The Makers Among Us: Kate Jackson

Every founder begins with a question. For Bluffer Kate Jackson, it started in a classroom. An entrepreneurship lecturer at Northwestern University, Jackson noticed something she couldn’t ignore. After the pandemic, fewer young women were enrolling in her classes. Curious why, she began asking. “The answers kept sounding the same,” she recalls. “Entrepreneurship is for guys.” “Guys are the ones who get funded.” “Startups weren’t built for people like me.”

Jackson understood where those beliefs came from, but she also knew they weren’t true. “The question was never whether these young women were capable,” she says. “I was watching them and I knew they were.”

What was missing wasn’t talent. It was visibility. “If you’ve never watched a woman stand up in a room full of investors and make her case, it’s awfully hard to picture yourself doing it.” That realization became the foundation for Girl Gonna Launch, a nonprofit designed to help girls see themselves as founders, innovators, and leaders before the world tells them otherwise. The organization teaches more than entrepreneurship. Participants learn to think like investors, solve problems creatively, and build confidence through experience. “You have to believe you can do it before you’ll ever try,” Jackson says. “That belief doesn’t come out of nowhere. It gets built.”

For Jackson, success isn’t measured by how many companies' participants eventually launch. She hopes they become women who stay curious, take risks, recover from failure, and trust themselves enough to speak up—even when they’re the only woman in the room. “I want to raise up a generation of girls who understand, without anybody having to tell them, that they belong in every room they walk into,” she says. “Not as guests. Not as the exception. As people who are supposed to be there.”

Her optimism is backed by evidence. Research shows that for every dollar of funding received, startups founded by women generate more revenue than those founded by men - a reminder that the challenge has never been ability, but opportunity. Yet Jackson believes the greatest return isn’t measured in dollars. It’s watching a girl realize she’s capable of building something the world has never seen before.