The Breadwinners Podcast

Caroline Jones built her identity on ambition, hard work, and never needing anything from anyone. Then motherhood shook the snow globe.

Caroline is a country singer, songwriter, and full-time member of Zac Brown Band. She booked her own tours of New England schools while still in college and didn't have a manager until 24. She brings that same founder instinct to raising her three-year-old son, Declan, with her husband, a professional sailor. We recorded in Nashville and talked about everything: the postpartum anxiety she didn't recognize until later, going back on tour at four months...

*This is a replayed episode from an earlier conversation*

The formula for women's success isn't what you've been told. It's not your title, your salary, or your track record. It's your status — how much others respect and value you. And the way women build it is completely different from what most of us have been taught.

Alison Fragale is an organizational psychologist, tenured professor, former McKinsey consultant, and the author of the national bestseller Likable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve. She has spent 20 years studying status, influence, and how wo...

Leaking when you sneeze, jump rope or lunge for a ball on the tennis court is common. Dr. Sara Reardon wants every woman to stop accepting it as the price of having children - because it's not normal.

Dr Sara Reardon is a board-certified pelvic floor physical therapist, known to more than 750,000 followers as The Vagina Whisperer. She and Alexis cover the pelvic floor at every stage, from a first period to perimenopause. Alexis talks about her forceps delivery and the day she peed on the tennis court. Sara admits the same thing happened...

**This is a replay from a previous episode**

What does it feel like to reach the pinnacle of your career — and realize it no longer fits? Devon McDonald spent 17 years in venture capital, rising to General Partner at OpenView Ventures while raising three kids and serving as the financial anchor for her family. In March 2020, OpenView had its largest exit ever when Datadog went public, returning the fund ten times over. On paper, it was the moment she'd worked her entire career for. On the inside? Devon was sitting alone in her car, listening to meditation au...

Everyone is calling everything a community right now. Marika Frumes has spent six years building the real thing, and she knows the difference.

Alexis sits down with Marika, founder of Mysha, the morning after the two co-hosted a dinner in Austin. Marika shares how a WhatsApp group of 18 expecting moms in January 2020 became a lifeline during the pandemic and grew into Mysha. She also opens up, for the first time on a podcast, about immigrating from the former Soviet Union at seven with $400. She talks about the childhood experiences that shaped why she builds spaces where everyone...

In this episode, Alexis Contos sits down with Patrice Meagher, a 20-year Commercial Real Estate veteran turned Founder and CEO of MilkMate. After spending two decades leasing millions of square feet in Manhattan , Patrice realized that while we can fly to space, the most "innovative" solution for pumping at work was still a storage closet or a bathroom stall. Patrice shares her journey of leaving a successful corporate career to solve a problem that had plagued her through four children: the inefficiency and indignity of pumping in the workplace. She breaks down her famous "Coffee Pot Analogy" - asking...

Most of us are told to chase the title, the house, the marriage that looks good from the outside. Keren Eldad had all of it, and it nearly broke her.

In this episode, executive coach and bestselling author Keren Eldad (Gilded, Gilt Free) sits down with Alexis to unpack what happens when your ambition outruns your actual self. Keren shares the exact moment her life "came crashing down" in the shower, why she believes overachievement is an addiction, and the difference between women with high standards and women trapped in perfectionism.

You're expected to work like you don't have kids and parent like you don't work.

Kelly Hubbell, founder of Sage Haus, looked at this impossible equation and decided to build the solution herself.In this episode, Kelly shares her journey from corporate tech sales to launching Sage Haus—a company that provides house managers and holistic family support for busy working parents. After her second child, Kelly found herself overwhelmed, creating a spreadsheet at 2am cataloging everything she was managing on top of her full-time job.

That breakdown moment became her breakthrough.

Postpartum is not a diagnosis. It's an experience every mother has, whatever form it takes. What determines whether you need support is severity and how long it lasts, and most of us were never taught the difference.

In this episode, Alexis sits down with Sonny Williams, a perinatal mental health certified counselor and clinician with BetterHelp, to break down the real spectrum of maternal mental health, from baby blues to postpartum anxiety, OCD, depression, and psychosis. This conversation is part of the launch of Courage to Confide, our campaign built on one belief: the courage to confide...

WeNatal co-founders Ronit Menashe and Vida Delrahim explain trimester zero: the three months before conception when both partners can improve egg and sperm quality through targeted nutrition, bioavailable supplements, and cutting alcohol, smoking, and vaping. Male factor influences roughly half of miscarriage and infertility outcomes, and men regenerate sperm continuously, which means the window to improve is real and short. On this episode of The Breadwinners, Ronit and Vida also share how they built a bootstrapped prenatal supplement company after two miscarriages a week apart, why the supplement industry runs on smoke and mirrors, and what burnout, a health...

