Lily Konkoly helps future female founders by doing three things at once: she collects and shares real stories from women in business, she turns gender research into clear, visual ideas that young people can act on, and she builds small but very real communities where girls can test out what it feels like to lead, sell, and create. You can see this in her long running work on the Lily Konkoly blog, in her research on gender gaps in the art world, and in the projects she has started with other teens. None of this is theoretical for her; it all comes from things she has tried, sometimes failed at, then tried again in a slightly different way.
If you work in medicine or health, this might sound a little far from what you do every day. But it is closer than it looks. The same patterns Lily tracks in art and entrepreneurship show up in hospitals, labs, and clinics too. Who gets funded. Who gets promoted. Who is seen as a “natural” leader and who has to prove themselves, again and again.
So looking at how she works can be useful if you are a medical student, a resident, a nurse thinking about starting a side project, or a researcher with an idea for a health startup that you keep talking yourself out of.
How one teenage blog turned into a training ground for founders
Lily started the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia blog when most people are just trying to survive high school. She did not frame it as a formal program or some big organization. It was just her, a laptop, and a growing curiosity about why so many driven, smart women seemed to hit the same invisible walls.
Over several years, she put in around four hours a week, every week. That adds up. She wrote more than fifty articles and interviewed over a hundred women who had built companies in different fields: food, tech, services, creative work, and more.
Many future founders do not need motivation posters. They need concrete stories, with context, from women who have already walked the path they are about to step on.
Here is how that blog, which looks like “just content” from the outside, actually functions as a quiet engine for future female founders.
Turning interviews into a library of unfiltered experience
Lily did not just feature the highlight reel of each entrepreneur. She kept asking about the boring parts: the failed pitches, the late invoices, the sexist comments in investor meetings, the weeks where nothing moved forward.
Over time, readers see patterns.
- Women are often asked about their “plan” for handling family long before men are.
- They get judged on results that are already in front of people.
- Men are more often judged on potential and future promise.
If you work in medicine, you might recognize this. A female resident gets questions about whether she “really” wants a demanding specialty. A male resident doing the same hours gets praise for being ambitious. Different field, same script.
Once you see a pattern clearly, it becomes much harder to blame yourself for it and much easier to design around it.
By gathering so many stories in one place, Lily gives young women something they rarely have access to: a rough but honest map. It is not perfect, and she does not claim it is. But it shows that their struggles are not random and not personal flaws. They are common, shared, and in many cases predictable.
Why this matters for health and medical founders
Medicine is slowly shifting toward crossovers with entrepreneurship: digital health apps, telemedicine platforms, devices, patient education tools. Many of these ideas come from people on the ground, especially women who see gaps in care every day.
The problem is that plenty of them never move from idea to prototype. Or they stop at a small side project.
Reading honest accounts from women in other fields, like the ones Lily collects, does two things for future health founders:
- It normalizes slow progress. Building a clinic, a health app, or a new research group will probably take years, not months.
- It prepares you emotionally for bias, funding hurdles, and awkward conversations long before you need to pitch your first grant or product.
Lily does not present a perfect strategy. She just keeps documenting what has worked for different women, in different settings, and lets readers connect that to their own world, including medicine.
From art history to health equity: what her research teaches future founders
At first glance, Lily’s academic work in art history might feel unrelated to a medical audience. She has studied Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas,” curated mock exhibits about beauty standards, and researched the career gaps between male and female artist parents.
On paper, that sounds very far from a hospital ward. Once you look at the logic under it, though, it feels familiar to anyone who cares about health equity.
Studying who disappears from view
In her honors research project, Lily examined how motherhood affects opportunities in the art world. She found that women often lose visibility and access to shows, residencies, and networks after having children. Men, on the other hand, can be praised for being “devoted fathers” while still being treated as serious artists, sometimes even more respected than before.
That split shows up in health and science too.
| Field | Women after having children | Men after having children |
|---|---|---|
| Art | Assumed to have less time for work, fewer invitations, slower career moves | Seen as more “grounded,” still invited, sometimes praised for balancing both |
| Medicine / research | Questions about dedication to residency, lab, or leadership roles | Viewed as stable providers, not usually asked to “prove” their commitment |
Lily turned her findings into a visual, marketing style piece that showed how deeply gender roles shape expectations. It was not just a paper to submit and forget. It was meant to be seen, discussed, and argued over.
If you want more women to found companies, clinics, or research groups, you have to start by asking who quietly vanishes from the career ladder at each life stage and why.
This kind of research mindset is helpful for future founders in medicine too. Before you build a company or project, you can ask:
- Who is not in the room at each step of care or research?
- Who gets credit for ideas, and who just gets labeled “supportive”?
- Whose time is assumed to be flexible, and whose is treated as fixed and valuable?
