Like a Wave We Break: A Private Evening with Jane Chen
Dinner and Workshop
Guests will enjoy fresh, house-made Neapolitan-style pizzas from Vera Pizza Naturale, prepared with naturally leavened sourdough by a pizzaiolo with Vera Pizza Napoletana training.
The meal will help create a warm, relaxed setting for an evening that goes far beyond traditional networking. A limited group of exceptional female founders and high-growth leaders will gather around one table to share food, engage in honest conversation, and build relationships with the space to become truly meaningful.
An intimate book conversation and resilience workshop for a highly curated group of high-growth female founders and leaders.
Behind every ambitious company is a founder carrying a story that rarely appears in the press release.
Diversify invites a limited number of venture-backed founders and high-growth leaders to a private evening with Jane Marie Chen—entrepreneur, humanitarian, and author of the USA Today bestselling memoir Like a Wave We Break: A Memoir of Falling Apart and Finding Myself.
Jane co-founded Embrace, a social enterprise born at Stanford that developed a groundbreaking, low-cost infant warmer for premature and vulnerable babies in communities without reliable access to traditional incubators. What began as an ambitious student project became a global mission, earning international recognition and improving access to lifesaving care around the world.
But behind that extraordinary public success was a far more complicated human story.
While building an organization designed to save lives, Jane faced the relentless pressure of entrepreneurship, profound personal loss, and the unraveling of an identity built around achievement and impact.
Like a Wave We Break is her honest account of what happened when success could no longer protect her—and how she learned to rebuild from within.
Jane’s story has resonated with some of the world’s most influential thinkers, entrepreneurs, and advocates for human transformation. Her memoir has received praise from Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO of Salesforce; Tony Robbins, bestselling author and life and business strategist; Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and bestselling author; Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, trauma expert and author of The Body Keeps the Score; Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; and Vicky Tsai, founder of Tatcha.
Their recognition reflects what makes Jane’s story so powerful: this is not simply a memoir about building a world-changing organization. It is an honest exploration of ambition, identity, loss, and the courage required to rebuild a life from the inside out.
The Experience
Jane will share the story behind the book before leading an interactive workshop designed specifically for leaders operating under extraordinary levels of responsibility, uncertainty, and expectation.
Together, we will explore:
How to separate our identity from our achievements
How to remain grounded when a company, relationship, or carefully constructed plan begins to change
How to recognize when perseverance has become self-abandonment
How to process failure without allowing it to define us
How to transform loss into clarity, courage, and more authentic leadership
How to build again without recreating the conditions that caused us to break
This will not be a traditional networking event or large public book talk. It is a confidential, thoughtfully facilitated experience where accomplished women can move beyond polished founder narratives and engage in the conversations that rarely happen in professional rooms.
Who This Is For
This gathering is designed for a select group of:
Venture-backed female founders
CEOs and senior executives leading high-growth organizations
Investors and ecosystem leaders supporting ambitious companies
Women navigating a significant inflection point in leadership, business, or life
Attendance will be intentionally limited to protect the intimacy and depth of the experience. Registration requests may be reviewed to ensure alignment with the purpose and composition of the gathering.
About Jane Chen
Jane Marie Chen is an entrepreneur, humanitarian, and internationally recognized leader in social innovation. She co-founded Embrace, whose affordable infant-warming technology was created to help premature and low-birth-weight babies survive in areas without reliable access to conventional incubators.
Jane is a TED Fellow and has been recognized as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the Year. Her work has taken her from rural communities and hospitals to global stages, including TED, the World Economic Forum, and the White House.
Her memoir, Like a Wave We Break, reveals the story behind those achievements: the ambition, sacrifice, loss, and eventual return to herself.
About Diversify
Diversify is a curated community of 208 venture-backed female founders who have collectively raised more than $1.9 billion. We create intentional experiences where exceptional founders, investors, executives, and cultural leaders build relationships that lead to meaningful capital, partnerships, and long-term impact.
Capacity is extremely limited. Request an invitation to join us.
Please bring a copy of Like a Wave We Break, an open mind, and one question you are ready to explore honestly.
Presented by Diversify, with the generous support of JPMorgan and Daxe.
This private gathering brings together a limited group of high-growth female founders and leaders for an evening of honest conversation, meaningful connection, and transformative reflection.