A few months ago, I co-hosted a webinar for EPIC-X, together with Yulia Stark, founder of the EWA Group. The topic was financial literacy for women founders, and going in, I expected it to stay fairly technical. Term sheets, cash flow, that kind of thing.
It wasn't technical at all.
"Revenue is ego. Cash flow is oxygen."
That line is mine, and I stand by it. I learned it the hard way, the way most founders do. A big client feels wonderful. A signed contract feels like proof you've made it. But a signed contract doesn't pay salaries if the payment terms are bad, and growth can actually make your cash position worse if you have to hire, deliver, or pre-finance before the money lands.
Revenue is what people applaud. Cash flow is what lets you breathe, sleep at night, and say no to a bad deal. For me, that's where financial literacy actually starts.
Why this is a wellbeing conversation, not just a finance one
This is where the webinar connected to something I think about constantly, both through PLG and through Herculean Alliance, the company behind it.
At PLG, wellbeing has always meant something specific: women moving together, connecting across nationalities and companies, feeling good in their bodies and in a room full of people who've got their back. That's real, and it matters enormously.
But wellbeing is bigger than the physical and the social. In my own work, I think about it across five pillars: physical, mental, nutritional, social, and financial. The first two are the ones people usually picture, yoga pants, step challenges, a fruit basket in the office kitchen. The financial pillar rarely gets invited to that conversation, and yet financial stress eats mental space faster than almost anything else.
Whether you run a company or run a household, not knowing your own financial baseline means carrying a fog you don't need to carry. Once things become clearer, even slightly, you get back a sense of control, and that control is, in the end, a form of freedom.
The honest, uncomfortable part
Yulia said something during the session that stayed with me: "We don't invest in the industries women actually build in." It's an uncomfortable statement, because the usual advice to women is to simply be more confident, ask bigger, negotiate harder. Confidence matters, of course. But it doesn't fix a funding landscape that isn't always built around the sectors and businesses many women actually choose to build.
Which is exactly why financial literacy matters beyond any single pitch or paycheck. It's about knowing what kind of life you actually want, and what you're not willing to give away to get it.
Closing the gap at scale
Part of what we discussed was Nayra, a free, bilingual financial literacy platform for women and youth across the GCC, built by EWA in partnership with the UAE Ministry of Economy. I sit on its Executive Board, and this is exactly why: the earlier women understand the language of money, the less dependent they become on rooms where someone else holds all the vocabulary.
For me, this was never really about becoming a finance person. It's about becoming freer. And freedom, in the end, is the thing every one of our five wellbeing pillars is quietly working toward.
