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She built it slowly, interview by interview, from her bedroom in Los Angeles, mostly on weekends, with a Google Doc, a basic WordPress site, and a long list of women she wanted to talk to. No big team. No funding. Just one teenager who kept emailing strangers until they started saying yes. That is how the global female founder blog that many people now know through Lily Konkoly actually began.

If you are used to medical case reports or academic papers, this kind of project might sound a bit loose at first. But the process behind it is not very different from research or clinical work. You gather data, you listen to people, you notice patterns, and then you share what might help the next person who walks through the door.

From London and Singapore to Los Angeles: why a global lens came naturally

Lily did not set out to build a blog that would speak to readers in 50 countries. That part happened almost by accident. Her childhood had already done the global work for her.

She was born in London. Then her family moved to Singapore. As a preschooler she sat in a half-American, half-Chinese classroom, learning Mandarin and watching different cultures meet in the same room. By the time she arrived in Los Angeles, switching between contexts felt normal.

At home, Hungarian was the main language. Nearly all of her extended family lives in Europe, so summers often meant flying back, speaking Hungarian all day, and slipping into what many immigrant families know well: one language inside the house, another outside. Mandarin sat on top of that. Her Chinese teacher from Singapore actually moved in as an au pair in Los Angeles for several years so the kids could keep learning.

Lily did not pick “global” as a brand. It was already built into how she learned to talk, travel, and notice people.

When she eventually started interviewing female founders from around the world, calling a chef in Peru or a maker in Hungary did not feel exotic. It felt like the next version of summer visits, just with better Wi-Fi and a long list of questions.

Why a teenager cared about gender bias long before college

The other piece behind the blog is less glamorous and probably more relevant if you work in medicine or research. Lily grew up in an all-girls school and spent a lot of time around art, museums, and academic mentors who talked openly about bias.

At school, conversations about who gets seen and who gets ignored started early. In the art world, she noticed that mothers often stepped back from visibility, while fathers were praised for simply “doing both.” That double standard bothered her. It still does.

During her senior year, she designed an honors research project on the gap between maternity and paternity in the art world. She looked at how becoming a mother could quietly lower expectations of a woman’s career, while becoming a father could raise them. It felt familiar to what happens to women in medicine who come back from parental leave and face questions that their male colleagues never hear.

Her research question was simple: why do we read the same life event, like having a child, as professional “risk” for women and professional “depth” for men?

That same question is at the heart of her blog. Just in a different format. Instead of charts and exhibit labels, she uses conversations with founders who have lived through those double standards in real time.

How the blog actually started: not as a big idea, but as a small habit

Lily began writing the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia around 2020. She was still in high school, busy with swimming practices, water polo, homework, and a side project selling slime with her brother. The blog did not start as a polished media venture. It started like a small research habit.

Her weekly routine looked a bit like this:

• Set aside about 4 hours per week
• Look for women doing interesting work, often with low public recognition
• Reach out with simple, respectful cold emails
• Prepare questions, almost like an interview guide
• Talk, listen, and then write their story in clear language

This rhythm is very close to how a young researcher learns to run a study. It is not fast, and it is not glamorous. It is repeated contact, note taking, and revision.

Why focusing on underrepresented voices made sense

Lily had already co-founded Teen Art Market, a digital gallery for students. There she saw how hard it was for young or lesser-known artists to sell work when they did not already have a name. That experience shaped how she thought about visibility.

When she turned to food and entrepreneurship, she carried the same idea. She was not interested only in founders who were already famous. She wanted to talk to women who were building something important without a big spotlight, especially in countries where women in business face stronger social pushback.

It is very close to the way medicine sometimes works when it is at its best. Not just asking what is happening in elite hospitals, but also paying attention to small clinics, rural areas, and early-career professionals who do not yet have titles, but see the daily reality up close.

Cold emails that did not feel cold

One of the most practical skills behind the blog is something many students and young professionals struggle with: reaching out to strangers. Lily did a lot of cold calling and cold emailing. Over 200 interviews with women in 50+ countries grew from those messages.

Looking at how she worked, a rough structure appears:

Step	What she did	Why it worked
Research	Read about the person, their work, and their context before reaching out.	People can tell when you know enough to ask real questions.
Short introduction	One or two sentences on who she is and what the blog focuses on.	Respect for their time, no long biography up front.
Clear ask	Proposed a short interview or email exchange with a time frame.	Busy founders like concrete requests.
Why them	Named one or two reasons their story felt important.	Makes the invite personal instead of generic.
Gratitude	Thanked them whether they said yes or no.	Builds long-term goodwill and future contact.

In a way, this is similar to writing to a senior clinician or PI when you are trying to join a lab. Too many people send vague messages. Lily was specific, and she respected context. She read about local food cultures, political situations, and gender norms before each conversation. That shows up in the interviews because she rarely asks only surface questions.

