Illuminate 2026: Doing Business Differently

How do I find customers without living on Instagram?

We begin with one of the most immediate challenges facing entrepreneurs: finding customers.

But underneath that question is a bigger one: what if we’ve misunderstood the relationship between a business and the people it serves?

Vicki opens Illuminate by grounding us in the economic and social conditions we’re building within now and why some of our inherited assumptions about entrepreneurship need another look.

Sonia Strobel of Skipper Otto then takes us inside a radically different approach to customers: community-supported fisheries, where people aren’t simply purchasers at the end of a transaction — they’re part of making an alternative food system possible.

From there, Vicki Saunders, opens up the idea of growing a business without “customers”: bringing people into the vision, story and values of what you’re building and creating participation, belonging and shared purpose rather than endlessly chasing attention.

Question underneath the day:
What changes when the people who buy from us become participants in what we’re trying to make possible?

What do nervous systems, capacity, relationships and personal liberation have to do with business success?

We spend enormous amounts of time talking about strategy, revenue, capital and growth.

We spend far less time talking about the human being trying to hold all of it.

Day 2 explores the invisible infrastructure underneath resilient businesses: nervous-system capacity, relationships, community, networks, unlearning, personal transformation and the ability to stay adaptive when circumstances change.

Golnaz Golnarag of AccelerateHer and Emily Bland of SucSeed bring different experiences of what happens when the inner work and the business work are no longer treated as separate.

This isn’t “wellness for entrepreneurs.”

It’s a serious exploration of capacity as a business asset.

Because in volatile conditions, the ability to remain grounded, connected, creative and adaptive may matter as much as anything on your spreadsheet.

Question underneath the day:
What becomes possible when we stop treating ourselves and our relationships as separate from the infrastructure of the business?

What does it actually take to build a viable business now?

Raise. Grow. Scale. Hire. Expand. Repeat.

That story has shaped a generation of entrepreneurship.

But what happens when the economics underneath it stop working — or when growth itself starts getting in the way of the business you actually want to build?

Day 3 gets very practical about this question through two different kinds of businesses: products and services.

For product businesses, Patrice Mousseau of Satya Organics, Sheena Russell of Made with Local and Cindy Warner of Lightbulb Finance bring us inside the decisions, trade-offs and financial realities that rarely make it into the founder story.

What happens when getting onto more shelves doesn’t necessarily make you more profitable? When growth creates fragility instead of resilience? When wholesale, distribution, inventory and financing fundamentally change the economics and trajectory of your company?

For service businesses, Anu Bidani of STEM Minds explores a different set of assumptions about growth.

Anu’s journey has taken STEM Minds from children’s STEM education into food systems, climate response and workforce development while experiments expanding into the US and India taught her that sometimes it isn’t the business that’s wrong; the surrounding systems simply aren’t ready to support it.

Together, their stories let us ask: What does scale actually mean for a service-based business? Do you need a bigger team? More markets? More programs? What happens when the thing you’re supposed to do next takes you further away from the reason you built the business in the first place?

Across both tracks, we’ll surface some of the lies of the old playbook, the new truths entrepreneurs are discovering, and the questions founders should be asking before choosing their path.

The point isn’t that growth is bad.

It’s that growth is a design choice, not a definition of success.

Question underneath the day:

What kind of business are you actually trying to build — and what does financial sustainability require in the world we’re in now?

Building new markets, changing systems and creating the businesses of the future.

Eventually, doing things differently takes us beyond improving individual businesses.

Sometimes the market doesn’t exist yet. Sometimes every stakeholder has to move. Sometimes solving the visible problem only reproduces the conditions that created it. And sometimes creating the future requires letting go of the stories, identities and assumptions that made sense in the old one.

Chloé Dubois of Ocean Legacy shares a journey from grief and environmental crisis into creating markets and infrastructure for recovered ocean plastics.

Chenny Xia of Gotcare explores what happens when transformation can’t happen one stakeholder at a time — when entrepreneurs, funders, institutions, customers and communities have to move together.

And Vicki brings the Coralus story: more than a decade of tiny experiments in redesigning how capital moves, how decisions get made, how relationships become infrastructure and how communities can recognize and resource possibilities before the existing system knows what to do with them.

This is where the four days ultimately lead:

You don’t have to lose your soul to create change.
But you may have to lose some of your stories about how change happens.

Question underneath the day:
If we stopped trying to win at the old game, what could we begin building instead?