How to Start and Grow a Successful Startup: Lessons from Central Asian Female Founders in Silicon Valley

November 7, 2025 | Palo Alto, California

On November 7, Central Asian Ladies Initiative (CALI) hosted How to Start and Grow a Successful Startup at Silkroad Innovation Hub in Palo Alto. The event brought together founders, aspiring entrepreneurs, and professionals for an evening focused on the realities of building companies—from early validation and product development to fundraising, pricing, and long-term execution.

The event featured three female founders from Central Asia building technology-driven startups across biotech, women’s health, and AI-powered productivity. While their companies operate in very different industries, their journeys revealed common patterns: strong problem focus, disciplined experimentation, and the importance of learning faster than the market.

Opening and Context

The evening opened with welcoming remarks from CALI and Silkroad Innovation Hub. CALI shared its mission of empowering and connecting Central Asian women by creating access to knowledge, networks, and practical guidance—especially in ecosystems like Silicon Valley, where founders from the region remain underrepresented despite strong technical and entrepreneurial talent.

Speaker Presentations

Zhanel Nugmanova, Co-Founder and COO of Valinor Discovery, opened the speaker session with a deep dive into building a biotech-AI startup in one of the most complex industries. Valinor develops interpretable machine learning models trained on patient-derived, multimodal data to predict patient response to therapeutics before clinical trials. Zhanel walked the audience through her path from academic research in computational biology to founding a company valued at $50M post-money. She emphasized that early traction came not only from strong technology, but from extensive customer discovery, credibility with pharma partners, and owning differentiated data. Her talk highlighted the long timelines of biotech and the importance of trust, patience, and execution.

Next, Svetlana Kaz, Founder and CEO of Strawberry Health, shared her journey of building a women’s health startup focused on at-home hormone testing and personalized fertility care for women in their 30s and 40s. Svetlana explained that Strawberry Health began with listening, not technology. Conversations with women consistently revealed gaps in fertility care, lack of clarity around hormone health, and limited proactive options. Drawing on her previous experience founding PlumThyme, a sustainable period care brand that scaled to 84 retail stores, she emphasized the importance of sequencing—validating demand, building trust, and narrowing focus before scaling. Her presentation underscored how personal pain points, when paired with rigorous validation, can become scalable businesses.

The third presentation came from Mika Sagindyk, Co-Founder of Tackle, an AI-powered time tracking and reporting tool that integrates directly into users’ calendars. Mika focused on early-stage product development and monetization, framing startup building around two core responsibilities: building and selling. She encouraged founders to focus on problems rather than ideas, use frameworks like Jobs-to-Be-Done to understand user needs, and avoid waiting for products to feel “ready.” A key takeaway from her talk was that early pricing does not need to be perfect—pricing is an experiment, and speed of learning is the most important metric in the early days.

Panel Discussion: From Insight to Action

The panel discussion brought the speakers together for a candid conversation about decision-making under uncertainty.

When asked how Strawberry Health validated fertility care as both a real pain point and a scalable opportunity, Svetlana explained that early validation came from direct conversations with users rather than assumptions. The first steps that mattered most—user interviews, pilots, and narrowing scope—created traction before the full product was built.

On fundraising in biotech and AI, Zhanel shared lessons from pitching highly technical work to investors who may not fully understand the science. She emphasized translating technical depth into outcomes investors care about, securing believers who understand the space, and avoiding shortcuts when it comes to data quality. She also highlighted that clean, longitudinal patient data is one of the hardest—and most defensible—assets to build.

Addressing monetization and early adoption, Mika discussed how founders can get customers, investors, and partners on board in the early days. Her advice was to start charging early, observe who stays as prices evolve, and focus on building for true customers rather than trying to please everyone.

The panel concluded with a reflective question for all speakers: Looking back, what is one thing you wish you had started doing earlier as a founder, and one thing you wish you had stopped doing sooner? Across answers, a shared theme emerged: talk to users earlier, ask for help sooner, and stop trying to build in isolation.

Why This Event Mattered

More than an inspirational evening, the event offered concrete lessons on how startups are actually built. Attendees gained insight into validating ideas, building products before they feel ready, navigating fundraising in complex industries, and learning quickly through experimentation.

For Central Asian women in particular, the event reinforced an important message: founders from the region are building globally relevant companies across the most competitive sectors. With access to the right knowledge, networks, and support, geography is not a limitation.

As CALI continues to create spaces for learning, connection, and visibility, events like this reflect its core belief—that practical knowledge, shared openly, can change who gets to build the future.