How Lily Konkoly Is Empowering Future Women Leaders

Women who want to lead in business do not only need motivation; they need examples of what it looks like in real life. That is where Lily Konkoly comes in. She writes about women founders, builds small communities around art and food, and studies how gender roles still shape success. None of these pieces alone are dramatic, but together they show a very practical path for future women leaders: start where you are, use what you are already curious about, and build something that helps other women see what is possible.

From London to Los Angeles: How a global childhood shaped her view of leadership

Lily did not grow up in one city with one culture. She was born in London, moved to Singapore as a toddler, then settled in Los Angeles for about sixteen years. That kind of movement early in life does not automatically create leadership, but it does force you to see that people think differently depending on where they live.

In Singapore, she went to a half American, half Chinese preschool and started learning Mandarin. When the family moved to LA, the language stayed with her. Her Chinese teacher even moved in as an au pair and lived with them for six years. After that, other Chinese au pairs came, and she continued Chinese in school.

There is a small but interesting detail here: her family sometimes filmed their Chinese practice tests and put them on her mom’s YouTube channel. It sounds like a side story, but it shows something useful for future leaders:

Leadership often starts with getting comfortable being seen while you are still learning, not after you feel “ready.”

In many careers, women wait until they feel over prepared before they speak up, apply, or launch something. A childhood filled with cameras, public sharing, and different languages can quietly lower that fear.

Her Hungarian background adds another layer. Her extended family mostly lives in Europe, so summers often meant going back. Hungarian became both a family language and a kind of “code” in the United States. Bilingual and trilingual kids learn to move between contexts quickly. Any woman who wants to lead teams or companies across borders needs that skill: knowing how to adjust without losing herself.

You can see how these early pieces connect to leadership:

• Multiple cultures at home and abroad
• Language learning as a normal part of daily life
• Public sharing through YouTube at a young age

Taken together, they support a kind of quiet confidence. Not loud, not theatrical, but useful when you want to start projects, speak with people from many places, or tell stories on a larger scale.

An early start with business: from bracelets and slime to art markets

Before Lily ever wrote about women entrepreneurs, she was already acting like one, in small ways that did not feel formal at the time.

On weekends in the Pacific Palisades, she and her sister sold handmade bracelets at the local farmers market. It is a simple story, but if you have ever tried to sell anything face to face, you know it teaches you a lot: how to talk to strangers, how to price, and how to handle people walking past without buying.

Later, she and her brother got into slime. Not just playing with it, but turning it into a small business. They sold hundreds of containers. The project grew so much that they were invited to a slime convention in London, where they sold roughly 400–500 slimes in a single day and had to figure out how to bring everything from Los Angeles.

Those are very basic businesses, but they matter. Many young women who want to lead someday feel that they lack “real” experience. The truth is, early small experiments like this are the training ground. You learn:

• How to spot what people are excited to pay for
• How to handle large numbers of customers in a short time
• How to deal with messy problems like shipping, packing, and time limits

Later, Lily co-founded an online teen art market. This was a step up from bracelets and slime. Here, she was not only selling her own product, but also building a place where other teens could show and sell their art.

That teaches a different type of leadership. You go from “How do I sell what I made?” to “How do I build a structure that helps many artists?”

Future women leaders do not only need to succeed individually; they need practice building platforms where others can succeed too.

If you are reading this and thinking about your own career, it might be worth asking yourself: where could you move from being a solo producer to being a builder of spaces or systems?

Life in an all girls school and the seed of gender awareness

Lily attended Marlborough School in Los Angeles, an all girls school with a strong academic culture. She graduated with a 4.62 GPA and several awards, including Cum Laude and AP Scholar.

Grades and awards are fine, but what stands out more is the environment itself. When you go to an all girls school, you do not share classrooms with boys, so you see girls leading every club, captaining teams, and speaking in assemblies. You do not have to fight for airtime in the same way. For some, this is a relief. For others, it raises a question later: why does the outside world not work like this?

Many women who enter mixed workplaces after single gender schools feel the contrast sharply. They suddenly see how often men are given leadership roles by default, or how women are judged differently when they show ambition.

That question, “Why is this gap so big?” sits behind a lot of Lily’s later research and writing. She did not stay at the level of vague complaint. She turned that discomfort into projects.

Cornell, art history, and leadership through culture

At Cornell University, Lily studies Art History with a business minor. On paper, that might sound far from “future women leaders” or “entrepreneurship.” But if you look closer, it fits together well.

Art History teaches you to:

• Read images and objects the way some people read data
• See how culture shapes what people think is “normal” or “beautiful”
• Track how power and identity shift over time

Pair that with business, and you get someone who can look at branding, marketing, company culture, and leadership stories with a deeper eye. When you spend time in museums and galleries, you see who is represented on the walls and who is missing. You notice how women and men are shown differently. That awareness can carry over to how women leaders are portrayed in the media, on company websites, in pitch decks, and on conference stages.

