At 33, Jes Wolfe decided the ladder was leaning against the wrong wall. She was living in Australia, moving upward through a corporate career, and becoming increasingly precise about the kind of work she wanted. The next company had to combine social impact with commercial weight. So she moved to San Francisco, built a community, and began an entrepreneurial chapter without knowing that it would eventually lead to a children's bookshelf.
The route there was agreeably indirect. After operating Hoodline, a local media technology company that was sold to Nextdoor, Wolfe took a break in Lake Tahoe. She got a dog. She skied. To keep a hand in the startup world, she invited founders to three-day "ski strategy camps" where chairlift conversations and business problems shared the schedule.
Elena Favilli, one of the creators of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, came through one of those camps. At the time, Rebel Girls was still easiest to understand as two books with unusually large ambition. Its one-page biographies replaced passive princesses with real women who made things, discovered things, led movements, won races, and changed their communities. Wolfe saw a company hiding inside the books.
The useful detourA career made of transferable parts
Wolfe's preparation for children's media did not look like children's media. She studied economics and political science at UC Berkeley, then worked in investment and finance, including at the International Finance Corporation. At Stanford's Graduate School of Business, she studied how technology companies became durable businesses. Boston Consulting Group added the mechanics of breaking complicated problems into projects. A sales leadership job in Australia gave her a team of more than 50 people. Hoodline put her inside the daily compromises of a growing media operation.
Between operating roles, she advised startups and made angel investments focused on women-led companies and funds. The experiences accumulated like tools in a drawer: financial modeling, customer acquisition, distribution, fundraising, the voice of the customer, and the unglamorous discipline of making a plan survive contact with Tuesday.
Favilli and Wolfe kept talking after Tahoe. Wolfe joined Rebel Girls in 2019 as its first independent board member. The next year she raised the company's first venture round and moved into the CEO role. She was not a founder replacing the original idea. She was an operator arriving to test how many forms that idea could take.
A difficult first dayThe pandemic arrives in the plot
Her timing was bracing. Wolfe became CEO as the pandemic closed bookstores and sent families home. The publishing business then ran into a global paper shortage, books stalled in ports, a fully remote team, scarcer startup capital, and eventually the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Every part of the company's physical supply chain seemed determined to become a management lesson.
The response was not a grand reinvention memo. It was a series of practical moves. Keep publishing. Build audio. Give the app a reason to earn a place on a family's screen. Develop events and products that let girls participate rather than only consume. Protect the editorial premise while changing the container.
One promise, many doorsDo not confuse the format with the mission
Rebel Girls began because its founders saw a representation problem in children's literature. Girls encountered too few female characters with agency. Real women were often presented as exceptions, if they appeared at all. The first books answered with a catalog: artists, scientists, athletes, activists, entrepreneurs, leaders, and explorers from across history and geography.
Wolfe treated that catalog as an expandable system. A child who cannot yet read can listen. A child with ten minutes in a car can open a podcast. A child looking for a daily ritual can use an app. A family can attend an event. A young fan can meet an athlete through video. The customer is not loyal to a medium; the customer is growing up.
A mission with more front doors
That distinction explains why the company can look like a publisher, an audio studio, a technology product, a licensing business, and an events brand without losing the thread. Wolfe has described the goal as letting girls "read, listen, watch, play and participate." The verbs are the strategy. Each one asks for a different product, partner, revenue model, and kind of attention.
The measure she returns to is not simply units sold. Wolfe cites parent surveys in which 94 percent say Rebel Girls helps inspire their children and 86 percent say their daughters' confidence increased. She talks just as readily about the notes the team receives. One favorite came from a 10-year-old who found a step-by-step business activity in Rebel Girls Awesome Entrepreneurs, created a string-bracelet company, built a website, and widened the world around her. A worksheet became a small act of authorship.
There is commercial discipline underneath the sentiment. Books provide reach and trust. Audio travels cheaply. An app can build a repeated habit. Licensing extends the brand without requiring the company to manufacture every object. Partnerships with organizations including Nike, Google, and Room to Read place the stories inside existing communities. An $8 million Series A led by Penguin Random House in 2023 brought a publishing partner onto the cap table.
The stealable idea: Choose a mission narrow enough to stay recognizable and a distribution strategy broad enough to meet the audience in motion. The format can change without making the promise vague.
The mountain methodMake the next step small enough to take
Wolfe learned endurance before she learned cap tables. As a competitive swimmer, she sometimes covered 30,000 meters in a day. Later came skiing, open-water diving, avalanche training, and mountaineering. In 2024 she reached the summit of Aconcagua, the highest mountain outside Asia.
Her explanation of the climb sounds like an operating manual: success requires breaking everything into the smallest parts. On a mountain, that means the next camp and the next stretch of ground. In a company, it means the next decision that can actually be made. The romance belongs to the summit photo. The method belongs to repetition.
Rebel Girls later turned footage from the expedition into The Climb: Rebel Girls Take On Aconcagua, a four-part documentary series featuring Wolfe and mountaineer Carla Perez. It is a neat reversal. Wolfe first joined a company devoted to telling other women's stories. The work eventually made her own adventure part of the catalog.
The next arenaFrom role models to fandom
Sport is the clearest expression of where Wolfe is taking the thesis next. Girls leave organized sports at a higher rate than boys during adolescence, even as sport remains a common training ground for leadership. Rebel Girls Sport approaches that gap through athlete stories, match recaps, podcasts, publishing, video, and in-person experiences. Its partnerships have included League One Volleyball and Athletes Unlimited Softball League.
Wolfe's view of the young sports fan is specific. Highlights matter, but personality is the connective tissue. "They want the whole human," she said during a 2026 discussion about younger fandom. Young audiences meet athletes through short clips, fashion, humor, setbacks, opinions, and community before they learn every rule or statistic. The route into fandom no longer begins only with a television broadcast.
She is also building on the ownership side. Wolfe chairs and serves as governor of the San Francisco Signal, the League One Volleyball club scheduled to begin play in January 2027. Its ownership collective brings together athletes, operators, investors, and cultural figures. Wolfe has framed them as active builders rather than names attached to a financing announcement.
The team gives her earlier idea a physical address. A story can tell a girl that women compete, lead, and own. A local club can give her a ticket, a ritual, a favorite player, and a place where the crowd proves the point together. Media supplies the possible life. Community makes it feel ordinary.
The long gameA larger catalog of possible selves
Wolfe's stated destination for Rebel Girls is 100 million girls by 2030. The number is large, but the more revealing phrase is her desire to be a meaningful part of those girls' lives. Reach can be bought. Meaning has to be earned repeatedly, in a book that respects a reader's intelligence, an app worth reopening, an athlete rendered as a person, or an event that leaves a girl feeling more capable than when she arrived.
This is why Wolfe's career finally looks coherent. Finance, consulting, operating, investing, mountains, media, and sport are not competing identities. They are a portfolio organized around agency: how people obtain the capital, confidence, tools, and stories required to act. Rebel Girls makes that idea legible to children. San Francisco Signal will test it in a stadium. Wolfe keeps building new rooms around the same invitation.