Lily Konkoly built a global female founder hub by doing one very specific thing over and over again: she talked to women, on record, in detail, and then published their stories online where anyone in the world could read them. Through her blog, Lily Konkoly turned hundreds of one-to-one conversations into a searchable, living library for women who are building companies, often in isolation, in different corners of the world.
That is the short version.
The longer version includes late nights in Los Angeles, cold emails that went unanswered, broken Zoom links, and a lot of spreadsheets. It also includes a teenager who was still doing homework and swim practice while interviewing founders in three time zones.
So, how does someone with an art history background, not a CS degree, end up running something that looks very much like a global knowledge product for female founders?
From personal curiosity to a public knowledge hub
The whole thing did not start as a “hub” at all. It started with curiosity and a gap.
Lily was a high school student at an all girls school in Los Angeles, already thinking a lot about gender, power, and who gets to be visible. She saw the same headlines about the same handful of women in tech and business. The usual list. Impressive, but also a bit predictable.
She wanted to know about everyone else.
Not just unicorn founders, but:
- Chefs who opened small, resilient restaurants in countries with weak support systems
- Designers who ran tiny but profitable ecommerce brands
- Women building SaaS tools for very narrow problems
- Local service businesses that quietly used tech to grow
The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia started as a way to answer a basic question: what does female entrepreneurship look like in real life, when you zoom in?
What makes this relevant for people who think a lot about technology is that she treated these stories like structured data. Not in a cold way, but in a repeatable way. Interview, extract insight, publish, categorize, cross reference.
Over four years, she turned that process into something that behaves much more like an open knowledge project than a personal blog.
Why an art history student cared so much about founders
On paper, Lily is an art history student at Cornell University, not a startup founder. That might look like a mismatch if you only see “business” as pitch decks and cap tables.
But the way she approaches founders is very close to how she approaches paintings.
In her research work on Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” she spent weeks unpacking layers of context, composition, and power. Who is centered? Who is looking at whom? Who is invisible, yet controls the scene?
She began to see something similar in the business world.
Women founders were present, but often positioned at the edge of the frame. Visible enough for a diversity panel, not always visible enough to be treated as default leaders.
Art history trained her to:
- Notice who is missing from the “official” story
- Ask whose version of success gets repeated
- Pay attention to small signals and background details
Those skills transferred well into long, careful interviews with female founders. She did not just ask, “How did you raise funding?” She asked, “What happened to your career after you had your first child?” or “Who gave you your first real chance, and why?”
Her honors research on maternity and paternity gaps in the art world sharpened this lens further. She documented how artists who were mothers often lost gallery space and attention, while male artists who became fathers were treated as more serious or more stable.
You can see that concern show up again in the kinds of questions she asks founders: what happens to your company if you step back for care work? Who assumes you will do that work by default?
From a blog to a global hub: what actually changed
It is easy to say “global hub” and imagine a giant Slack group or some venture-backed platform. That is not what Lily built.
Her hub is simpler, and that is what makes it workable for a single person.
At its core, the hub is:
- A structured archive of founder interviews and stories
- A loose but real community orbiting those stories
- A growing index of patterns that repeat across geography and industry
What turned the blog into a hub was not a single feature launch. It was several small shifts over time.
1. She made interviews systematic, not random
In the early days, she talked to whoever would say yes. Friends of friends. Local founders. Women she could meet in Los Angeles.
Over time, she started to treat outreach almost like user research.
She tracked for each interview:
| Attribute | Examples she tracked |
|---|---|
| Industry | Food, SaaS, retail, creative services, health, education |
| Stage | Idea, early revenue, growth, exit |
| Location | Country, city, local vs global markets |
| Funding | Bootstrapped, angel, VC, grants, family-funded |
| Life context | Parenting, caregiving, first-generation, career switcher |
This gave her a very simple but powerful tool: she could see where her coverage was weak.
If she had a lot of US tech founders and very few African or South Asian founders, she adjusted outreach. If many stories came from consumer brands and very few from B2B tools, she changed targets.
Is this data science? No. But it is disciplined enough to avoid the trap of only telling stories from one social circle.
