On October 7-8, 2025, Female Founder Collective launched The Cabinette's inaugural Ascent Summit at The Proper in Santa Monica, bringing together over 50 founders, operators, and investors for two transformative days of strategy, storytelling, and real talk about scale.
The Cabinette is a six-month accelerator exclusively for high-growth founders doing $5M+ in annual revenue, who've proven their concept and now need to know how to scale their teams, navigate exits, and build lasting personal wealth. Inside this accelerator, we explore the gap between early success and $50M, acquisition, or liquidity. Most importantly, The Cabinette delivers what most communities don't: ruthless prioritization, tactical coaching through sticky inflection points, and a network of people who deeply get where you are and are ready to help you get where you're going. In other words, it's your catalyst.
The Ascent Summit is the flagship immersive experience within The Cabinette, where strategy meets spotlight and founders stop playing small. Over two days, we rolled up our sleeves and got into the weeds. Expert-led sessions and stage-specific breakouts unpacked operations, team management, and vision execution. Founders troubleshot real bottlenecks, pressure-tested their next hires, and left with clarity on how to scale with intention.
Then we shifted gears to amplify visibility—through personal branding playbooks, storytelling workshops, and tactical sessions on turning founder presence into a growth lever. We closed with an intimate salon dinner featuring VCs, M&A experts, and exited founders guiding no-BS conversations on preparing for acquisition, defining your personal exit number, and stepping fully into your financial power.
The Summit kicked off on October 7th with an intimate salon dinner at The Proper's Olea Garden Terrace. Over cocktails and a carefully curated menu featuring Lifeway Foods' signature kefir and farmer cheese, founders gathered for two powerful conversations. Devi Brown, wellness educator and corporate advisor, led the first discussion on high-performance leadership. She unpacked why well-being is central to scaling and how grief literacy, rest, and nervous system awareness strengthen leaders rather than weaken them. Then Misbah Uraizee, Co-Founder of Nectar Social, dove into AI, virality, and the future of brand-customer relationships, revealing how "manufacturing virality" is less about luck and more about systematized engagement. Both sessions featured table discussions where founders workshopped real challenges with their peers.
Day two brought the full Summit experience, with Female Founder Collective co-founders Ali Wyatt and Rebecca Minkoff kicking us off with a warm welcome.
Megan Dolce opened with a session on putting the future of your brand—and yourself as a leader—into perspective. As the Co-Founder and Head Coach of RIPE, she opened with a rallying cry: "Walk into a room like you own the room, but it all starts here" (pointing to herself). She emphasized studying your wins instead of your failures, embracing your what-ifs, and being bold—because playing small will hurt your business, hurt your team, and make building what you want ten times harder and longer.
Robyn Ward, CEO of FounderForward, followed with an interactive workshop on the "inside game of scaling," featuring a live case study with Sarah Jahnke of Homecourt. Her message was clear: "If you're not hiring that executive team fast enough, it's not that the market's hard. It's usually perfectionism, control issues, imposter syndrome, or your underlying relationship with money." Founders mapped their saboteurs—the hyperachiever, the avoider, the perfectionist—and learned that this internal work isn't extra, it's foundational.
After, Rebecca Minkoff led a panel, presented by Lifeway Foods, unpacking the personal and professional shifts that come with scaling, featuring Siffat Haider (Arrae), Julie Smolyansky (Lifeway Foods), and Jenefer Palmer (OSEA). They dove into the tactical elements of what it takes to create the right support system, including internal advisors, and external champions as both your life and business evolve.
Julie Smolyansky (Lifeway Foods) shared taking over her father’s company at 27, immediately facing doubt: “His best friend said five feet away from me, there’s no way a 27 year old girl could run this company. That’s it. It’s over. Sell your stock.” She worked sometimes 22 hours a day for years before learning the importance of self-care, now training for her 14th marathon as a metaphor for the multi-decade journey. Jenefer Palmer (OSEA), who started meditating at 20, emphasized the importance of delegation: “It’s all about letting go. We let go of our children. We let go of different aspects of our job because we have to always move forward.” She stressed hiring for kindness, owning your formulations, and trusting instincts over credentials. Siffat Haider (Arrae) discussed protecting company culture when hiring and only accepting perfect-fit candidates: “When have we ever hired a seven out of 10? Like we are a 10 out of 10 because our team is a hell yes every single time.” She emphasized taking mastery over each channel before expanding, waiting five and a half years before their nationwide Target launch.
The panel stressed trusting your gut when hiring and understanding that the race is with yourself, not competitors.
Founders then broke for a working lunch featuring roundtable discussions on navigating personal and professional relationships. In the afternoon, founders joined self-selected breakout sessions designed to tackle stage-specific challenges.
