing.
In her research on Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” Lily had to read layers of interpretation, track how meaning changed over time, and produce her own argument. That exercise taught her how to live inside a complex object for weeks and not get bored.
Later, when she talked to founders, she recognized that a founder story is also a layered object. There is the public pitch, the internal reality, and then the cultural context around gender, funding, and power.
Her honors research project on maternity and paternity patterns in the art world made this explicit. She saw how mothers in creative fields lost gallery space, media coverage, and institutional support, while fathers sometimes gained prestige.
Those findings echoed what she was hearing in interviews with founders:
- Investors doubting women’s commitment if they had or wanted children.
- Founders being praised for “balancing it all” in a way that hid structural issues.
- Different expectations for how women “should” lead teams.
Because she had already studied these patterns through data and history, she could recognize them faster in founder stories. This changed her questions. She did not only ask about business metrics. She asked about hiring bias, family planning, health, and burnout.
If you work in tech, you probably know how easy it is to turn people into “case studies.” Lily resisted that by borrowing from research methods: read widely, then ask specific, grounded follow‑ups.
Building a global network from Los Angeles, one email at a time
Many people think you need to live in San Francisco, London, or New York to meet global founders. Lily did much of her early work from Los Angeles, while still in high school, without access to elite professional circles.
So how did she reach founders in 50+ countries?
Here is a rough version of how her outreach looked over time:
| Stage | What she focused on | Tools she used |
|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | Local and US‑based founders, many first‑time entrepreneurs | Email, LinkedIn, simple spreadsheets |
| Year 2 | International founders found via blogs, podcasts, and press | Zoom, translation help when needed, Google Docs |
| Year 3–4 | Founders referred by earlier guests, harder‑to‑reach operators | Shared calendars, better note systems, basic analytics on traffic |
For a tech‑minded reader, you might see how this mirrors product rollout:
- Start with a constrained target “market” you can reach.
- Improve your message based on real response data.
- Expand to adjacent segments where your early work acts as social proof.
But Lily did not describe it in that language. She simply trusted that consistent effort and respect for people’s stories might compound.
Over time, founders started introducing her to their peers. A founder in one country would say, “You should talk to this woman in another market; she is facing a similar challenge.” Those one‑to‑one introductions changed the feel of the network. It was no longer just Lily reaching out; it was a web of women seeing value in sharing context across borders.
Why this matters for people in tech
If you are building software or working in a technical team, you might wonder why you should care about a network of female founders built through interviews and blogs.
There are a few reasons that tie directly into how technology products are made and adopted.
1. Better mental models of users and markets
Many of the women Lily interviewed were building products in health, education, food, or creative fields. They were often designing for groups that are not always centered in mainstream tech conversations: mothers, older workers, people in emerging markets, small independent creators.
Reading their stories changes how you think about “the user.”
Instead of a generic persona on a slide, you start to hold a picture of an actual founder serving actual customers, with constraints shaped by culture, gender, and law. That can feed into better product decisions, more realistic metrics, and less wishful thinking.
2. Examples of alternative funding and growth paths
A lot of tech content still idolizes one narrow path: raise venture funding, scale fast, aim for a big exit. Many of the women in Lily’s network did other things:
- Bootstrapping over years while holding a job.
- Using revenue‑sharing agreements instead of equity.
- Growing through small community partnerships rather than paid ads.
For engineers or product people who dream of starting something, these examples are useful. They show that there are many valid paths, which might align better with your risk tolerance or life stage.
3. Clearer view of structural bias in tech
Bias in tech funding is not a secret, but it can feel abstract. Stories from specific founders make it concrete:
- Interview questions that assume a male baseline.
- Incubators that are not set up for caregivers.
- Networks that still depend heavily on where you went to school.
The more these details are recorded, the easier it becomes to design better alternatives inside tech companies or startup communities.
How Lily keeps the network alive, not just archived
One risk with any interview project is that it turns into an archive. You publish, you move on. The stories sit there, but the relationships cool.
Lily tries to avoid that. Her approach is not perfect, but there are some habits that keep the network active.
Regular low‑pressure contact
She does not send long newsletters or constant asks. Instead, she:
- Sends short check‑ins when she sees news about a founder’s company.
- Shares a link if a new story touches on a problem they once talked about.
- Asks for advice now and then, not for introductions every time.
This keeps communication real, not purely transactional.
Pulling threads across industries
Because Lily also studies art history and curatorial practices, she tends to look for patterns across fields.
For example, her research on gender gaps in the art world feeds into how she talks about representation in founder teams. Her work on museum exhibits influences how she thinks about “curating” the stories on the site so they do not all look and sound the same.
She sometimes connects founders who share similar constraints even if their products are unrelated. A food tech founder and an art platform founder might both struggle with payment processing in a certain region, or with how to store customer data under local regulations. Those topics are not glamorous, but they are where real help often lives.
