The Best Week in Years to Start a Business in LA

My LA Tech Week was mostly about capital.

On Tuesday we hosted Chloe & Cocktails in Beverly Hills. It's an invitation-only reception for women founders, investors, LPs and dealmakers, hosted by the Ayana Foundation with J.P. Morgan and Chloe Capital. On Wednesday night I was at the Hollywood Palladium for Selena Gomez's fourth annual Rare Impact Fund Benefit, which raised nearly $3 million for youth mental health in one evening. And I spent an evening at SVRN's investor event. SVRN describes itself as the social network for private capital, connecting family offices, angels and VCs.

Two conversations followed me out of every room.

The first was about deal flow. The institutional investors I talked to want more of it. They aren't getting access to the right founders, and the right founders aren't getting in front of them. That's a gap we want to fill, and it's a big part of why the Ayana Foundation hosts rooms like Chloe & Cocktails and runs Founder Readiness programs.

The second was about consumer brands. The ones getting real traction often have a celebrity or a big entertainment platform behind them. What we want to figure out is how to repeat that model at scale, for more founders than the few who already have a famous name attached.

My takeaway from the week is simple. Building a company has never cost less, and customers have never cared more about what a brand stands for. If you have been waiting for a sign to start, this is it.

Women founders: record dollars, but look closer

The headline numbers look great. PitchBook reports that US female-founded companies raised a record $73.6 billion in venture capital in 2025. That was 27.7% of all US deal value, an all-time high.

Then you read the next line. AI startups took about two-thirds of those dollars, and more than $30 billion came from Scale AI and Anthropic alone. Companies founded only by women got 1.1% of US venture capital in 2025. In the first quarter of 2026, that share was 0.6%.

So the money is real, but it is piled into a few very large rounds. Most women building consumer, wellness and community businesses will not see it.

Put that next to what I heard all week. Investors want more good deals. Women founders can't get in the room. The fix is access. Rooms like Chloe & Cocktails exist for exactly that reason.

In the meantime, build so you don't have to wait. Make revenue early. Spend less. Grow a community that buys from you before an investor ever looks at you. PitchBook also found that women founders closed more than half of all US venture deals in personal products and food products in 2025. Consumer is where we already win.

Celebrity brands done right start with the mission

Celebrity brands get dismissed as vanity projects. Some are. The good ones are run like real businesses, and their numbers back that up. e.l.f. Beauty bought Hailey Bieber's Rhode for $1 billion in 2025. Rare Beauty is reported to bring in more than $400 million a year, with press estimates putting its value around $2.7 billion.

Sitting in the Palladium on Wednesday, what stayed with me was the order things happened in at Rare. On the red carpet that night, Selena told Billboard, "We created this fund before we even sold a single product, so this has always been our mission." One percent of every Rare Beauty sale goes to the Rare Impact Fund. The fund has raised more than $30 million since 2020 and wants to mobilize $100 million for youth mental health.

Fame can get someone to buy once. Meaning is why they come back. Rare's shade names are words like Hope, Joy and Worthy. The fund's content runs on the brand's main social channels, right next to product launches. The mission lives inside the product. It shows up every day, all year.

This is the model I want to see repeated at scale. A famous name or an entertainment platform brings attention. A real mission keeps it. Pair the two on purpose and you get distribution most founders can only dream about. Your community is your celebrity. A wellness founder with 2,000 people who trust her has more pull with those people than any billboard.

Philanthropy as strategy

Women founders often treat giving as something we'll do "once we've made it." I'd push back on that.

When Rare Beauty launched in more than 1,500 Ulta Beauty stores in February, Ulta ran a checkout campaign for the Rare Impact Fund and its own charitable foundation. Rare's chief impact officer said it raised more than $2 million. A retail launch and a giving campaign happened at the same register, and both did better for it. Then on Wednesday I watched the same idea work at the Palladium. The benefit raised roughly $3 million through paddle raises and a live auction, in a room full of artists, advocates and nonprofit partners.

Giving that is designed into the business builds trust. It gives your community a reason to talk about you. It also keeps you honest about why you started.

It can start small. Our Chloe & Cocktails invitation asked guests to donate to the Ayana Foundation's Founder Readiness programs. Try a percentage of sales, a partner nonprofit you show up for every quarter, or one event a year where the money goes somewhere that matters.

AI is the cheapest co-founder you will ever have

Gusto's 2026 New Business Formation Survey estimates that about 174,000 new US businesses in 2025 very likely would not exist without AI. Among women who used AI to launch, 54% said it made starting easier and cheaper.

But women are using it less. In the same survey, 64% of men used AI to start their business, compared with 56% of women. JPMorganChase Institute data from business bank accounts shows the same pattern. By the end of 2025, 19.7% of male-owned small businesses were paying for AI tools, compared with 17.2% of female-owned ones. The gap was widest among Gen Z owners, at 20.0% for men and 13.9% for women.

That gap is the opportunity. One Tech Week panel in Venice, "Building Modern Brands With AI, Content & Creators," asked what changes "when execution gets easier." For me the answer is practical. AI is how I run several businesses at once and still stay responsive. It keeps my CRM current, so momentum from one conversation carries into the next one. It won't tell you why your customer cares. That part is yours. It does make sure the follow-up actually happens.

The week after Tech Week is where the value is won

A week like this one is a huge investment of time. You meet dozens of people in a few days. By the following Friday, most of those conversations have faded.

This is where I lean on AI the hardest. Use it to remember everyone you met and what you talked about. Use it to draft follow-ups and get the next meetings on the calendar. Use it to build a simple tracker of who you owe a note, who wants an intro, and who said "let's talk in November." Then update your CRM while it's fresh.

The events create the momentum. The follow-up keeps it. Without it, the hours you put into those rooms are gone.

Why now

The Census Bureau reported 534,947 new business applications in September 2026, up from August. People are starting things. Customers keep rewarding brands with a reason to exist. And LA has the creators, the culture, the capital and, as this week showed, a tech scene that wants consumer founders in the room.

The old excuse was that you needed a big team, a big raise or a famous name. The cost side of that excuse is mostly gone. What's left is the work only you can do: knowing your people, standing for something, and showing up.

If you've been waiting, start this week

Pick the problem you keep talking about. Use AI to build the cheapest version you can test in 30 days. Decide now what your brand will give back, even if it's small. And if you were at Tech Week, send your follow-ups before Monday.

If you are a woman building in wellness, beauty, travel or community and you want to swap notes, find me on Instagram at @lynnfernandoofficial. I'd love to hear what you're building.