*This is a replayed episode from earlier in Season 1*

The first man to sit at the Breadwinners table. We're bringing back this conversation with Nick Firchau, host of the Paternal podcast, because the questions it raises haven't gone anywhere.

Nick has interviewed more than 130 men about fatherhood, and this episode gets into what those conversations reveal: men parenting without a model, the friendships they don't know how to build, and the load they carry but rarely name. Alexis and Nick also take on the topics that tend to get avoided, from the respect-versus-love dynamic in...

Melanie Kaplan is the founder and CEO of oPPal, a peer support platform for postpartum moms that matches new and expecting mothers, called Little oPPals, with trained, experienced mothers, called Big oPPals. She built it after her own experience with severe postpartum depression and anxiety, and she joined host Alexis Contos the same week oPPal launched nationally in May 2026.

In this conversation, Melanie shares the full story for the first time in this much depth. Four months after her first daughter was born, a weaning hormone crash collided with a birth control error, and Melanie left home...

This is a replay of an earlier episode.

Alexis reunites with Julie Cordua, CEO of Thorn, the organization building technology to defend children from online sexual exploitation. The two worked together 15 years ago on Thorn's launch, and Alexis has watched Julie turn that early mission into her life's work while raising three kids of her own.

**Content warning: This episode discusses child sexual abuse and exploitation. We don't include graphic details, but the subject matter is inherently difficult.**

This conversation explores what it means...

Jaclyn Johnson built Create and Cultivate from a blog into a multi-million dollar company, sold it, watched it fall apart under new ownership, and bought it back. In this episode, Create and Cultivate founder Jaclyn Johnson breaks down what it actually costs to build a company: a $75 million acquisition deal that collapsed because of COVID, a private equity sale two years later, a stage zero breast cancer diagnosis, and a marriage that ended along the way. She explains how she negotiated her way back into ownership of the company she started in 2012, why she now runs Cherub to get...

In this episode, Alexis Contos sits down with Morgan Zanotti, the founder behind Waay and former leader at Primal Kitchen, to discuss what it really takes to build wellness brands while being a breadwinner mother. From navigating the competitive CPG industry to creating products that align with her values as a parent, Morgan shares the unfiltered reality of startup life, financial responsibility, and integration. Learn about her journey from established brand to founder, her philosophy on health and family, and how she's redefining what success looks like as a mother-entrepreneur in the wellness space. The Breadwinners Join The Breadwinners...

Most parents think entertaining their kids is the job. Lizzie Assa says the real job is stepping back enough for kids to build the skill of playing independently.

Lizzie Assa, founder of The Workspace for Children and author of But I'm Bored, joins The Breadwinners to break down what independent play actually is and why it's disappearing from modern childhood. Alexis and Lizzie get into the difference between a toy and a prompt, why a bored kid is a sign you're doing something right, and how to build independent play skills from toddlerhood through the teenage years.<...

Ali Tate Cutler⁠ gets brutally honest about what nobody tells you: how to build a business while grieving the version of yourself you once were. Less than 1% of guests on major business podcasts are mothers. The rest? Childless men teaching strategies that don't work when you're building while celebrating your own transformation as a working mom. Ali (former supermodel turned social media strategist) created a new framework: Mothers don't grind, we create. We don't hustle, we flow. She shares the grieving process of losing her pre-mother self, what she misses, the paradox of freedom, how to create when your ti...

Twenty years ago, Neha Ruch and I were colleagues at an ad agency in Boston. Two twenty-somethings staying late, expensing cab rides home, measuring our worth by how hard we hustled.

Today, between us, we have six kids, two platforms, and a completely different definition of what it means to be ambitious.

Neha is the founder of The Power Pause and the author of the book by the same name. For a decade she's been building language for a question most high-achieving women won't say out loud: if I'm not working for pay, what is...

Most working mothers have never been asked what they actually carry, and what they bring. At our Los Angeles dinner, we pulled women aside and asked.

In Confidence is a five-part documentary series filmed at The Breadwinners' inaugural Los Angeles dinner. Eight women stepped away from the table and into something rarer: unfiltered truth. What came out wasn't curated. It was real.

Over five episodes, Breadwinner mothers, primary earners, founders, executives, single mothers, confront the questions that don't typically get asked.

What IS my job description as a mother, no one gave it...

This is a replay of an earlier episode with Libby Leffler of First.

Libby Leffler built an entire company around the conversation most couples never have. As founder and CEO of First, a platform making prenuptial agreements accessible to modern couples, she's reframing the prenup not as a divorce document but as a partnership design tool - the first legal agreement a couple makes, not the last resort.

In this episode, Alexis sits down with Libby to explore what it actually means to build a financial foundation before a...

