I Sat in a Room With a Nobel Laureate and Thought About You
Last week I sat in a room at Station F in Paris.
On stage: a Nobel laureate in economics. A Turing Award winner. The CEO of one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world.
The event was the AI Forum Europe, run by INSEAD (my alma mater where I did my MBA and also where I’ve been coaching executives for the past 9 years) and Wharton (their American strategic partner). Some of the sharpest minds in technology and economics, in one place, circling one question. What does AI actually change?
I went in thinking about markets and models. I came out thinking about you.
Because somewhere between the keynotes, I realized that everything they described about AI and large organizations points to a quiet truth about women in tech entrepreneurship. The woman building a business alongside her corporate career is not behind in this shift. She is structurally ahead.
Let me show you what I mean.
You Are the Top, the Bottom, and the Sideways
Nicolai Tangen runs Norges Bank Investment Management. He manages the savings of an entire country.
He described how a large organization actually adopts AI. You push from three directions at once. From the top, with leadership and a dedicated AI team. From the bottom, with everyday people he called AI ambassadors. And from the sides, by building the structure that lets people experiment safely.
I sat there doing the math for a company of one.
In a corporation, this takes years. Committees. Budgets. Politics. The same politics that pushed many of my clients out of the roles they were promised.
But when you are building your own business, you are the top, the bottom, and the sideways at the same time.
You are the leadership deciding to adopt AI. You are the person on the ground using it every day. You are the one who sets up the experiment.
There is no committee to convince. No budget to approve. Adopting AI in your business is one decision. And it belongs entirely to you.
That is not a limitation of being small. That is the advantage. The bottleneck was never resources. It is willingness to adapt. And adapting fast is the one thing a one-woman business does better than any giant.
Both the Harvard and INSEAD professors on stage agreed on the advice. Grab this moment. Be ahead of the curve.
The Founder Who Stopped Competing With Asana
Philippe Aghion won the Nobel Prize in economics this year. His work is about how innovation really happens.
One idea from his keynote stayed with me. Firms innovate to escape competition. The ones who feel far behind are often too discouraged to try at all.
I thought of my client Giuliana immediately.
Giuliana started a software idea eight years before she reached out to me for help. Then life happened. A baby. A maternity leave. A VP role at a global firm. A second baby. And when she came back, her role had quietly been taken over. Eventually she was pushed out.
She still loved her original SaaS startup idea. But there was a problem. The market had moved. Her concept had become what Asana now was. A funded giant with a large team. She was one woman with a small group of volunteers.
She almost stopped there. Most people do.
Instead, we asked a better question. Not how do we build this. But where is the strongest market need that also fits her values and her reason for starting.
She ran real customer interviews. She let the market choose between two directions. She pitched with simple mockups, not a finished product.
The result. Three letters of intent from organizations ready to become her first clients. Before she built the SaaS.
She did not beat Asana. She stopped competing with it. She found her category of one. That is how you escape competition. You stop fighting on someone else’s ground.
It Is Not How Much AI You Use. It Is How.
Hyunjin Kim, a professor at INSEAD, shared research I have not stopped thinking about (her keynote was my favorite!).
Most companies use AI in narrow ways. Writing. Editing. Summarizing. Her point was simple and sharp. It is not how much AI you use. It is how you use it.
The firms that win do not bolt AI onto their admin. They build it into what they actually offer. One example from the day stayed with me. A company called Gamma serves more than seventy million users with a team of around fifty people. AI changed what the product does, and how the whole business scales.
This is where my client Mona comes in.
Mona is a Global VP of Sales and Customer Success. For years she wanted to build an app for the women she serves. For years she hit the same wall. She is not a developer. Hiring one was out of budget.
Then she sat down with Lovable (using the bonus No-Code sprint we experimented with inside the program this year) and started creating it herself. Not a mockup. The real thing.
Her reflection afterward was the part that moved me. The barrier was never the idea. It was always the tools. And the tools just changed.
That is the question worth sitting with. If you were starting your business from scratch today, with AI, what would you build that was impossible to build before. Not a smaller version of an old plan. Something new.
Women in Tech Are Not Behind. They Are Ahead.
At the end of the day, Yann LeCun, who won the Turing Award, described where this is going. Soon each of us will move through our work with a team of AI assistants at our side.
For a corporation, that is a slow transformation. For you, it is a choice you can make this week.
This is the heart of building a Weatherproof Business™. Not more resources. Not waiting until you feel ready. A validated idea, built in parallel with your career, with tools that finally match your ambition.
I have coached more than 1,200 senior executives through this exact hesitation, and the pattern is always the same. The women I work with are not behind the giants. They are lighter, faster, and closer to their customers. In the age of AI, that is exactly who wins.
If you have been sitting on an idea, waiting for the right moment, this is it. The advantage is real, and it is yours to use.
My free masterclass walks you through the full Weatherproof Business™ Formula, step by step. It is the clearest place to start.
