The 4th Wealth Catalyst Summit - with Syama Bunten
San Francisco, October 16.
You are invited to a private gathering for women building, deploying and preserving wealth creatively.
Join us at the Historic Klamath.
“This is a peer-led room. Everybody was a peer. Anybody in that room could have been on stage.”
Marcia Dawood, Angel Investor, Author and Speaker
Who we design the room for
The Wealth Catalyst Summit is highly curated.
Past summits have convened
Founders
Inheritors
Women managing family capital and stepping into intention and vision.
Investors
Writing their first checks or their hundredth, across every stage of the allocation journey.
Operators
Running companies at scale, building wealth through ownership, and learning how to wield it.
PhilaNthropists
Directing capital with greater strategy, clarity, and conviction toward the futures they want to help build.
Board Directors
Bringing governance, influence, and strategic perspective to the rooms where consequential decisions get made.
Sponsored by
Two ways capital shows up in the room.
Earnership
You took the risk. You built the company, climbed the ladder, or became the first in your family to create wealth on your own terms. You are part of the $30 trillion women are coming into ownership of by 2030.
You need a room that matches your ambition.
Inheritorship
You are a steward of capital: a critical part of the $124 trillion intergenerational and spousal wealth transfer passing by 2048. You are deciding what gets preserved, what gets deployed, and what gets built.
You need a peer group equal to that responsibility.
Our Speakers Include
SPEAKERS ANNOUNCED AS CONFIRMED. MORE TO FOLLOW.
Sunitha Anand
Founder & 2x Acquirer, AddsVal CPAs & Advisory
Frmr PwC & Grant Thornton, CPA & Certified Tax Coach
Samina Bari
Founder & CEO, Farewell
Led $40B+ in Biotech M&A & Operating Partner, How Women Invest
Cat Berman
Co-Founder & CEO, CNote, $1B+ Capital Deployed
Frmr Managing Director, Charles Schwab, 3x Founder
AMY DORNBUSCH
Founder, AtlasDaughters, Mother-Daughter Philanthropy
Director, Marks Family Foundation
Jesse Draper
4th Generation VC, Founder Halogen Ventures
100+ Investments, 6 Unicorns, $15B Portfolio Value
Roberta Hudy Valentine
Founder, nvstIRA, Self-Directed IRA Advocate
Frmr Director, Equity Trust Company
Malina Johnson
Investor & Advisor Athena Alliance
Former GM, Global Copilot AI GTM, Microsoft
Jaimie Mayer
Frmr Chair, Nathan Cummings Foundation, 4th Generation
Founder, Middle Child Philanthropy
Mica Mayo
Co-Founder, Untapped Investing, Angel Syndicate
Frmr VP, ServiceNow, Oracle & Sun Microsystems
The working agenda
Panels will include:
9:00 AM
Doors, Breakfast & Peer Matches
10:00 AM
Opening: The Capital Agency Equation
Syama Bunten
10:15 AM
Every Financial Decision Comes Down to This
Emily Scott
Every financial decision you make comes from somewhere. The investments you choose, the risks you take, the opportunities you dismiss, even what you believe is possible for you. Long before we had money of our own, we were absorbing ideas about it from the people around us.
Research in financial psychology shows that our core beliefs about money begin forming in childhood, with children as young as five already demonstrating financial behaviors that can carry into adulthood. But those beliefs do not stop forming at five. Parents, teachers, bosses, partners, friends and culture continue to model what money means, who is good with it, who gets to have it, and what someone like us is supposed to do with it.
Over time, those stories become identity. I’m not good with money. I’m too old to start. I’m not an investor. That kind of opportunity isn’t for people like me. We can spend decades reinforcing an identity without realizing we are doing it.
Emily Scott has spent more than 30 years helping women and families navigate both the human and technical sides of money. She opens the day by helping us understand where our financial instincts come from, because today you will encounter new ideas, investments and possibilities.
Knowing what is behind your immediate yes, no, or not right now gives you the opportunity to question it, and perhaps make a different choice.
10:45 AM
The Cycle We Are In
Ophira Edut
We are constantly looking for better information. Market cycles. Economic indicators. Consumer behavior. Demographic shifts. The signals that might help us understand what is changing, what is coming, and where opportunity might be hiding.
But some of the world's most successful investors and business leaders have looked beyond conventional data too. J.P. Morgan famously consulted astrologer Evangeline Adams. Today, astrology is having another moment, with a new generation using it less as prediction and more as another framework for understanding timing, patterns and cycles.
Over the last year, as we traveled the country building Wealth Catalyst, we looked at every kind of data to understand where women were ready for these conversations, which markets we should enter, and even when we should be there. Astrology was one of those inputs.