Jeni Britton built Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams from a $30,000 SBA loan into a $175 million company. She is doing it again with Floura, her next-generation fiber company turning produce trimmings like watermelon rinds and apple cores into nutrient-dense bars.

This episode is not a business case study. Alexis Contos sits down with Jeni for an interior conversation about the person underneath both companies. The near-death experience at age seven that made her feel invincible for the rest of her life. The family that broke apart violently when she was fourteen. Why she does not believe in free will...

Most women have been sold self-care as a product. Dr. Pooja Lakshmin is here to tell you it's infrastructure.

Pooja is a board-certified psychiatrist, New York Times contributor, and author of the national bestseller Real Self-Care: Crystals, Cleanses, and Bubble Baths Not Included. In this episode, she breaks down the four principles of real self-care (boundaries, compassion, values, power), the difference between performative wellness and the internal work that actually moves the needle, and why high-achieving women keep landing in the same burnout loop. She also shares the moment she landed in the hospital after her own...

School is out 46% of the year. After you subtract PTO and federal holidays, working parents are left covering 99 days with no formal childcare — and no amount of workplace flexibility closes that gap. Molly Morse isn't just naming the problem. She built the solution. Molly Morse is the co-founder of Recess, a marketplace that connects parents to afterschool programs, camps, and kids' classes - with real-time availability, actual filters, and no glorified Craigslist energy. She spent a decade building consumer marketplaces before becoming a mother and experiencing firsthand how broken the search-and-booking experience was. That rage-plus-inspiration moment became a company. In...

Iskra Lawrence built one of the fastest-growing body care brands in America,  ⁨Saltair , without paying herself a salary. That's not the beginning of the story. It's barely the middle.

This episode traces one of the most honest founder journeys in beauty: a girl from Kidderminster UK told that she was too curvy for straight-size modeling and too small for plus-size. A model who cold-called brands directly, walked into a New York agency at 22 with a pitch deck, and made a veteran agent cry — because no model had ever done that before. A woman who chall...

The aesthetics industry is largely run by marketing. Adriana Culling built her practice to be the exception. Adriana is the founder of Maeva Aesthetics in Austin - a nurse injector with a background in clinical research and a near-complete second degree in chemistry who chose building her own aesthetics business specifically so she would never feel pressure to upsell a patient or inject something that wasn't in their best interest. This episode cuts through the noise: what Botox and filler actually do, how to spot a bad injector before they touch your face, which treatments are worth it and...

The tests exist. The science has been here for decades. The only thing that's ever been missing is access.

Pranitha Patil co-founded Function Health because she lived the gap herself. Diagnosed with PCOS at 16, pre-diabetes and high cholesterol in her 20s, she spent years running experiments on her own body, tracking her biomarkers in a spreadsheet before she had the language for what she was actually doing. She was her own baseline because no research existed for South Asian women like her.

Function Health now has nearly 500 employees, has...

Your body isn't broken. You just haven't had the right person in your corner.

Dr. Alexis Griffin is a Doctor of Physical Therapy, a board-certified sports clinical specialist, and the woman who has kept NFL players, NBA athletes, and Olympic competitors performing at the top of their game. She has also navigated four pregnancies, four unmedicated deliveries, and four postpartum recoveries — each time rebuilding herself with the same rigor she brings to elite athletes. Now she's opening a gym in Austin and entering one of the most expansive seasons of her career.

*THIS IS A REPLAY FROM AN EARLIER EPISODE IN SEASON 1*

Aileen Fitzgerald left a nearly decade-long nursing career, ended a long-term relationship, and moved into a new home the night before the Austin snow apocalypse, with four weeks of rent money and a set of paint brushes.

This episode is about what it looks like to burn your life down in order to build one that is actually yours.

Aileen Fitzgerald is a world-renowned painter and former ICU nurse whose work captures what she...

The formula for women's success isn't what you've been told. It's not your title, your salary, or your track record. It's your status — how much others respect and value you. And the way women build it is completely different from what most of us have been taught.

Alison Fragale is an organizational psychologist, tenured professor, former McKinsey consultant, and the author of the national bestseller Likable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve. She has spent 20 years studying status, influence, and how women can build both — without compromising who they are.

<...

What does it actually look like when two ambitious people are building a life together .... from both sides? In this episode, I hand the mic to my husband, Todd Grantham - entrepreneur, father of four, and the person who has seen me at my most magnetic and my most completely undone. No script, no canned questions. Just a real conversation about what modern marriage actually looks like when ambition, identity, money, and family are all in the mix at the same time. We get into the invisible load debate and why one viral Instagram post made me break my...

What does it actually look like to build something sustainable — in your body, your business, and your family — without burning everything down in the process?

