Leisa: Hello, I’m Leisa Holland Nelson and welcome to another edition of Women Mean Business, where we’re going to take you up close and personal with extraordinary women doing extraordinary things. My guest today is Carolyn Rodz, the Founder of The Circular Board, a collaborative accelerator for female entrepreneurs. Carolyn, welcome to Women Mean Business.

Carolyn: Thank you so much for having me.

Leisa: I’m going to guess that when you were playing on the swing set you weren’t thinking of building a collaborative accelerator for female women entrepreneurs; how did you get to doing Circular Board?

Carolyn: I’ve actually always been pretty entrepreneurial as my mother and father will attest but this really started as the answer to what I wish I would have had when I started my first company back now over 10 years ago. I really think there are so many resources out there for startups and we’re certainly not trying to reinvent the wheel, but our goal is to help open up that gateway for women so that when they’re first starting their companies – either they’re coming out of the corporate world or launching their first business right out of school – how do they get tapped in to everything that’s available out there? So we provide a platform and try to help them with those very early stage decisions that will position themselves for growth.

Leisa: And you decided to do this because? I know had a successful marketing firm.

Carolyn: Yeah, so I had a marketing agency, we worked with a lot of startups in doing that – definitely larger corporations as well – but I really was drawn to the startup space and started spending a lot of time in the Bay Area, in New York, really trying to understand what were the things that were making certain companies grow and certain companies not. And as I did that realized there was a real void in the accelerator space, particularly for women – who operate much more collaboratively, they tend to gravitate towards certain structures. They really like frameworks, also capitalizing on their strengths and trying to identify what are the things that are holding them back that we can help get them over.

Leisa: Well I’m going to thank you for doing that – thank you.

Carolyn: Thank you.

Leisa: There you have it, another extraordinary woman doing extraordinary things. I’m Leisa Holland Nelson, President and Co-founder of ContentActive, Houston’s leading website and mobile app company. You can find me at ContactActive.com or follow me on Twitter @LHNelson. We’ll be back again next week with another edition of Women Mean Business.