Lily’s work gives a template. Look at a specific field, find the gender gap, talk to the people living it, then present the pattern in a way that others cannot ignore as easily.
Curating stories like a scientist collects data
Lily treats stories almost like data points. Each interview, each exhibit, each research project is another piece in a larger picture about how gender shapes opportunity.
For medical readers, this can feel close to patient narratives. One story can be moving, but twenty or fifty stories start to show where systems are failing, or where bias keeps repeating. The process is similar.
- Gather individual experiences.
- Look for shared themes.
- Turn those themes into something visible: a paper, a blog, a slide deck, a talk, or a startup idea.
This habit of organized curiosity is part of why Lily’s work supports future female founders. She does not just say “gender inequality exists.” She keeps asking where, how, and who it affects, then turns that into something young women can actually use.
Practicing entrepreneurship early: slime, art, and real sales
One underrated part of Lily’s story is how early she started practicing the basics of entrepreneurship in small, almost playful ways.
The slime business that taught logistics and stamina
As a kid, Lily and her brother got into slime. Not just making it, but selling it. They grew the project until they were invited to a slime convention in London.
For a child, transporting hundreds of containers of slime from Los Angeles to London is not a minor thing. It is supply chain, pricing, retail setup, and customer service all rolled into one long, somewhat sticky weekend.
She remembers selling four to five hundred slimes in one day. That kind of volume forces you to solve problems fast:
- How do you package and label everything so it survives the trip?
- How do you stand there all day, stay kind to customers, and keep your math straight?
- How do you handle the stress when you are running low on a popular product halfway through the event?
These are the same small, unglamorous muscles that founders need, whether they are opening a clinic, launching a private practice, or starting a health tech company.
Teen Art Market and the reality of selling creative work
Later, Lily co founded an online Teen Art Market. It acted like a digital gallery where students could show and sell their art. This project did something important: it removed the safe distance between “I like making things” and “Will anyone pay for this?”
Many people in medicine have a version of this gap. You might have a clever idea for a patient education tool, a better workflow for charting, or a small telehealth service for a specific group. But you never ask if someone would actually pay for it, or which problem they care about enough to solve first.
By giving high school students a place to sell real work, Lily helped them confront questions like:
- How do I price something without feeling guilty or arrogant?
- What if no one buys anything?
- What if people do buy and I cannot keep up?
Those are founder questions. Practicing them young makes it easier to face them again later, in higher stakes settings like health startups, private practice models, or new clinical services.
Building communities where girls try on leadership
Lily has never only been a solo writer. She also builds group spaces where other young people, especially girls, get to lead and create.
Hungarian Kids Art Class: an experiment in leading from the middle
Her Hungarian Kids Art Class in Los Angeles started from a simple idea: combine her background, her culture, and her love of art. She gathered kids with Hungarian roots or an interest in the culture and held bi weekly art sessions over several years.
On the surface, this is just a small community class. Underneath, it contains many of the skills future founders need to practice:
- Designing a clear reason for people to show up.
- Planning regular sessions and sticking to the schedule.
- Handling drop offs in attendance without giving up.
- Balancing what she wants to teach with what the kids are actually excited by.
If you imagine this in a medical or health setting, you might see something similar in:
- A student led public health education group.
- A resident who starts a low cost weekend clinic for a specific community.
- A nurse who organizes wellness workshops for colleagues to prevent burnout.
These are all “small” projects that act as training grounds for later, larger initiatives. Lily treats them as serious learning spaces, even when the tone in the room is light and friendly.
Chess, sports, and the habit of staying in the game
Lily’s childhood in Los Angeles was full of structured practice. Chess tournaments. Competitive swimming for around ten years. Later, water polo, including two hour ocean swims during the height of COVID when pools were closed.
None of that sounds like business at first. Still, it builds a trait that female founders, especially in medicine, will rely on more than they might expect: the ability to keep showing up even when it stops being fun or visible.
Entrepreneurship often looks exciting from the outside, but from the inside it feels much closer to long practices, cold water, and small improvements that no one claps for.
You can see that mindset in Lily’s CV and in her projects. She keeps committing to things over multiple years: the blog, the research, the art class. She does not jump from one flashy idea to another every two months.
For future founders in health, this is a quiet but crucial lesson. That app idea, that clinic model, that research based nonprofit you imagine will not become real because it is brilliant. It will become real if you keep working on it during the boring months when no one is paying attention.
From global childhood to global thinking in business and health
Lily was born in London, moved to Singapore as a toddler, then grew up in Los Angeles. She spent summers in Europe with her Hungarian family and kept up Mandarin through childhood tutors and high school classes.
This kind of movement shapes how you see systems. You stop thinking of any one way of doing things as “normal.” For future founders, especially in health, that mindset can be quietly powerful.
Language and “secret” advantage
Lily is bilingual in English and Hungarian, has working Mandarin, and basic French. In the United States, Hungarian almost functions as a secret code. She and her family can talk freely in public knowing very few people around them will understand.