Turning interviews into stories instead of transcripts

Plenty of blogs publish raw Q&A sessions. Lily chose a slower path. She listened, then shaped the material into stories. There is nothing wrong with a transcript, but she wanted the reader to feel like they were sitting across from the founder, not sorting through a call log.

Her process, as she describes it, sounds similar to preparing a patient case that will actually be useful to colleagues:

• Start with the context: who this person is and where they work
• Highlight one or two main decisions or turning points
• Note the barriers they faced, with concrete details
• Show what they tried, including failures and wrong turns
• End with something the reader can carry into their own choices

In medicine, you have to strip away noise while keeping enough detail to keep the case real. She aimed for something similar. No hype, no miracle founder narrative. Instead, she leaned on careful observation and clear language.

Why this approach matters for readers used to medical content

If you usually read medical journals, guidelines, or case reports, you might be skeptical of founder stories. It can feel like fluff. But Lily’s approach is close to qualitative research. She looks for patterns across stories: where do women lose opportunities, when does bias show up strongest, and what small steps helped them keep going.

Seen through that lens, her blog is like a long, informal study of how women in different regions navigate pressure, stigma, and expectations in their working lives.

For many women in healthcare, these themes are not abstract. Things like:

• Balancing family planning with training schedules
• Being talked over in meetings or case conferences
• Hidden expectations about emotional labor with patients and staff
• Unequal pay or promotion tracks that reward visibility over quiet work

When a founder in Nairobi or Budapest talks to Lily about these pressures in her industry, you may hear your own workplace in their story, even if your field is surgery, nursing, or public health.

Doing research and running a blog at the same time

Lily’s formal research training shaped how she ran the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia. Through Scholar Launch, she spent ten weeks on Velázquez’s painting “Las Meninas,” working through details frame by frame. She also worked with a professor from RISD on beauty standards in art across history.

From the outside, that might seem far from interviewing chefs and founders. But the methods overlap:

• Careful observation
• Respect for context
• Asking why a detail appears in one place and not another
• Tracing how power and gender shape what we see

In “Las Meninas,” who stands at the center and who stays at the margins is not random. In her interviews, who gets quoted first, who gets full paragraphs, and whose story is told again is also not random. It reflects Lily’s choice to move underrepresented voices closer to the center of the frame.

Why so many of her interviews are with women in food

One recurring thread in Lily’s blog is food. She has done hundreds of interviews with women in the culinary world: chefs, bakers, small food business owners across 50+ countries. That pattern is not accidental.

Cooking was always part of her home life. Her family is, in her words, a “kitchen family.” They cooked often, filmed simple recipe videos, and were invited to appear on food television. They actually turned down some TV opportunities so they could keep their summers free for travel and family time. Food for them was less about performance and more about daily connection.

When she started talking to women chefs, she saw how cultural expectations sit heavily on food and gender. In many societies, women are expected to cook at home, but professional kitchens are dominated by men. The jump from home cooking to chef is not just about skill. It is about who is given permission to take up space, stay late, travel for training, and be loud about their work.

This is where the link to medicine becomes clearer. In many countries, women tend to carry unpaid care work at home while also working full time in caring professions like nursing, pediatrics, or primary care. That double load has physical and mental health effects. It shapes burnout, sleep, stress markers, and long-term well-being.

When Lily listens to a chef in Argentina describe 16-hour shifts, harassment from senior staff, or guilt about children at home, she is hearing a pattern that appears in many hospitals too. Different setting, similar pressure points.

Building a feminist food community without calling it a “project”

From those interviews, Lily helped build an informal feminist food community. There were no large campaigns. Instead, it grew through:

• Repeated contact with founders, chefs, and makers
• Sharing their stories across the blog and social channels
• Connecting women in different countries who had similar goals

People sometimes assume “community building” means big events, branding, and sponsorships. Here it looked quieter. A message sent after publication. A connection made between two chefs who had never met. A follow-up months later to see how a restaurant was doing through a new wave of restrictions or economic shifts.

Doctors and researchers might see something familiar here. Meaningful professional communities often start with:

• A few people who care about the same problem
• Regular, honest conversations
• Willingness to share strategies, not just successes

Lily’s blog gave women a place to speak about stress, financial strain, and bias in a straightforward way. That kind of narrative space is related to mental health. Being able to name what is happening is part of coping with it.

Balancing high school, sport, and a global interview schedule

There is a practical question many people ask: how did she find the time to run a global blog as a teenager?

Her schedule was not light. She was a competitive swimmer for about ten years, then played water polo for three years in high school. During the pandemic, when pools in Los Angeles closed, her team trained in the ocean for two hours a day. On top of that came schoolwork, research, LEGO builds, and family life.

The only way she kept the blog going was by treating it like training. Not as a huge one-time push, but as small, repeated sessions. About four hours per week over several years, which adds up to over 50 posts and 200+ interviews.

