We Are the Leaders, Issue #12, Reshma Saujani

by BREAKTHRU Team

January 23rd, 2026

Dear Leaders,

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the kind of leadership this moment actually requires.

As inequality deepens, monopolistic, winner-takes-all mentalities harden, and systems increasingly reward hoarding over care, I keep returning to one question:

Is this the Catalyst’s moment?

Catalysts are the leaders who refuse to accept the story as it’s been told. They don’t merely critique the present, they interrupt it. They look toward the future and awaken us, sometimes by naming our fear directly, sometimes by offering a better way forward when imagination feels thin. They are motivated by urgency. They fear stagnation more than failure. And when they use their power well, they don’t just inspire – they activate us all.

But Catalysts are rare. And they are often misunderstood.

What they need most isn’t applause or admiration. They need air cover. They need people willing to stay in the discomfort long enough for real change to take root. Without that support, Catalysts don’t burn out because they’re wrong, they burn out because they’re isolated.

Reshma Saujani, a Catalyst of this moment, has been advancing systems-level, societal change for nearly two decades, and the momentum she’s building suggests she’s only beginning to reshape what’s possible.

Again and again, she has surfaced truths we quietly accepted as inevitable and challenged them head-on. She dismantled the myth that boys are “naturally” better engineers through Girls Who Code. In a viral commencement speech, she reframed the conversation around so-called “imposter syndrome,” insisting the issue was never women’s confidence but broken systems. And most recently she exposed the lie that childcare isn’t an economic issue, forcing the country to confront care as infrastructure through national full page adverstisement in the NYTimes calling childcare in crisis (check out her organization:Moms First).

Each time, she didn’t offer self-help. She offered a real solution and a way forward. And I am here for it.

Reshma Saujani: The Awakened Catalyst

Reshma Saujani is a Chicago native, the daughter of Indian immigrants who believed deeply in public service and possibility. At 33, she found herself living a life that looked successful from the outside, a corporate lawyer in New York City, but felt deeply conflicted on the inside.

A conversation with her best friend changed everything. The advice wasn’t strategic or polished. It was simple: Just quit. So she did.

And instead of finding another job she might tolerate, Reshma did something far riskier. In 2010, she ran for Congress in New York’s 14th District, challenging an 18-year incumbent. She became the first South Asian woman to ever run for Congress. She campaigned hard. She rallied communities. She showed up fully. And she lost — badly.

The headlines were brutal. The political establishment was furious. She was told she hadn’t waited her turn. She was humiliated, publicly and thoroughly. But inside that loss was a revelation that would change her life.

For most of her life, Reshma realized, she had chosen paths where she could succeed while avoiding the ones where she might fail. Running for office broke that pattern. It taught her that failure wasn’t the end of the story. It was the beginning.

She has said that instead of living her life perfectly, she decided to live it bravely.

That decision led directly to Girls Who Code (even though she herself wasn’t a coder).

From Failure to Movement

Many people first encountered Reshma through Girls Who Code, but her work was never just about teaching skills. It was about naming a deeper lie: that women weren’t opting out of opportunity because they lacked ambition, but because the cost of belonging was too high.

She challenged an entire culture to stop telling women to “Lean In” and start interrogating the systems that made success unsustainable. What she built with Girls Who Code is remarkable — and the envy of countless national nonprofits.

And then, when the pandemic exposed what caregivers had always known — that our economy runs on unpaid, unsupported labor — Reshma became even more explicit.

Women don’t lack ambition. They lack support. Caregiving isn’t a personal problem. It’s a policy failure.

Care, she reminds us, is the invisible infrastructure holding everything else together and yet it’s the first thing we treat as optional. We talk endlessly about productivity and growth while quietly assuming someone else will absorb the cost of keeping families afloat.

Through her promotion in the NY Times of the Marshall Plan for Moms, Reshma plus her coalitionforced childcare, paid leave, and caregiver support into the center of economic conversation, not as perks, but as infrastructure.

That catalytic pressure has led to real change.

As recently as last month in New York City, initiatives Reshma helped champion resulted in expanded childcare access and increased public investment in caregiving, moving care out of the private margins and into shared responsibility. These wins didn’t come from shaming parents or asking families to cope better. They came from insisting that if care is essential to society, it must be treated that way in policy and funding.

And the work is far from finished. As Reshma wrote recently:

“Child care in the U.S. is an utter market failure…The United States is the wealthiest country in the world that invests the LEAST into child care.”

From Reflection to Action

As you move through this week, I invite you to sit with these questions:

What assumptions do I hold that may need to be challenged?
What truth am I avoiding naming because it would require systems to change?
And who are the Catalysts on my team, in my family, or in my community — and how can I support them instead of sidelining or avoiding them?

Because Catalysts don’t burn out because they’re wrong. They burn out because they’re often alone.

Until Next Week

Next week, we’ll explore the OG leader of BREAKTHRU — our first client and a foundational inspiration for this work: Laura’s legendary college basketball coach, Kathy Delaney-Smith. I’ll be with her this week at an oversold book signing where her leadership journey began in Westwood, MA.

Lindsay Gaskins

Co-Founder and CEO of BREAKTHRU