Celebrity astrologer and AstroTwins co-founder Ophira Edut takes us through the larger cycles we are living in now and what they may suggest about the period ahead.
This is not about handing your decisions over to the stars. It is about expanding the information you are willing to consider. The more perspectives you have, the better equipped you are to recognize patterns, question assumptions, and ultimately decide for yourself what information matters and what you want to do with it.
11:15 AM
Coffee Break
11:30 AM
The Optionality You’ve Earned
Sunitha Anand • Malina Johnson
We tend to think about successful careers as a straight line. Build expertise. Move up. Earn more. Take on more responsibility. But at some point, the more interesting question becomes not how far you can go on the path you are on, but what else everything you have built makes possible.
The data challenges the idea that our biggest moves need to happen early. Research from MIT and the U.S. Census Bureau found that the average founder of the fastest-growing new ventures is 45. Experience, relationships, pattern recognition, reputation and access to capital compound over time.
That creates optionality. The executive becomes a founder. The founder takes a corporate role. The CEO becomes an investor or board director. The operator becomes an acquirer. What can look like a pivot from the outside may actually be an intentional decision to deploy what you have built in an entirely new way.
The advantage of experience is not simply that you know more. It is that you have more to work with.
This conversation is an invitation to take inventory of what you have accumulated and ask a different question: What could I do now that I could not have done ten years ago?
12:00 PM
The Questions You Should Be Asking But Aren’t
Libby Clark
You hired the experts. A wealth advisor. An accountant. An estate planner. An attorney. They are smart, accomplished and good at what they do. But there is a problem: how do you know what they are not telling you?
Nearly 4 in 10 investors have switched or added an advisor in recent years, with unmet needs among the leading reasons. Often the issue is not bad advice. It is the strategy that was never surfaced, the opportunity that fell outside one advisor’s lane, or the question you did not know enough to ask.
And missed coordination can be expensive. A tax strategy considered after a transaction may be too late. An estate planning opportunity can disappear once an asset appreciates or changes hands. An investment decision made without considering liquidity can create problems somewhere else. Your accountant, attorney and wealth advisor can each be doing excellent work, while no one is looking across the entire picture.
So who is connecting the dots? What should your advisors be asking each other? What should you be asking them? And how do you know whether the team that got you here is the team you need for what comes next?
You do not need to know everything your advisors know. But you need to know enough to unlock what they know.
12:30 PM
When Life Changes, So Does the Portfolio
Robin Hauser • Samina Bari • Holly Ruxin
We build portfolios around assumptions. How much we earn. Who we share our life with. What we own. How much risk we can take. What we are building toward. Then life changes, and suddenly the portfolio built for one version of your life may no longer fit the one you are living.
Divorce, the death of a spouse, an inheritance, the sale of a business, aging parents, or a shift in how you want to spend the next decade can change far more than a balance sheet. Women are particularly likely to face these transitions while simultaneously taking greater responsibility for financial decisions. In the coming years, trillions of dollars in assets are expected to shift into women's control as part of the broader intergenerational transfer of wealth.
Those moments can change what you need from your capital. Liquidity may matter more. Concentration that once made sense may become a risk. Tax and estate strategies may need to change. An investment you were comfortable holding for twenty years may no longer serve the life you want now.
This conversation gets personal about how women have changed their own allocations after major life events, what they learned only by going through them, and what they now see differently.
Because sometimes the most important portfolio question is not “What should I invest in?” It is “What does my money need to do for my life now?”
1:00 PM
Lunch
2:15 PM
The Capital You Already Have
Cat Berman • Laura Spivy • Roberta Hudy Valentine
When we think about making a new investment, we usually start with the same question: where will the money come from? But there may be more investable capital already sitting inside your financial life than you realize.
Retirement accounts hold trillions of dollars in the U.S., yet most are invested within the menu of traditional stocks, bonds and funds offered by a custodian. Self-directed IRAs can open access to a much broader universe, including private companies, private funds and real estate. Donor-advised funds offer another overlooked pool of capital. Assets contributed for future giving can potentially be invested while they wait to be granted, including in certain private-market opportunities when properly structured.
Then there is cash. The money sitting in savings, money market accounts and other short-term vehicles while you decide what to do next. Where it sits, what it earns and what role it plays in the rest of your portfolio are investment decisions too.
This session takes an inventory of the capital you may already control and explores what different accounts can actually do, where the rules and restrictions matter, and what options you may not have known were available.
Before looking for more capital, it may be worth asking: What is the capital I already have doing right now?
2:45 PM
The Exit Construction & What Comes Next
Leah Solivan • Megan Gardner
You spend years building the company. But when it comes time to sell it, decisions made long before the offer arrives can determine how much of the value you actually keep.