This rhythm might feel familiar if you practice medicine or study science:

Area	Her routine	Parallel in medicine/research
Skill building	Weekly writing and interviewing practice	Regular journal clubs, case reviews, or lab meetings
Time blocks	Dedicated hours protected for the blog	Clinic days, protected research time
Feedback	Listening to how founders reacted to pieces	Patient feedback, peer review, supervisor comments
Endurance	Keeping the project alive over years, not weeks	Long-term trials, multi-year studies, residency

She did not remove everything else from her life to do this. She kept her sports, her travel, her language practice. That made the process slower, but it also meant she brought more range and resilience into the blog.

Why this kind of blog matters for health and medicine readers

You might still be asking a fair question: why should someone in healthcare care about a blog on female founders?

There are at least three links that show up again and again in Lily’s work.

1. Gender bias as a shared structure

The patterns she saw in art and entrepreneurship look similar to patterns in medicine:

• Women praised for “caring” roles, but blocked from leadership
• Assumptions that mothers are less committed to career
• Higher scrutiny on appearance and tone
• Unequal pay and slower promotion for the same work

When these stories get told publicly, they give people language for what they feel. That can influence policy debates, mentorship programs, and even informal conversations in hospitals.

2. Work conditions and health outcomes

Many founders she interviews talk about long hours, stress, sleep loss, and the physical wear of constant standing, cooking, travel, or meetings. For women who already carry more domestic work, this adds up.

From a medical angle, this connects to:

• Cardiovascular risk under chronic stress
• Mental health, including anxiety and depression
• Reproductive health and the impact of long shifts
• Occupational health, especially in kitchens and factories

Hearing these stories in plain language can help clinicians understand what is behind a patient’s brief note of “stress at work” or “tired all the time.” It is very rarely just about one job. It is about invisible expectations around gender and care.

3. Role models for younger women in science and health

Lily started this blog in high school, long before Cornell and formal art history training. Many of the women she interviewed built careers in environments that did not fully welcome them. That mix is powerful for younger readers.

When a teenage girl reads about a chef who pushed through harassment to open her own kitchen, she might not become a chef, but she may feel bolder asking for a research position or a residency slot.

Role models do not have to be in the same field to influence confidence. They just have to model what it looks like to hold steady when the structure around you is not neutral.

What Lily’s process can teach you if you want to start your own “global” project

If you are thinking about starting a similar project, maybe on women in medicine, public health, or medical art, you can pull a few simple practices from Lily’s work. None of this requires a big platform at the beginning.

Start from genuine curiosity, not a brand plan

Lily was curious about why women had to work harder for the same outcome. That curiosity showed up in her art research, her slime business, her Teen Art Market, and her blog.

If you are more drawn to topics like burnout among residents, or how nurses hold teams together during crises, you can start there. Do not force yourself to copy a food focus if that is not honest for you.

Use simple tools and keep the bar low at the beginning

Her setup was basic:

• Google Docs or Word for drafts
• Simple WordPress site
• Email, social media DMs, and sometimes phone calls

Over time, the work made the platform, not the other way around. A similar approach could work if you want to document experiences of women in cardiology, or midwives in rural areas, or patients navigating chronic illness.

Let your other interests feed the project

At first glance, LEGO builds, competitive swimming, and long summers in Hungary do not scream “female founder blog.” Yet they shaped:

• Her patience for complex builds and long projects
• Her comfort with discipline and training
• Her understanding of cultural detail and language

If you already have a background in biology, statistics, or clinical communication, those skills can make your interviews stronger. You can ask better follow-up questions about health, stress, or body impacts than a typical business reporter might.

A quick Q&A for readers who are still undecided

Q: Does a project like Lily’s really change anything, or is it just “content”?

A: It will not replace policy changes or legal reform. But stories can shift what people see as normal. When you read dozens of accounts of women facing the same type of barrier, it becomes harder to call each case “an exception.” That shift in shared understanding often comes before structural change.

Q: I work in medicine and have limited time. Is it realistic to start my own blog or interview project?

A: Probably not if you picture yourself publishing three times a week. But Lily’s rhythm of four hours per week is more flexible than it sounds. One in-depth story per month can still build into a meaningful archive over a few years. The key is consistency, not volume.

Q: How do I find the “right” people to interview if I want to focus on women in health?

A: You may already know more people than you think. Look around your hospital, community clinic, or training program. There are nurses, junior doctors, technicians, social workers, and patients with rich stories that never reach print. Start close to your daily life. That is what Lily did with art and food. The global reach came later.

Q: Is it better to aim for a big audience from the start?

A: Not necessarily. Lily’s early posts did not reach thousands of readers. But the conversations were still real, and the skills she built through them made later work stronger. For medical and health readers, a small, engaged group of peers who actually use what you publish can be more meaningful than large but shallow reach.

If you do decide to start something, the most practical lesson from Lily’s story might be the simplest one: pick one person, ask good questions, and write their story as clearly as you can. Then repeat that process long enough for the patterns to show themselves.