Building It Your Way: Why Female Founders Need a Different Playbook
Start before you're ready. Ship it ugly. Charge more.
It's good advice. For a lot of women building companies, it lands differently — or it doesn't land at all.
Ana Milhazes and Ligia Gomes coach female founders and entrepreneurs at Nomads & Pirates. This is a short, honest talk about the patterns they keep running into, and what actually shifts them.
Three in particular:
The perfectionism trap. Why "it's not ready yet" is so often the real reason a good product still hasn't launched — and what the waiting actually costs.
The loneliness of deciding alone. Most founder decisions get made in a room with one person in it. That room is a lot harder when nobody around you is building anything either.
What changes with community. The difference between building in isolation and building alongside people who are three months ahead of you. That difference turns out to be structural, not motivational.
No slides full of statistics. Just what they see in the room, week after week, and what they'd tell you if you sat down with them for an hour.
Who this is for
If you're building something and doing most of the deciding by yourself — early stage, pre-launch, or years in and quietly stuck — this one's for you.
About Nomads & Pirates
Ana and Ligia coach female founders and entrepreneurs at Nomads & Pirates. Everything in this talk comes from that work: real patterns, real people, no theory.
Part of Porto AI Week
Porto AI Week runs 14–18 September. For one week the whole city becomes the venue: dozens of independent events, hosted by the communities, companies and studios that already make Porto work. No main stage, no single lineup. This one opens the week.
The tools change every six months. The hard parts don't.