For founders, the stakes can be enormous. Qualified Small Business Stock can potentially exclude millions of dollars in capital gains from federal taxes, but eligibility and planning opportunities depend on decisions made well before an exit. The same is true for estate planning, charitable giving, ownership structures and how equity is held. Once the buyer is at the table, some of the most valuable moves may no longer be available.
Leah Solivan founded TaskRabbit in 2008, built it into an international marketplace, and ultimately oversaw its sale to IKEA in 2017. Megan Gardner brokered the transaction. Together, they take us inside the exit from two sides of the table: what Leah was weighing as the founder, what Megan could see from the deal side, what needed to happen before the sale, and which decisions become harder or impossible once a transaction is underway.
Then the deal closes and the problem changes. Wealth that was concentrated in a company you knew intimately is suddenly liquid. Now you have to decide what to do with it, how much risk to take, who to trust, and what you want to build next.
An exit is a liquidity event. It is also one of the biggest capital allocation decisions a founder will ever make.
3:15 PM
Investing in New Headlines
Reema Khan • Jesse Draper • Mica Mayo
Some of the most consequential companies of the next decade are being built in markets that many investors still struggle to see. Space. Quantum computing. AI infrastructure. Childcare. The future of family. New models of health and caregiving. The opportunities look very different, but they have something in common: the investors getting there early are seeing something others have not yet recognized.
Reema Khan invests at the frontier. Through Green Sands, she backs deep tech, AI and space companies including SpaceX, Axiom Space, X-energy and Pasqal. Her lens is long-term and geopolitically informed: which foundational technologies have the potential to reshape industries, economies and global power?
Jesse Draper looks for another kind of blind spot. Through Halogen Ventures, she has made more than 100 investments in female-founded companies, increasingly focusing on the future of family. Childcare, health, financial wellbeing and the infrastructure of everyday life have historically been dismissed as niche markets. Jesse sees enormous businesses hiding inside problems millions of families experience every day.
Two investors. Two very different ways of seeing what others miss.
How do they recognize an opportunity before consensus forms around it? How long are they willing to wait? When do they invest through a fund, an SPV or directly? And what makes an exciting future actually investable?
The next big market may already be visible. The advantage is learning how to see it differently.
3:45 PM
Connection Exercise
Lotus Wong
4:15 PM
Champagne Reset
&
4:45 PM
Unconventional Impact
Kelly Ann Winget
We usually talk about impact as something we do with a portion of our capital. We invest for returns over here. We give over there. Maybe we add an impact allocation somewhere in between. Kelly Ann Winget challenges the premise that those decisions need to live in separate buckets.
Kelly has spent nearly two decades inside the mechanics of private capital, working across more than 250 deals and helping raise nearly $1 billion. Today, through Alternative Wealth Partners, she invests across private businesses and real assets in sectors including energy, infrastructure, manufacturing and supply chain.
Her approach to impact is unconventional. Instead of starting with a label, start with what the capital actually does. Who owns the business? Who gets access to the investment? What jobs does it create? What gets built? Who participates in the upside? And who gets to become an investor in the first place?
Ownership adds another dimension. Writing a check can support an outcome. Investing can give you exposure to it. But owning or controlling an asset can give you the ability to influence how value is created, where profits flow, and what happens next.
The question becomes bigger than whether an investment qualifies as “impact.” What is your capital actually building, and are you proud to stand behind it?
5:15 PM
What Will Your Wealth Set in Motion?
Amy Dornbusch • Jaimie Mayer
We spend decades thinking about how to build wealth. Eventually, a different question emerges: what do you want that wealth to make possible?
That question is becoming increasingly consequential as trillions of dollars move between generations. But transferring assets is only one part of the equation. Families are also transferring values, decision-making power, relationships and responsibility. How you prepare the next generation to inherit those things may matter as much as the structures you use to transfer the money.
Jaimie Mayer knows what it means to inherit a philanthropic legacy and then help evolve it. A fourth-generation family philanthropist, she spent seven years chairing the Nathan Cummings Foundation, where she helped lead the decision to align 100% of the foundation's assets with its mission. Today, she works with multigenerational families navigating the complicated intersection of wealth, values, power and generational change.
Amy Dornbusch is approaching the next generation from another direction. As Director of the Marks Family Foundation, an investor and founder of AtlasDaughters, she is creating experiences that bring children directly into philanthropy, exposing them to the people and problems their capital can affect rather than waiting until adulthood to begin the conversation.
Together, they ask a bigger question about legacy: Are we simply preparing the next generation to receive wealth, or are we preparing them to know what to do with it?
