TEAM
Founder: Polly Rodriguez
Polly Rodriguez is the co-founder and CEO of Unbound. With a background in strategy consulting, Polly started her career at Deloitte, where she was ranked the top analyst and consultant for two consecutive years, specializing in brand turnarounds during the recession. She went on to scale the YCombinator dating startup Grouper to $5M in revenue. With a BS in Economics from Miami University, Polly’s favorite job was working for Senator Claire McCaskill in Washington, DC on the Affordable Care Act. She has a penchant for bourbon, the St. Louis Cardinals, ricotta cheese, and ponies.
Co-Founder: Lidia Bonilla
Lidia Bonilla is a pleasure strategist and product inventor, committed to women having lives full of power, pleasure, and intimacy. Her signature program, The Pleasure Reset, is a life changing 6-week course where you are guided through a deep dive into your love life. She also is the founder of House of Plume, an intimate lifestyle brand that provides the discerning consumer with storage options for their pleasure items. She is the co-founder of the Women of Sex Tech, a global organization dedicated to merging sex and technology. She is a highly sought after expert, whose work has been covered by the New York Times, Refinery 29, Forbes and Essence Magazine. She’s passionate about speaking on topics like making pleasure a habit, learning how to love your body, and creating a life of freedom and authenticity.
Advisor: Bryony Cole
Bryony Cole is a sextech researcher, podcaster and industry analyst. She is the creator and host of the Future of Sex podcast, founder of Sextech School. Bryony has been on stages across the world forecasting trends in the sextech industry for governments, tech titans and entertainment companies, including SXSW, PEN World Voices Festival, Skolkovo Foundation and Founders Forum.
Bryony recently launched Sextech School, a program for entrepreneurs looking to get started in sextech.
Twitter: @bryonycole
Instagram: @futureofsex
Advisor: Cindy Gallop (she/her)
Cindy Gallop is the founder and CEO of www.makelovenotporn.com, launched at TED 2009 – ‘Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference’. In 2013 she turned MakeLoveNotPorn into the world’s first user-generated, human-curated social sex videosharing platform https://www.makelovenotporn.tv/ socializing and normalizing sex in order to make it easier to talk about, to promote consent, communication, good sexual values and good sexual behavior. MakeLoveNotPorn is spearheading the Social Sex Revolution https://socialsexrevolution.com/(the revolutionary part isn’t the sex, but the social). Cindy is raising the world’s first sextech fund http://www.alltheskyholdings.com/ . She speaks at conferences globally and consults, describing her approach as ‘I like to blow shit up. I am the Michael Bay of business.’
Twitter: @cindygallop
HOW IT ALL STARTED:
In 2015 Lidia Bonilla and Polly Rodriguez met in a hotel bar in Flatiron to commiserate over being female entrepreneurs in the sex tech industry. They were in an industry dominated by men and they couldn't open bank accounts, take out Facebook or Instagram ads, use payment processors or get investors to take them seriously. Instead of giving up, they decided to create a community with other female founders who were facing similar challenges. What started as a small group quickly grew into a movement.
Today, The Women of Sex Tech represent artists, creators, entrepreneurs, journalists, educators, innovators, and engineers in over six cities globally. Collectively, they generate millions in revenue and have secured funding from some of the top tier venture capital funds in the world. Their mission is to change the way the world views human sexuality and to create a community that fosters femme-identifying entrepreneurship. The Women of Sex Tech is much more than a small group of female founders, it's a movement, and we hope you'll be a part of it.