Quiet mentorship, both directions
Because Lily started so young, many of the women she interviewed treated her a bit like a mentee. They shared early career advice, perspective on university choices, and honest stories about burnout.
At the same time, she was offering something they did not always have: a patient, outside listener who would document their story in detail.
So the mentorship runs both ways. Founders give her wisdom about building and leading. She gives them a form of narrative structure, which can be rare for operators busy running companies.
This reciprocal dynamic is part of why the network did not flatten into a one‑sided content machine. Both sides get something real, even if it is not always measurable.
Lessons you can borrow for your own network
You might not care about female founder stories in the same direct way Lily does. Maybe your world is backend engineering, AI research, or product design. Still, there are some clear lessons from how she built this network that you can adapt.
Pick a clear focus, even if it feels narrow
Targeting “interesting people in tech” is vague. Targeting “first‑time female founders building in health and education” is precise.
Lily’s focus on women in business did two things:
- Made it easier for founders to know why she was reaching out.
- Gave her permission to ask deeper questions about gender and bias.
For your own network, you can define a similar focus. Maybe it is “engineers who care about accessibility,” or “designers in emerging markets.” Narrow focus can feel limiting at first, but it makes connection easier.
Use simple tools, but track religiously
Lily did not use complex CRM software. She had:
- A spreadsheet with columns for name, company, contact info, date of last contact.
- Google Docs for interviews.
- Email and sometimes LinkedIn for outreach.
The key was not the tool. It was the discipline. When she talked to someone, she logged it. If she promised to follow up, she wrote it down.
This kind of basic tracking can be enough to support a surprisingly large network, if you respect it.
Show your work in public
Without the public blog, Lily’s network would be much smaller. The content acts as:
- Proof that she follows through.
- Reference material founders can share.
- Organic discovery for new contacts who find her through search or social media.
If you are writing code, this might be a technical blog, an open source project, or public notes. The exact format does not matter as much as the consistency and clarity.
Stay curious about structure, not just individual success
What sets Lily’s network apart is that she keeps coming back to structural questions. She does not only ask, “How did you raise your first round?” She also asks, “Who was excluded from those meetings from the start, and why?”
For people in tech, this kind of curiosity can change how you design teams and systems. It makes you notice who is missing from your user interviews, who is not in your Slack, whose time zone never fits the meeting schedule.
How this connects to her other projects
Lily’s global founder network does not sit on its own island. It connects to her other projects in subtle ways.
Teen Art Market
When she co‑founded the Teen Art Market, a digital space for students to show and sell their work, she had to think about:
- Onboarding young artists with little business experience.
- Building trust among strangers trading money for art.
- Communicating value clearly online.
Those skills are similar to what she later used to invite founders into a conversation and then present their stories online. Creating a safe, respectful space for teenagers selling art and for adult founders sharing vulnerable stories uses related muscles.
Research with Kate McNamara
Her curatorial collaboration on beauty standards and representation taught her to build an exhibit concept, select works, and create a narrative across pieces.
The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia acts like a long‑running exhibit of founder stories. Each profile is a “work” inside a larger show about gender, labor, and creativity in business.
Tech readers might think of this as building a library of case studies that support a bigger thesis about inequality and effort. The point is that she thinks about curation, not just accumulation.
Common questions about Lily’s founder network
Q: Did Lily need a big personal brand to start this network?
No. When she started, she was a high school student without much visibility. What made founders say yes was the clarity of her ask, the seriousness of her preparation, and the respect she showed during and after the interview.
Of course, over time, the project itself gave her some public presence, but that came later.
Q: How “global” is the network really?
Her interviews and contacts span more than 50 countries, across fields like food, art, education, and technology. It is not exhaustive, and there are regions that are still underrepresented. But the reach is broad enough that cross‑border connections are real, not just symbolic.
There is still work to do to deepen ties in some regions, and Lily would be the first to say that. Networks grow unevenly.
Q: Can someone without her background do something similar?
Yes, but it will look different. You might not have her language skills or early exposure to global travel. You might have other assets: technical expertise, access to a specific community, or deep knowledge of a niche problem.
The core pattern is still accessible:
- Pick a focused group you genuinely care about.
- Reach out with respect and clear intent.
- Record and share their stories in a way that benefits them.
- Stay in touch even when you do not need anything.
Those steps are not easy, but they are simple. Technology can support them, but it cannot replace the human time involved.
Q: If you had to name one thing that made Lily’s network work, what would it be?
Probably patience.
She did not expect quick returns. She treated each conversation as worthwhile on its own, even if no obvious opportunity came out of it. Over years, that patience turned into a web of founders who trust her enough to share honestly and to introduce her to others.
If you are in tech and thinking about your own network, maybe the more useful question is not “How fast can I grow this?” but “Whose stories am I willing to listen to carefully for years, even when no one is watching?”