Motherhood in Motion - The Podcast for Mothers with Ambition

Motherhood in Motion

Motherhood in Motion explores what happens in the moments of movement between roles, identities, seasons, and geographies, when mothers are actively navigating what it means to build lives that work for both their families and themselves. Ambition does not halt after motherhood. It recalibrates. It clarifies. These conversations in our podcast surface patterns, connect research to real stories, and contribute to redesigning the systems that mothers and families actually need. This is not about doing it all. It is about defining what your “all” means, and finding the support to get there.

  1. Oct 14

    Companies Get Slack. Families Get Sticky Notes. Laura Cunningham on the Mental Load and Hi Ava

    Companies get Slack. Families get sticky notes. Laura Cunningham, co-founder and CEO of Hi Ava, decided that was not good enough. Laura spent fifteen years in product, worked for the Bloomberg administration building tools for teachers and students, caught the startup bug, and eventually spent two and a half years building agentic AI systems for a layer one blockchain. She is also the mother of two daughters, nine and seven, and it was the collision of those two worlds, building AI systems all day while the invisible load at home kept growing, that led to Ava. Hi Ava is an AI-powered household operating system built around the four stages of the mental load, addressing all of them. And in their beta, 76% of all tasks parents brought to Ava were associated with childcare. As we keep saying on this podcast: childcare is infrastructure. Hi Ava is building the tech layer that finally treats it that way. In this episode Laura talks about the motherhood crisis moment that woke her up, the identity barrier that makes mothers hesitate to ask for help even from an app, why she believes AI can become a genuine layer of care infrastructure if users are involved in shaping it, and her tip for any founder sitting with a problem they cannot unsee. Motherhood in Motion is the podcast for mothers with ambition, hosted by Anushka Kalyanpur DeLuca and Constanze Munz. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

    Companies Get Slack. Families Get Sticky Notes. Laura Cunningham on the Mental Load and Hi Ava

  2. Sep 26

    Built for Myself First: Shweta Johri Scott on AI, Mental Load, and the Mother Founder Edge

    Shweta Johri Scott spent years at Amazon, built a sustainable bedding brand during long COVID, and three months ago launched Jade AI, an advisory and education company helping women executives, founders, and teams actually implement AI into their lives and businesses. She is also the mother of a nearly two-year-old daughter and a self-described introvert who has had to learn to put her face on camera, talk about her revenue publicly, and lead with radical transparency. In this episode she talks about why motherhood did not change her ambition but made it disproportionately expensive to act on, and why that sharpened everything. About the four levels of working with AI and where most of us are stuck. About why she shares her monthly revenue publicly and what happened when she did. About the moment her husband's AI experiment changed her day so much that when it went offline she noticed immediately. And about why, if she had millions of dollars to invest, she would put every single dollar behind mothers who started businesses. Motherhood in Motion is the podcast for mothers with ambition, hosted by Anushka Kalyanpur DeLuca and Constanze Munz. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

    Built for Myself First: Shweta Johri Scott on AI, Mental Load, and the Mother Founder Edge

  3. Sep 16

    Motherhood as a Startup: Julie Nguyen on Going All In

    What does it take to leave a career you love and build something from nothing — while raising two young boys? Julie Nguyen, co-founder of Crunchmoms, joins Constanze and Anushka to unpack the "problem she couldn't unsee" after becoming a mother in a new city. She reframes motherhood as a startup (discovery phase, then operational excellence), explains why she refused to burn out to build, and gets honest about the financial trade-offs of going all in. We talk community as the heartbeat of a business, "think big, act small," raising boys who'll grow into good men, and the co-founder partnership with Liying that began with a single LinkedIn message. Her throughline: ambition doesn't have to be rushed. 🎧 Motherhood in Motion — where ambition and motherhood live together, not in opposition.

    Motherhood as a Startup: Julie Nguyen on Going All In

  4. Aug 31

    The Pursuit of Joy: Anita Hossain Choudhry on Raising Money, Raising Kids, and The Grand Pursuit

    Anita Hossain Choudhry has always followed her curiosity. Through every unexpected turn, every transition, every season of life. And it is exactly that motion, that willingness to follow joy through every chapter, that led her to build The Grand Pursuit, a community and coaching platform for ambitious mothers, backed by Alexis Ohanian's 776 Ventures. In this episode Anita talks about how ambition does not wane after motherhood, it gets more specific and more intentional. About what it felt like to sit on the stairs of her apartment, six months pregnant, wondering if she should walk away from everything she had just decided to build. About fundraising from the back of a tow truck with the music blasting. About the retreat she created that brought Dr. Becky Kennedy, Neha Ruch, Eve Rodsky, and Sheila Lirio Marcelo into one room for an honest conversation about trade-offs and guilt. And about why she built a space where women do not have to choose between their professional hat and their mother hat. Where they can simply be both, without explanation, without calculation, without apology. And about the thing she most wants every mother to hear: stop mourning who you were before kids. Celebrate who you have become. Motherhood in Motion is the podcast for mothers with ambition, hosted by Anushka Kalyanpur De Luca and Constanze Munz. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.