In the Basecamp room, Keleigh Thomas Morgan (Co-President of Sunshine Sachs Morgan & Lylis) led "Strategic Partnerships as a Growth Lever," digging into how partnerships and collaborations with brands, retailers, and cultural leaders can unlock awareness, revenue, and staying power. Founders learned how to spot opportunities, structure deals that actually work, and execute collaborations that amplify reach and position companies for long-term success. "A lot of times people think partnerships like I'm just going to do this one big thing. It's going to be amazing, it's going to change my whole business and I'm going to make tons of money and everyone's going to care about it, [but] it's a lot harder than that."
Over in the Horizon room, Daina Trout (Co-Founder and former CEO of Health-Ade Kombucha) facilitated "Succession & Exit Planning" and shared the raw truth about her journey from planning to sell in 2018 to actually exiting to private equity in 2021 (and again in 2025). She noted that "Investors usually get paid first and will push you to roll over more than you wanted to," and "Once they've already gone through that process, they want you... Just know that once they're in a deal they don't want to pull out of the deal, it doesn't make them look good." For her, strategic moves that mattered included: cutting 40% of staff to become profitable, protecting proprietary IP during due diligence, and navigating the "pregnant with Coke" perception that affected every buyer conversation.
In the Vista Lounge, the J.P. Morgan Wealth Management team, Allison Fay Novak (Executive Director, Head of Liquidity Specialists), Sarah Daya (Executive Director, Central Lead, Wealth Planning and Advice), and Alpa Patel Vitale (Managing Director, West Coast Lead, Wealth Planning and Advice), hosted “Wealth Planning for Founders.”
"Financial literacy education is important for all women, and especially for business owners. With the right knowledge and resources, female business leaders can plan strategically and have the tools to confidently help take their business to the next level. It’s equally important to foster a supportive community among women in business, where they can collaborate and share their experiences,” says Alpa Patel Vitale, West Division Lead for Wealth Planning and Advice at J.P. Morgan Wealth Management.
J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Member FINRA/SIPC
Back in the main ballroom, Ebony Mackey, social media strategist and virality expert, brought founders together for "Personal Branding Playbook," a workshop tackling one of the most powerful (and underutilized) growth levers available: visibility. When used intentionally, personal branding becomes more than just presence—it's a sales driver, a loyalty builder, and the foundation for building a cult following. Ebony walked founders through turning personal branding into a sales driver and loyalty builder, mapping what to own yourself versus what to hire out, and showing up authentically at scale.
The Summit closed with a powerful panel on "Money, Power, Exit" featuring Alison Wyatt, Michelle Wahler (Beyond Yoga), Ellen Chen (Mendocino Farms), and Dulari Amin (Sidelines VC). This conversation brought together founders and investors to explore what it really takes to get exit-ready, unpacking everything from identifying the signals that it's time to sell to defining your personal "exit number."
Michelle Wahler (Beyond Yoga) shared the disorienting reality of staying on after selling her 16-year-old company: "I feel like it's as if you have built your dream home and then someone comes in and they're like, I'll pay you and they offer you stupid money. And you're like, all right, I could build this again. So you sell it." Her biggest regret was not prioritizing herself and her marriage, spending the past 18 months working through the results of pouring everything into the business.
Ellen Chen, Founder of Mendocino Farms, emphasized trusting your gut during negotiations: "In my gut, I knew we shouldn't have given up as much. I kind of told my husband and he's like, no, it's fine, it's gonna be okay. And inside I'm like, no it's not. And if I could go back, I would have changed that deal structure." Now she's chosen to focus on being present with her kids, recognizing that time is more valuable than money.
Dulari Amin (Sidelines VC) cautioned founders against chasing the highest valuation: "I've seen my founder friends who've taken that highest valuation and what ends up happening is the expectations is your growth needs to be exponential, right? And they almost implode because they can't get to that scale and they're getting pushed." She emphasized choosing the right partner and working with bankers who understand your industry.
All three panelists agreed on what freedom means post-exit: time—the ability to choose your own busy and prioritize what truly matters.
The Cabinette is a six-month accelerator for founders doing $5M+ in annual revenue—the stage where hustle meets structure, and where the strategies that got you here won't get you to $50M, acquisition, or lasting wealth.
What you unlock as a member:
"We built the net we all wished we had," says Rebecca Minkoff, Co-Founder of Female Founder Collective. "This is the space I wish existed when I was trying to figure out my next big move—not just in business, but in life and legacy. The Cabinette is the room where we talk about what's really next, and how to get there—with power, confidence, and support."
Because here's the truth: when women get rich, they reinvest. And The Cabinette is where that cycle begins.
Applications for our next cohort open soon. Join the waitlist to be the first to know when applications go live and unlock the resources, insights, and connections you need for your next chapter.
The Cabinette’s inaugural Ascent Summit was made possible through the support of our sponsors: J.P. Morgan Wealth Management, Lifeway Foods, and TriNet—committed to helping women founders build, scale, and sustain wealth.