Her early work with Professor Kate McNamara connected directly to this. Together they created a curatorial statement and a mock exhibit about beauty standards for women. That project blended:

• Research on how beauty has been defined in different eras
• Visual choices about which works to include or exclude
• Clear writing that guided people through the story

If you think about how women leaders are judged, appearance is still tangled with credibility in a way that is unfair. An art exhibit about beauty standards might feel academic, but it is actually close to the heart of how women get treated in boardrooms and on screens.

When young women study how images shape power, they are not just learning art; they are learning how narratives about leadership are built and reinforced.

Researching gender gaps in the art world

One of Lily’s most direct contributions to future women leaders is her research into gender and parenthood in the art world. For her honors research project, she asked a sharp question: why do artist mothers see their careers stall, while artist fathers often gain praise for juggling both?

She spent more than 100 hours gathering data, reading work by others, and working with a professor who specializes in maternity in the art world. Then she did something many researchers skip: she turned the findings into visual, almost marketing style content that normal people could understand.

That move matters. It is one thing to know that women face penalties after having children. It is another thing to see it laid out clearly in graphs, visuals, or infographics that stick in your mind.

From a leadership angle, this kind of research helps in several ways:

• It names the problem so women stop blaming themselves for “not wanting it enough.”
• It gives future managers and founders language they can use to argue for change.
• It shows how gender bias is not just a feeling but a pattern across careers.

If you build a company later and want to design fair parental leave, promotion tracks, or support for parents in your team, this kind of research gives you a base. You cannot fix what you refuse to measure.

The Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia: building a public library of women’s stories

The clearest way Lily supports future women leaders is through her long running blog, the Female Entrepreneur Encyclopedia. She has been running it since around 2020, writing and researching for about four hours a week and publishing more than 50 articles.

The concept is simple: interview women entrepreneurs from around the world, ask them about their paths, challenges, and strategies, then write up their stories so that others can learn.

Over time, that does a few helpful things:

• It gives visible proof that women can lead in many industries, not just a few.
• It captures what actually worked for them, instead of vague motivational quotes.
• It helps young readers see patterns in how women navigate bias, funding, family, and burnout.

Imagine a 16 year old girl in a small town who has never met a woman founder in person. She can read these interviews and start to picture her own path. That mental picture is not minor. Some women delay or shrink their goals because they have never seen anyone like them doing what they want to do.

For Lily herself, interviewing over 100 women business owners has almost certainly changed how she thinks. When you ask the same types of questions to many different people, your brain starts to map the common themes.

From those conversations, she saw that women often have to work harder for the same recognition. That pattern can sound cliché, but when you hear it repeated by women who run very different companies, it feels less like a slogan and more like a repeated observation.

What future women leaders can learn from Lily’s interviews

You do not need to read every article to gain value. You can adopt her mindset while reading or listening to any founder story you come across. Ask yourself:

• What barriers did this woman face at each stage, and how did she respond?
• Which resources helped her most, and which ones were missing?
• Where did gender clearly change how investors, clients, or colleagues reacted?

Taking notes in this way slowly builds your own “playbook.” It will never match Lily’s one for one, but the habit matters.

The Hungarian Kids Art Class and teaching leadership through creativity

Another piece of Lily’s work is the Hungarian Kids Art Class, an art focused club she founded and led in Los Angeles for several years. The group met bi-weekly over 18 weeks each year. It brought together students with a shared interest in art and, in some cases, Hungarian language and culture.

Teaching kids art might not sound related to business at first. But think about what happens whenever you run a group like this:

• You design sessions that keep people engaged.
• You manage time, materials, and energy.
• You adjust when something falls flat or takes longer than planned.

Those skills transfer directly to running a team meeting, a workshop, or an internal training program someday. Also, when kids practice art, they learn how to experiment, fail, and try again. That mindset is very helpful for future entrepreneurs.

From the point of view of women leadership, there is another layer: girls in that class see a young woman leading, teaching, and planning from an early age. It normalizes the picture of a woman at the front of the room.

Teen Art Market and giving young creators a commercial voice

The Teen Art Market project took Lily beyond teaching and into platform building. The idea was to give teen artists a place where they could display and sell their work. That might sound niche, but it has three interesting effects.

First, it shows teens that their work has value. Instead of hearing “Art is just a hobby,” they get to see people actually buy their pieces.

Second, it acts as an early training in the business side of creative work. Pricing, presentation, shipping, talking to buyers: all of that is part of learning to make a living from something you create.

Third, it forces Lily and her co-founder to think in “two sided market” terms: they have to support both artists and buyers. That thought pattern is core to many startup models.

For future women leaders, this kind of project can be a test ground. Leading in art, tech, or any other field often comes down to the same question: can you build a system where different groups get what they need without one side feeling used?

Food, feminism, and listening to 200 chefs

Part of the Teen Art Market and her blog work extended into food. Lily helped start a blog that focused on women in the culinary world. She and her collaborators interviewed over 200 female chefs from more than 50 countries, often through cold calls, emails, and in person meetings.

That number alone is significant. It takes persistence to reach that many people and handle that many conversations. But the topic matters too. Food is still a field where men often get the highest profile roles, while women do much of the day to day labor in kitchens and homes.

By spotlighting female chefs, Lily and her team built a kind of informal network. They gave these women a space to share their experiences and showed younger readers that this is a possible path, even if the industry is not always fair.