    The Pursuit of Joy: Anita Hossain Choudhry on Raising Money, Raising Kids, and The Grand Pursuit

  5. Aug 13

    From Corporate to Founder: Ashleigh Lloyd on Flexibility, Family, and Filling Gaps

    At Motherhood in Motion we keep it real. Ashleigh Lloyd is the co-founder of Baby and Kids Expo, one of the fastest-growing parenting platforms in the region. And she will be the first to tell you that founding something of your own does not automatically mean more time with your kids. In this episode she gets honest about what flexibility as a founder actually looks like: the peaks, the troughs, the seasons where it works and the seasons where it really does not. The problem she could not unsee became the business she built. But building it came with its own trade-offs. That is the conversation we love having on this podcast.

    From Corporate to Founder: Ashleigh Lloyd on Flexibility, Family, and Filling Gaps

  6. Aug 3

    Reincarnation, Not Recalibration: A Founder on Ambition, Trade-Offs and Why a Business Is Not a Hobby

    Roshni Khemnani Mehta spent six years in investment banking after LSE before building two brands: Izaak Azanei, the knitwear label she founded with her sisters, and Little IA, thepersonalised children's gifting business that started as her COVID baby and now grows 50 to 80 percent a year. She is also the mother of three children under eight, running through the hardest growth phase she has faced yet. In this episode she tells Constanze and Anushka why motherhood is less a recalibrationthan a reincarnation, why she builds her life around accepting trade-offs instead of chasing balance, and why she will only run a company as long as it does not hinder the mother she wants to be. She is honest about the guilt, the systems she has built, and the support that makes all of it possible. Her advice to anyone thinking of starting a business is just as direct: do it only if you can do it better than everyone already doing it, because a business is not a hobby.

    Reincarnation, Not Recalibration: A Founder on Ambition, Trade-Offs and Why a Business Is Not a Hobby

  7. Jul 20

    Motherhood Is a Leadership Development Program

    What if motherhood isn't the thing slowing your career down - but the most intense leadership program you'll ever complete? This week, Constanze and Anushka sit down with Alexa Starks - founder of Executive Moms, editor-in-chief of Mothered Magazine, and CEO of Mothered Media. From the Netherlands (via Dallas, two toddlers, and one big rebrand), Alexa has built a research-and-media company redesigning the data behind working motherhood. Her Maternal Strengths Report measured twelve leadership skills - and mothers reported that every single one improved after having kids. The biggest jumps weren't the “soft” skills everyone expects. Time management rose 123%. Negotiation, 83%. We get into why the operational skills surprised everyone, how survival mode forges capability nobody names, why flexibility only counts when there's “no consequence attached,” and what companies actually have to change beyond a workshop. Alexa also shares the raw tip she's held back from her TEDx and Forbes features - about what you're really building when you're just trying to get through the day. It maps closely onto Motherhood in Motion's own two waves of UAE research on motherhood and ambition - 70% of mothers held or grew their ambition after kids, and ambition froze, rather than disappeared, when infrastructure collapsed. Find Alexa's reports and National Working Motherhood Week at motheredmedia.com, the magazine at motheredmagazine.com, and her Substack, “Like a M**********r.” Full episode on Spotify + YouTube

    Motherhood Is a Leadership Development Program

  8. Jul 9

    She Kept Moving Anyway: Our Season One Finale

    For the first time, Anushka and Constanze sit down in the same room to close out Season One, a season recorded across continents, time zones, and a regional war. They named this season's arc "she kept moving anyway," and in this finale they trace how it played out: two very different situations, one that froze and one that grew, and the survey work that pulled ambition back into view. They revisit the moments that stuck, from Liying's "my ambition is not rushed" to Lucy's have the joy, drop the guilt, then show how they turned that research into something real: the in-person Nannies & More event where the survey findings became a live panel and roundtables on the infrastructure mothers actually need. They close on Season Two, "the problem she couldn't unsee," and its founders who saw something missing and built it, gentle and fierce at once. Motherhood in Motion is the podcast for mothers with ambition, hosted by Anushka Kalyanpur DeLuca and Constanze Munz.

    She Kept Moving Anyway: Our Season One Finale
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About

Motherhood in Motion explores what happens in the moments of movement between roles, identities, seasons, and geographies, when mothers are actively navigating what it means to build lives that work for both their families and themselves. Ambition does not halt after motherhood. It recalibrates. It clarifies. These conversations in our podcast surface patterns, connect research to real stories, and contribute to redesigning the systems that mothers and families actually need. This is not about doing it all. It is about defining what your “all” means, and finding the support to get there.

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