In a business context, language skills often give three advantages:
- Access to stories, research, and case studies from other regions that never get translated.
- Stronger trust with clients or patients who share that language.
- A sense that you do not always have to fit into the dominant culture’s habits to do serious work.
If you think about health equity, this is directly relevant. Many future founders in medicine will build solutions not for a vague “general public,” but for specific groups with specific languages and needs. Lily’s comfort with crossing languages and cultures can encourage young women to treat their own background as an asset, not something to hide.
Travel, museums, and seeing bodies represented in different ways
Lily spent Saturdays visiting galleries and museums. Her research on art history, especially works like “Las Meninas,” connects back to how bodies, power, and gender are pictured.
Medicine, in its own way, is full of images too: anatomy charts, textbook diagrams, case photos, advertising for clinics, health posters in waiting rooms. Those images shape how patients feel about their bodies and what they think is “healthy” or “normal.”
Lily’s interest in curating art about beauty standards is not far from this. She asks: Who gets shown? In what light? Who looks active and who looks passive? Who is idealized and who is treated as a problem to fix?
Future founders in health can borrow that mindset:
- When you design a website for a new clinic, who do your stock photos show?
- When you build a health app, whose body types and skin tones appear in your illustrations?
- Do your patient stories reflect only one cultural view of family, gender, or age?
These choices affect who feels welcome, much like museum curation affects who feels spoken to. Lily’s art background makes her sensitive to this, and that awareness can ripple out to founders who follow her work.
Why her story matters for young women in medicine
You might be thinking: “I am in med school” or “I work full time in a clinic, I do not have extra hours for a blog or art projects.” That is fair. But you do not need Lily’s exact path to gain value from it.
What her story offers is a set of repeatable patterns that can fit into a medical life with some adaptation.
Pattern 1: Start small and public
Lily did not wait for a perfect platform. She started a blog and improved along the way. For a future female founder in medicine, a “small and public” starting point might be:
- A simple newsletter for your specialty that highlights women doing interesting work.
- A short online resource for patients with a specific condition you see often.
- A recurring webinar where you invite female health professionals to talk about their paths.
These projects do not have to become businesses right away. They are ways to practice building something that exists outside of your job description.
Pattern 2: Collect stories before you design solutions
Lily interviews female entrepreneurs and studies artist parents before she tries to “fix” anything. That habit translates directly to health settings.
If you are thinking about a startup or a new clinic model, talk to:
- Patients who fall through the cracks of the current system.
- Nurses, techs, and others who understand the daily workflow better than most managers.
- Women who tried to launch similar ideas and stopped. Ask why.
This step might feel slow, especially if you are used to fast decision making in clinical settings. But it prevents you from building something elegant that no one actually needs.
Pattern 3: Treat your “side” skills as central
Lily’s side interests are not really side. Her art history lens strengthens her gender research. Her blog sharpens her interviewing and communication. Her childhood businesses gave her comfort with sales and public interaction.
For women in medicine, similar “side” skills can be just as central for future founding work:
- Language skills that help you serve immigrant communities.
- Coding or data analysis that let you test ideas on your own, without waiting for an engineer.
- Teaching or public speaking that help your future company tell its story clearly.
Lily’s story suggests that you do not need to tuck these skills away. You can build with them, not in spite of them.
Questions medical readers might ask about Lily’s work
Q: I am in medical training with almost no free time. What is the smallest step I can borrow from her?
A: The smallest step is probably to start a structured habit of collecting stories. Once a week, write down one detailed story from your environment that shows a gender or equity issue in health: who got dismissed, who got praised, who was not in the room. You do not have to publish them right away. After a few months, look back and see what patterns appear. That set of notes can become the seed for a paper, a project, a startup idea, or at least a better understanding of where change is needed.
Q: I am not interested in art at all. Does Lily’s background still have anything to teach me?
A: Yes. You can ignore the art itself and focus on her process. She learns by looking closely at one case, asking who is visible and who is not, then connecting that to real people’s lives. In medicine, your “artworks” are case reports, clinic workflows, residency schedules, insurance rules. The method is the same: examine something specific, notice who pays the price, and then design around that reality instead of pretending it is neutral.
Q: I want to found something in health someday, but I do not feel like a “natural” entrepreneur. What does Lily’s story say about that?
A: Her story suggests that “natural” founders are often just people who practiced early and often, in low stakes ways. Lily sold slime, bracelets, and art. She ran a blog and an art class. None of those looked like step one of a formal startup journey. Taken together, they built her comfort with risk, rejection, and responsibility. You can do something similar within your limits: help run a small clinic project, join a research spin out, or start a modest online resource. The point is not to feel ready. It is to build the muscles you will need later, while the stakes are still manageable.