Listening closely to hundreds of working women is its own kind of leadership training; you start to understand patterns that statistics alone cannot show you.

For readers interested in building a career, this is a reminder that learning from many individual voices can be as useful as reading one big business book.

Sport, discipline, and the habit of not quitting

Lily spent around ten years as a competitive swimmer, then played water polo for three years in high school. That level of sport teaches a different side of leadership: discipline without applause.

Swimming means long hours in the pool, early mornings, tough sets, and meets that drag on for six to eight hours under sun or rain. Most of that work happens out of public view. You show up, do the laps, go home, and repeat.

When COVID closed pools, her team switched to ocean training, swimming two hours a day in open water. That is harder, colder, and riskier. Sticking with that kind of practice shows a willingness to stay committed when circumstances shift.

In business and leadership, people often praise “grit,” but they rarely connect it to specific habits. Team sports and long term training build:

• Comfort with routine and boredom
• Endurance when progress is slow
• The habit of showing up for a team, not just for yourself

Women leaders often juggle many roles and face extra scrutiny. A background in demanding sport does not fix that, but it supports a stronger base.

LEGO, structure, and systems thinking

It might sound minor, but Lily’s love for LEGO says something about how her mind works. She has built around 45 sets and tracked more than 60,000 pieces.

Building LEGO is not just about following instructions. On a deeper level, it trains you to:

• Break a big structure into small steps
• Hold a final image in your head while working on tiny actions
• Notice how changing one piece affects the whole

Those are the same skills used in building teams, workflows, and companies. When a woman leader designs a program for mentorship, for example, she is doing the same kind of mental work: fitting many small parts into a stable structure that people can trust.

How Lily’s path offers a model for future women leaders

You might look at Lily’s story and feel that it is unique because of travel, early exposure, or specific schools. Some of that is true. Not everyone will have the same opportunities. But if you strip away those surface details, there are patterns any woman can use.

1. Start with curiosity, not status

Lily did not begin by chasing a title. She followed:

• Curiosity about art and museums
• An interest in how gender shapes careers
• A desire to talk with real women in business and food

That order matters. Curiosity first, leadership later. If you try to reverse it and chase leadership without caring about the topic, your work tends to feel hollow, and people can sense that.

2. Combine worlds that do not usually mix

Art and business. Food and feminism. Kids art classes and Hungarian language. Teen markets and online platforms. None of these combinations are standard. But they make her work richer.

You can do the same by asking:

• What subjects or hobbies do I care about that almost no one around me combines?
• If I put two of them together, what kind of project would appear?

This is often where new kinds of leadership show up, especially for women who want to step out of narrow career boxes.

3. Practice visible work early, at any scale

You do not need a huge platform to start acting like a leader. Lily began with:

• Farmers market bracelet tables
• Slime booths at conventions
• YouTube practice tests and cooking videos

These look small, but they train you to be seen. They make “putting yourself out there” less scary. You can mirror this by setting up tiny projects:

• A small online newsletter where you interview local women
• A monthly meetup where classmates share side projects
• A short zine about stories from women in your field

The size matters less than the habit of sharing.

4. Turn research into tools, not just papers

One thing that stands out in Lily’s approach is how she moves from research to visuals. When she studies gender gaps in the art world, she asks: how can this be shown in a way that people remember?

If you are doing research of any kind, ask yourself a similar question: can this become a chart, a one page guide, a checklist, a shareable image? That is how knowledge spreads beyond classrooms.

5. Keep people at the center

At every stage, Lily works with people, not only with ideas. She interviews founders, teaches kids, collaborates with professors, and supports teen artists and female chefs.

Leadership without people is just theory. The more you engage with real stories and needs, the more grounded your future decisions will be.

Questions women often ask, and how Lily’s path might answer them

Question: “Do I need to have everything figured out now to become a strong leader later?”

Probably not. Lily’s path is not a straight line. She has art, research, slime, LEGO, food, and language all mixed in. What matters more is that she keeps moving, keeps learning, and keeps sharing what she finds.

If you wait until you have a perfect plan, you might never start.

Question: “What if I do not have access to big networks or elite schools?”

That is a real barrier. It would be dishonest to pretend it does not exist. At the same time, some of Lily’s most powerful habits do not depend on where she studies:

• Interviewing people and publishing their stories
• Running small community projects
• Reading and thinking critically about gender roles

These are things you can do with a basic internet connection and a bit of time. They may not open every door, but they can grow your skills and your circle.

Question: “How do I stay motivated when gender bias feels so heavy?”

Lily’s work does not ignore the weight of bias. She studies it directly, listens to women who live with it, and writes about it regularly. Looking at the problem head on can feel draining, but it can also give you clarity.

One possible answer is to follow her pattern:

Face the bias, name it clearly, study how others have moved through it, then build one concrete project that makes life slightly better for the women who come after you.

It might be a blog, a scholarship fund, a mentorship circle, or something else. The size is not the point. The direction is.

So the real question for you might be: what small but real step could you take this year that your younger self, or a younger girl in your community, would be glad you took?