2. She treated geography as a feature, not a constraint
Lily grew up between continents: born in London, time in Singapore, then sixteen years in Los Angeles, with Hungarian family and summers in Europe. She is fluent in Hungarian, conversant in Mandarin, and comfortable switching contexts.
That background made “global” feel normal, not special.
For many founders, crossing borders is a risk. For Lily, crossing borders was family routine, so it felt natural to ask: why not learn from a founder in another country who is wrestling with the same problem?
Her previous project, the Teen Art Market, had already forced her to think globally. To fill that site with diverse stories, she interviewed more than 200 female chefs across 50 countries. She did it the slow way: cold emailing, in-person meetings when she traveled, messages that sometimes never got a reply.
When she turned her attention to female founders, she reused the same muscle:
- Cold emails that referenced a specific thing the founder built or shipped
- Flexible call times to match odd time zones
- Short, clear explanations of why the interview mattered and who would read it
The result was that a teenager in Los Angeles was having detailed business conversations with women in cities she had not yet visited. Over time, some of those founders began to read each other’s stories and reach out through Lily, even if informally.
That is where the “hub” feeling started: stories as connectors.
3. She used tech in a quiet, practical way
There is no fancy proprietary platform behind her work. What she uses is closer to a stack any student could set up.
But the way she uses it is intentional:
- Online publishing tools to make interviews searchable and linkable
- Spreadsheets or simple databases to track guest info and patterns
- Basic analytics to see which stories get read, and by whom
- Video tools for interviews with automatic transcripts to reduce manual work
From a tech-focused reader’s point of view, it might seem uneventful. Yet there is a lesson there: you do not need a new platform when basic tools, used deliberately, already increase access.
Her background with filming Chinese practice tests and cooking videos for YouTube as a kid helped. Recording, editing, and publishing content was already normal in her home. That familiarity reduced friction later, when she needed to record and publish founder stories consistently.
The hidden labor behind “founder-friendly” content
It is tempting to imagine Lily just emailing someone, hitting record, and publishing. In practice, the work is a lot more layered, and not all of it is visible.
Here is what sits behind each “simple” founder profile.
Finding the right people
She is not chasing only the most visible names. She wants range.
That means:
- Digging into local news in different countries
- Asking previous guests, “Who else should I talk to?”
- Watching for people who work at the edge of tech, not just pure software founders
The female chefs project helped here. She learned quickly that the best stories rarely sit on the first page of search results. You often find them in local blogs, niche podcasts, or small social media accounts.
Building trust quickly
Many women are careful when talking publicly about money, bias, or failures. Often for good reason.
Lily learned to:
- Share her own background first, so people know who is listening
- Explain what will be public and what stays off the record
- Offer to review sensitive quotes with the founder before publishing
This might slow content production a bit, but it increases honesty. For her goals, that tradeoff makes sense.
The hub is not just about visibility. It is about accuracy. If founders cannot say what actually happened, then readers are just consuming a polished myth.
Editing for clarity, not for drama
Because Lily studies art and history, she is used to close reading. She brings that to editing.
She trims jargon. She cuts long digressions that do not serve the main idea. She keeps the founder’s voice natural, even if it means leaving in small hesitations or plain language instead of big slogans.
From a tech ecosystem standpoint, this matters. Many younger readers are tired of grand narratives about “changing the world.” They want to know:
- How long it took to get the first 10 users
- What tools the founder actually uses each day
- When they almost gave up, and what they changed instead
Her interviews tend to include those details, not just the highlight reel.
Patterns she saw across hundreds of women
After four years of watching founders talk about their work, some themes repeat. They are not universal, and there are exceptions, but they show up often enough to notice.
For readers who build products or work with startups, these patterns are not just interesting. They are signals about where support is missing.
1. Visibility comes late, responsibility comes early
Many women are already doing “founder-level” work before they get the title founder or CEO.
They are:
- Running operations quietly in a family business
- Acting as de facto product managers inside a company without recognition
- Managing unpaid community groups that function like small organizations
Formal recognition often happens after they have already made the thing work. Not before.
From a tech point of view, that means we often underestimate where future founders are hiding. They are not always in accelerator programs or on demo stages. Sometimes they are the person who “just makes everything run” in a local restaurant or a community-led project.