5:45 PM
There Is More Than One Way to Fund the Deal
Mel Dorman • Lauren Luckey
Mel Dorman bought a Portland triplex with just $500 of her own cash in the deal. Lauren Luckey bought her first business for $1. Neither opportunity began with a traditional lender handing them the capital they needed.
Mel spent her career in social work before a family crisis changed the way she thought about money and financial security. She discovered seller financing and learned that the terms of a deal could sometimes matter as much as the purchase price. Within five years, she had built a multimillion-dollar real estate portfolio using creative financing strategies.
Lauren went from Army officer to entrepreneur, ultimately owning 16 businesses and completing multiple exits. Along the way, she experienced the other side of the capital equation: what happens when a fundamentally good business needs cash to operate, grow or simply bridge the gap between doing the work and getting paid. Today, she provides working capital to other business owners facing that problem.
Their stories challenge a deeply held assumption about wealth building: that access comes first and opportunity follows.
Sometimes the opportunity comes first, and the work is figuring out how to structure the capital around it.
Seller financing, acquisition structures and alternative business financing offer different ways to do exactly that. The question becomes less “Do I have enough money to do this?” and more “How else could this deal get done?”
6:15 PM
Closing Remarks
Syama Bunten
6:30 PM
Cocktails
The Working Lunch
Choose your capital table
or open dine with Wealth Expanders
Small-group conversations with experts and women who have done it before. Pick the question most relevant to you, bring your own situation, and use lunch to get specific.
What women say after they leave the room.
“Wealth Catalyst is a singular event. The energy of women having deep and meaningful discussions about investment, capital and wealth without a stitch of shame, guilt or hesitation was something I didn’t think I’d ever see. It chills me to think of the collective power of that room. I can’t wait to go back!”
LIBBY CLARK, ESQ.
Frmr General Counsel, Strategic Advisor
Founder, LiKeWell & Autonomy Framework
PANELIST WCS NY 26 • GRT GUEST
WCC MEMBER
“Last year, I attended the Wealth Catalyst Summit with Syama Bunten and left thinking differently about acquisition entrepreneurship. This year, thanks to women I met at the Summit, I’m buying a company.”
COCO SELLMAN
Founder & Acquisition Entrepreneur
SALON HOST NYC • GRT GUEST
“Wealth Catalyst was one of the most practical and generous conferences I’ve attended. The advice was tangible, candid, and immediately useful. But what stayed with me most was the room itself: growth-oriented women openly sharing what they know, not keeping the good stuff for themselves.”
Paru Radia
Principal @ Paru Radia LLC (Strategic Coaching & Executive Advisory)
What you walk out with
The ROI is both immediate and compounded: it begins with people and perspective and continues with capital and investment.
A clearer personal investment thesis — with stronger conviction around what you believe, what you back, and why.
New relationships — with women who can co-invest, collaborate, advise, or help shape what comes next.
Specific deal flow — and introductions to opportunities, ideas, and capital conversations you would not have accessed on your own.
Tangible takeaways — elevated playbooks, thoughtful materials, and beautiful keepsakes that extend the experience beyond the day itself.
Ongoing access — through the online community, where the conversation, relationships, and opportunities continue long after the room clears.
The Catalyst Campus
The Historic Klamath
This year, we’ll gather aboard The Historic Klamath at Pier 9 on San Francisco’s Embarcadero. The Klamath is a beautifully restored historic ferry sitting directly on the San Francisco waterfront, with a light-filled event space, open-air decks, and an extraordinary landscaped roof deck overlooking the city, the Bay and the Bay Bridge. Its 3,000-square-foot roof deck has 360-degree views, and I genuinely cannot imagine a more quintessentially San Francisco place for this particular room of women to gather.
Pier 9 · The Embarcadero · San Francisco
See what it feels like.
Watch moments from past summits
The Wealth Catalyst ecosystem
The Summit is the Flagship inside the Wealth Catalyst Ecosystem
The Private Community
A curated, application-based membership for women building, processing, and deploying capital together. The Diligence Room, Deal Flow, virtual events and year-round conversation.
Getting Rich Together
The podcast exploring how women build wealth, navigate risk, and express their capital agency. Gold Stevie Award Winner, Podcast of the Year from American Writing Awards, Titan Business Award Winner.
Substack
Essays and deeper thinking on women, wealth, power, and the cultural and structural forces shaping all three.
Confident & In Control
A four-part masterclass for the woman ready to face her capital with more clarity, confidence, and self-trust.
However you arrived here, there’s a place for this conversation in your life.
If this is not the right fit right now, we’ll share other ways to stay connected and continue the conversation.
Seats are allocated by application • We review every request individually.