Juliet Starrett has done it. Three world championship titles in elite whitewater paddling. A law degree. Nearly a decade in Big Law. Co-founder of San Francisco CrossFit, one of the first 25 affiliates in the world. And today, co-leader of The Ready State alongside her husband Kelly Starrett — the movement and longevity platform that has transformed how millions of people think about what their bodies are capable of. Their book, Built...

What does it feel like to reach the pinnacle of your career — and realize it no longer fits? Devon McDonald spent 17 years in venture capital, rising to General Partner at OpenView Ventures while raising three kids and serving as the financial anchor for her family. In March 2020, OpenView had its largest exit ever when Datadog went public, returning the fund ten times over. On paper, it was the moment she'd worked her entire career for. On the inside? Devon was sitting alone in her car, listening to meditation audiobooks, wondering why she felt desperate to escape. In this raw, ho...

One year ago, we gathered a group of extraordinary women around a dinner table at SXSW — and The Breadwinners was born. In honor of our one-year anniversary, we're bringing back the episode that started it all for the listeners who've joined us since. "You're not hitting your skincare routine, being a great mom, crushing it at your job, putting dinner on the table, and having sex with your husband in 24 hours every day," says Kim Chappell, Chief Brand Officer at Bobbie. "Nobody is. That's not happening." In this pilot episode, Alexis Contos sits down with Kim to talk about wh...

What does it take to walk away from 17 years of corporate security — stock options, healthcare, a VP title at Nike — and bet on yourself?

In this episode, Alexis sits down with Mel Strong, co-founder of Next Ventures, a health and wellness-focused venture fund. Mel's path has been anything but linear: first-grade teacher, journalist, marketing executive, interim CMO of Oura Ring, and now fund manager — and she's candid about every messy step it took to get there.

In this conversation:

You're expected to work like you don't have kids and parent like you don't work. Kelly Hubbell, founder of Sage Haus, looked at this impossible equation and decided to build the solution herself.

In this episode, Kelly shares her journey from corporate tech sales to launching Sage Haus—a company that provides house managers and holistic family support for busy working parents. After her second child, Kelly found herself overwhelmed, creating a spreadsheet at 2am cataloging everything she was managing on top of her full-time job. That breakdown moment became her breakthrough.

What does modern fatherhood really look like in 2025 - and why aren't more men talking about it?

In this episode of The Breadwinners Podcast, host Alexis Contos sits down with Nick Firchau, creator and host of The Paternal Podcast, to have an honest conversation about the challenges fathers face today. From the crisis of male loneliness to the invisible labor dads carry, Nick shares insights from over 130 interviews with fathers from all walks of life.

This conversation explores why fatherhood feels so isolating for many men, how generational patterns shape the parents we become, and...

Ali Tate Cutler gets brutally honest about what nobody tells you: how to build a business while grieving the version of yourself you once were.

Less than 1% of guests on major business podcasts are mothers. The rest? Childless men teaching strategies that don't work when you're building while celebrating your own transformation as a working mom.

"Mothers don't grind, we create. We don't hustle, we flow."

Ali (former supermodel turned social media strategist) created a new framework: Mothers don't grind, we create. We don't hustle, we flow.

She shares the grieving...

In this episode, Alexis Contos sits down with Patrice Meagher, a 20-year Commercial Real Estate veteran turned Founder and CEO of MilkMate. After spending two decades leasing millions of square feet in Manhattan , Patrice realized that while we can fly to space, the most "innovative" solution for pumping at work was still a storage closet or a bathroom stall. Patrice shares her journey of leaving a successful corporate career to solve a problem that had plagued her through four children: the inefficiency and indignity of pumping in the workplace. She breaks down her famous "Coffee Pot Analogy" - asking...

It started with a pinched sciatic nerve and a diet of dollar-slice pizza. In 2012, Sarah Levey was working in fashion on a $32,000 salary, desperate for physical recovery but completely alienated by the performative nature of traditional yoga. She didn't just want a workout; she wanted a sanctuary where she didn't have to look like the teacher or the person in the front row. So she built Y7 Studio—a beat-bumping, candlelit rebellion against the mirrors, bright lights, and judgment of the typical studio experience.

​

In this candid conversation, Alexis and Sarah go far beyond the busi...

In this episode, Alexis Contos sits down with Libby Leffler, tech executive turned founder of First, who is dismantling the stigma around prenups and reframing them as the ultimate act of partnership design.

After spending nearly two decades building generation-defining companies like Google, Facebook, and SoFi, Libby noticed a glaring gap in how we handle our most significant personal "merger", marriage. She realized that while we plan meticulously for our careers and companies, we often leave our relationships to chance. She founded First to change that, shifting the narrative from a "breaking point" to "...