2. Funding stories are heavily filtered
The gap between what founders say on stage and what they say privately is wide.
On stage, you might hear:
- The size of the round
- The marquee investors
- The quick version of the pitch narrative
In Lily’s longer interviews, women talk more about:
- Being asked repeatedly about family plans during investor meetings
- Lower valuations compared to male peers with similar traction
- Self-funding for years before anyone would take a call
Many founders also talk about using technology as a way to reduce risk. They stay lean. They adopt low-code tools, no-code platforms, and basic automation to avoid hiring before revenue. This is where the tech angle becomes very clear: software is not just a product category. It is often the reason some of these businesses survive early years without outside money.
3. Support networks are uneven, but replicable
When Lily asks, “Who helped you the most?” three types of support come up often:
| Type of support | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|
| Informal mentors | Experienced founders who answer questions by text, share templates, sanity-check decisions |
| Peer groups | Small circles of women at similar stages sharing revenue numbers, failures, and personal struggles |
| Technical allies | Friends or partners who help with infrastructure, product, or analytics, even if they are not co-founders |
None of these require a huge platform. They require introductions and a reason to talk.
By publishing many founder stories in one place, Lily unintentionally created material for future peer groups. Someone in Mexico can recognize a similar struggle in a founder from Hungary and then reach out. The hub acts like a quiet discovery layer.
From teen experiments to intentional community design
It would be easy to say Lily “just” runs a blog, but that ignores her earlier projects and how they feed into the hub.
Hungarian Kids Art Class and Teen Art Market
Before she focused on founders, Lily created and ran an art class for Hungarian kids in Los Angeles. She also co-founded an online Teen Art Market, which functioned like a digital gallery for student art.
These projects taught her three practical lessons:
- People are much more likely to show up when there is a clear, small ask
- Selling creative work is emotionally heavy, not just a pricing exercise
- Simple websites can still change who gets to be seen and paid
Those lessons transfer almost directly to female founders.
The emotional weight is similar. Many women Lily interviews talk about attaching their self-worth to company metrics. Many say they did not want to be “too visible” until everything was perfect, which kept them in the background longer.
By running an online space for teen artists first, Lily saw how exposure and sales could reshape someone’s confidence. The same thing happens when a founder in a small city sees her story next to founders from global hubs. It changes what feels allowed.
Competitive swimming and water polo as invisible training
Lily spent about ten years as a competitive swimmer, then three years in water polo. That might feel unrelated to female founders at first glance.
But think about the daily pattern:
- Early mornings or late evenings dedicated to training
- Repeating similar drills for tiny improvements
- Spending hours at meets waiting for a few short races
The mental framework is close to building an archive or a product.
You show up. You do a small piece. You do not see huge change in a week, but in a year the volume is obvious.
Her time training in the ocean during COVID, when pools were closed, also speaks to something founders often share: the choice to keep going in worse conditions than before. It is uncomfortable, less controlled, but it keeps the motion going.
That same steadiness shows in the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia schedule: four hours a week, week after week, for years.
Many projects fail not because they are a bad idea, but because nobody is willing to do the small, boring parts repeatedly. Lily’s background as an athlete made the repetition feel normal rather than discouraging.
Why this matters for people in tech
If you are deep in technology, you might ask: why should I care about a humanities student interviewing founders?
A few reasons are practical, not just ethical.
1. Better founder diversity is not just a slogan
Most tech ecosystems still recycle similar types of founders. Same schools, same cities, same networks. That narrows the range of problems tackled and users served.
A global, narrative hub of female founders:
- Makes it easier to find people working on different markets or use cases
- Surfaces problems that traditional pipelines ignore
- Offers VCs, angels, and operators a source of leads they do not already know
You can argue that serious investors should build their own pipelines. They should. But many still rely on warm introductions. Hubs like Lily’s give them another layer of discovery if they are willing to look.
2. Stories reveal real user needs before the market catches up
In her interviews, founders often describe workflows and hacks they built to survive.
Those hacks can signal product opportunities:
- A chef using spreadsheets and messaging apps to manage supply chains could use a better inventory tool
- A small ecommerce founder hacking together multiple platforms might need an integrated back office product
- A coach delivering programs in multiple languages using manual processes might need localization tools
If you build software, these stories are early indicators of unmet needs. They are unstructured data, but they are rich.
