FEMALE FOUNDERS 100

There’s one thing women have no shortage of: energy. The kind of boundless energy to convert dreams into action, to chase ambition fearlessly, to let nothing get in their way. For some of our Female Founders 100, it’s the first time they have hatched a company. Others have been at this for decades. This is just the beginning of a conversation with—and the building of a vibrant community by—the women whose smarts are rattling industries far and wide.

Reese Witherspoon

HELLO SUNSHINE/DRAPER JAMES

Every year seems like Witherspoon’s year, but the past few set records. In 2016, she launched Hello Sunshine, a new storytelling vehicle that aims to change the narrative around women—then went on to produce, star in, and win Emmys for HBO’s Big Little Lies while running her fashion and homewares brand, Draper James. Whether it’s through Hulu and Apple TV—she’s locked in development deals with both—her own on-demand TV channel, or her book club rivaling Oprah’s, Witherspoon is channeling her smarts and financial power to fix the gender imbalance in entertainment. —Tom Foster

Rachel Haurwitz & Jennifer Doudna

CARIBOU BIOSCIENCES

In the future, deadly diseases will be snipped from your DNA like lines of bad code. At least that’s how the University of California at Berkeley biochemistry professor (Doudna) and her former-student-turned-CEO (Haurwitz) envision it. Doudna’s research team at Berkeley published the first paper illustrating Crispr’s gene-editing abilities back in 2012, and then spun it out into the Berkeley-based company, which now has 50 employees—half of whom are female—and more than $40 million in funding. The controversial goal, which the founders hope to accomplish within five to 10 years, is to release FDA-approved therapies that could attack everything from cancer to cystic fibrosis, as well as to engineer malaria-resistant mosquitoes. First, though, they have to survive their ongoing patent dispute with MIT.

—Kevin J. Ryan

Sarah Kauss

S’WELL

She turned a water bottle into a $100 million-plus art canvas.

Sallie Krawcheck

ELLEVEST

Krawcheck jokes that she’s the only person to have been fired on the front page of The Wall Street Journal—twice. But her Wall Street gigs—head of global wealth management at Bank of America Merrill Lynch and CFO of Citigroup—prepared her for her next mission: building an investing platform specifically for women. “There’s a reason women rank finance 33rd out of the 33 industries that serve them,” Krawcheck says. “They feel talked down to, misunderstood.” Her answer is a four-year-old investing platform that is driven by an investor’s goals—like buying a house, paying for child care, or retiring by a certain age. Krawcheck hopes Ellevest, the fastest of the so-called robo-advisers to reach $100 million in assets under management, will help close what she calls the “investment gap,” or the fact women invest less than men and, on average, keep 68 percent of their money in cash. “This is quit-your-job money,” she says. “This is get-out-of-a-bad-relationship money. This is important.”

—Kimberly Weisul

Morgan DeBaun

BLAVITY

DeBaun was sitting in a cubicle at Intuit, reeling from the shooting of Michael Brown near her hometown St. Louis. Frustrated by the dearth of black media, she quit her job and launched a digital media platform for black Millennials. “For a really long period of time, I wanted to find an idea that made being broke worth it, even if we didn’t get a big, billion-dollar exit,” she says. The Los Angeles–based media company recently launched 21Ninety.com, for women of color, acquired travel site TravelNoire.com, raised $6.5 million in funding, and opened a tech office in Atlanta—a hot spot, DeBaun says, for African American computer science majors. —Kate Rockwood

Moj Mahdara

BEAUTYCON MEDIA

Why host a beauty trade show when you can throw a