In the latest episode of What the Tech from Boast we sat down with Mikayla Stewart, Co-Founder and CTO of Athena Collective, a platform and community designed to ensure that every female entrepreneur has the resources and tools they need to succeed—regardless of background or bank balance.
Mikayla brings a unique background to this mission: she’s served as a fractional COO for 12+ stealth-stage startups, turning chaotic early-stage businesses into well-oiled machines. More recently, she’s been building custom AI-powered applications that solve operational problems without unnecessary bloat. At Athena Collective, she’s channeling all that operational expertise and technical skill into solving a problem that has frustrated her for years: the systematic disadvantage female founders face when building businesses.
Entrepreneurship Was Built In
Mikayla’s journey into entrepreneurship started young, shaped by a unique combination of influences. “My dad always instilled in me: there’s always something else. Who cares if you fail? There will be another door,” she explains.
But alongside that entrepreneurial freedom came structure. Her British mother and grandmother provided rigid frameworks. Her Marine grandfather added discipline. The combination? “You get someone who’s just like, I don’t know, let’s just see what happens. But you approach it with such structure—we’re just gonna tackle it one thing after another. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.”
That balance between experimentation and execution has defined Mikayla’s approach to building businesses and, now, to building the infrastructure that helps other women build theirs.
Born From Frustration
Athena Collective emerged from a pattern Mikayla couldn’t ignore while working at Bit3, a consulting company where she worked with startups across the US and Canada.
“It was roughly an even split between men and women,” Mikayla recalls. “But if I would give feedback or advice to a male founder, they’re like, ‘Oh, let me call this guy,’ or ‘I know someone who’s really good at this.’ They just have this Rolodex that never ends and I don’t get it. I don’t understand how it’s just instilled in them.”
Female founders? A completely different response: “They were just like, ‘So where do I start?’ They always went into ‘Alright, we’re here. What’s next? What do we do?’ And I was so frustrated and annoyed that women don’t have the people to call and they don’t have the support.”
Even worse, many organizations claiming to support female founders do it “in kind of a gross way”—checking DEI boxes or looking to take advantage rather than genuinely helping.
Mikayla and her co-founder Sarah wanted to fix it. “We wanted things to just be easier for other people.”
More Than Just Community
Mikayla is refreshingly clear-eyed about what community alone can and can’t accomplish.
“I am really big on: community is not going to solve all the problems. I love community—there are so many that have been instrumental in my career. But they don’t replace the tactical know-how.”
Athena Collective combines three critical elements:
- Community Connection Bringing women together from zero through to exit. Mikayla focuses on early-stage founders while Sarah works with companies closer to exit, creating coverage across the entire journey.
- Technical Knowledge The tactical pieces that founders need but don’t know how to access: How do you define your sales process? What does it mean to create an ICP? If you’re a traditional business owner (like a real estate agent), how do you figure out who your ideal client is?
- Smart Technology AI-powered tools that don’t just throw generic answers at problems, but actually meet founders where they are and guide them through the right questions for their specific situation.
The Recommendations Engine That Meets You Where You Are
Mikayla built a recommendations engine that captures detailed information about each founder:
- Who you are and what you’re trying to build
- Whether you’re building something to pay the bills or the next unicorn
- What stage you’re at and what walls you’re hitting
- How you learn best (diving through articles vs. workshops and activities)
- What you’re looking at on the platform
The algorithm then creates personalized learning paths: “Okay, you’re at this stage, you seem to be really focused on operations right now. Here’s a learning path that’s gonna help you with where you’re at, your business type, and the questions you should be asking to get to that next step.”
The goal isn’t just information delivery; it’s skill competency. Helping founders build the foundational knowledge they need to take their business where they want it to go.
Why There’s No LLM in the Platform (On Purpose)
One of the most interesting technical decisions: Athena Collective deliberately doesn’t use LLMs in the platform.
“I love LLMs. You will see it on my LinkedIn—I talk about them all the time. I use them all the time. Me and Cursor, we’re like this,” Mikayla says. “But it’s not going to help our founders if everything you’re doing is just taking the problems you need to solve and we throw it into an LLM and surface up document after document. That’s not valuable.”
Her philosophy: Founders need foundational skills and knowledge to be able to question what consultants or AI tell them.
“There are critical questions you need to be able to answer as a founder to be truly successful, and there is foundational business knowledge that’s really critical to know. Most of the business books I read are from the seventies because they were so tactical, so clear-cut. New business books are just fluffier language of the same thing, but it’s harder to pull out the insights.”
Athena brings founders back to clear-cut tactical foundations—no Instagram virality language, no fluff. Just what actually works.
Launching During Wedding Week
The commitment to Athena Collective is real. Mikayla launched the current version of the platform the week of her wedding, while the team was at Web Summit.
“I was putting features into production while doing the painting for our table signs and the calligraphy for the seating chart and answering messages from the team at Web Summit,” she laughs.
As a solo technical founder building the entire platform herself (with occasional database architecture help from her husband), she moves fast. “I moved so fast as a single developer. I’m really impressed with myself because this is my first proper build of just me.”
The Unexpected Global Reach
What started with Mikayla and Sarah’s North American networks is expanding organically. They had a random influx of members from Australia one week after being featured in the Female Startup Club newsletter.
Mikayla’s response? She dove into Australian tax rules for entrepreneurs to make sure those members had relevant resources. “I actually had a member come to me and she was like, ‘I didn’t expect anything about Australia.’ And I was like, ‘Well, you’re here. I wanted to make sure there was something for you.'”
After attending Slush in Helsinki (courtesy of Helsinki Ventures), Mikayla connected with founders from Lithuania and an all-female hacker house based in London. The mission is expanding to English-speaking countries and Western Europe—but the mindset is global.
“There’s 252,000 registered female majority-owned companies in the world. That doesn’t include anyone with a female in the minority. That doesn’t include unregistered companies because data shows a lot of women don’t register their companies because they think they’re just hobbies.”
Even if Athena never reaches everywhere, Mikayla’s mission is clear: “If one person tells me they’ve grown their business or hit their goal because of us, my mission is accomplished. I have no illusion that we will solve the entire problem. But I wanna see how far we get into it.”
What’s Next for 2026
Official Curriculum Product – Launching in January, a comprehensive learning system built into the platform
Event Circuit – Web Summit in Vancouver, Ed Tech Week stops (New York, Boston, San Francisco, LA) with Athena events at each, Women in Tech Regatta in Vancouver
Moving-Body Events – As an ultra-marathon and triathlon athlete, Mikayla loves hosting walks and active networking events during tech weeks
Continuous Platform Evolution – “I add new features weekly. My brain just goes on spirals, so our product looks radically different all the time. People put in requests and I’m like, ‘We can do that.'”
Key Takeaways
Community alone doesn’t solve the problem – It needs to be complemented with tactical know-how and smart technology that meets founders where they are.
The boys club is real – Male founders have automatic access to networks and resources that female founders have to actively search for. That systematic disadvantage needs infrastructure to overcome.
Foundational knowledge matters – Before throwing LLMs at problems, founders need the core skills to evaluate solutions and question advice.
Meet people where they are – Personalized learning paths based on business stage, learning style, and specific challenges work better than one-size-fits-all content.
Global problems deserve persistent solutions – You might not solve everything, but if you help one person succeed, the mission has value.