3. Humanities skills are not opposed to tech
Lily’s path contradicts a common belief that “technical” and “humanities” work sit far apart.
Her art history work on “Las Meninas” is, in a way, applied pattern recognition:
- Who holds power?
- Who is seen vs unseen?
- What symbols repeat across contexts?
Those questions are also core to building fair products. Ranking algorithms, recommendation engines, and content feeds all have to decide who is visible. Founders who understand history and representation may design differently.
Her research on gendered gaps in the art world also helps her read startup culture. It is not a perfect one-to-one match, but she can spot similar dynamics: praise for “founder dads,” quiet penalties for “founder moms,” and biased assumptions about commitment.
How she keeps the hub human while it scales
As her archive grows, there is always a risk: scale can flatten nuance. Everything starts to sound the same.
Lily uses a few simple tactics to avoid that.
She centers specific moments, not generic advice
Instead of asking, “What advice do you have for young founders?” she often asks:
- “Tell me about a week when you thought you might shut the company down.”
- “What was the first version of your product or service? How did it look, exactly?”
- “What is one decision you would repeat, even if it looked like a failure from the outside?”
These questions pull out scenes, not slogans. Scenes travel better. A reader in another country can adapt the insight to their own context.
She accepts that some gaps remain
No single person can represent every region, every industry, every identity. She is aware of that.
Instead of pretending her hub is comprehensive, she treats it as one node in a larger network of resources. She sometimes points readers to other projects or founders if her archive does not yet cover a certain theme.
That honesty matters for credibility. It also leaves room for others to build adjacent hubs, perhaps focused on specific regions or sectors.
What others can learn from Lily’s approach
You might not want to build a global founder hub. Maybe your interest is in open source, climate tech, or developer tools. Still, there are patterns in Lily’s work that translate.
Here are a few that stand out.
1. Start with curiosity, not branding
She did not write a mission statement first. She started asking questions that bothered her and publishing the answers.
If you want to build something similar:
- Pick a group whose stories feel under-documented
- Decide on 5 to 10 questions you genuinely care about
- Commit to documenting one story at a time for a fixed period, say a year
After a year, look at the patterns. Then you can describe what you built. Not before.
2. Use simple tools very well
Lily shows that a student with basic tech skills can produce a globally relevant resource. You do not need custom apps on day one.
If you work in tech, this is a useful check: are you skipping projects because they do not feel fancy enough, even though simpler versions could help real people now?
3. Combine data with narrative
Her background with structured research means she tracks enough data to see gaps. At the same time, she keeps the interviews personal and grounded.
If you focus only on data, you risk abstraction. If you focus only on story, you miss patterns.
Her balance is not perfect, but it is practical. A basic table of industries plus a deep human story already beats a shallow dashboard with no context.
Questions people often ask about Lily’s work
Q: Is the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia a business or just a passion project?
Right now, it is closer to a mission-driven project than a highly monetized business. She treats it as a serious commitment, but not everything she does is driven by revenue. She prefers to keep editorial independence, which means saying no to some obvious monetization options that would distort which founders get covered.
Q: How does she manage time between Cornell work, research, and the hub?
Her schedule is full. She treats the hub like an ongoing course: a set number of hours per week, similar to how she treated swim practice. Some weeks are heavier than others, especially around exams or research deadlines, so she batches interviews and edits content ahead of crunch periods.
Q: Does she plan to build a dedicated tech platform for the hub?
She is interested in better tools for discovery and connection, but careful about avoiding tech for its own sake. If a new platform would genuinely help founders find each other or filter stories by need, she may explore it. If it only adds complexity without real value, she is more likely to stick with simple, open tools that readers already know.
Q: What is one thing she would like people in tech to do differently after reading these founder stories?
From what she has shared, one clear wish is that people with technical and financial power listen earlier and more quietly. Instead of waiting for a polished pitch, look for founders who are already solving real problems in scrappy ways. Read their full stories, not just their headline metrics. Then ask a simple question: “What would make your work easier next month?”