About Motherhood in Motion - The Podcast for Mothers with Ambition
Motherhood in Motion explores what happens in the moments of movement between roles, identities, seasons, and geographies, when mothers are actively navigating what it means to build lives that work for both their families and themselves.
Ambition does not halt after motherhood. It recalibrates. It clarifies. These conversations in our podcast surface patterns, connect research to real stories, and contribute to redesigning the systems that mothers and families actually need.
This is not about doing it all. It is about defining what your “all” means, and finding the support to get there.
Companies Get Slack. Families Get Sticky Notes. Laura Cunningham on the Mental Load and Hi Ava
Companies get Slack. Families get sticky notes. Laura Cunningham, co-founder and CEO of Hi Ava, decided that was not good enough.
Laura spent fifteen years in product, worked for the Bloomberg administration building tools for teachers and students, caught the startup bug, and eventually spent two and a half years building agentic AI systems for a layer one blockchain. She is also the mother of two daughters, nine and seven, and it was the collision of those two worlds, building AI systems all day while the invisible load at home kept growing, that led to Ava.
Hi Ava is an AI-powered household operating system built around the four stages of the mental load, addressing all of them. And in their beta, 76% of all tasks parents brought to Ava were associated with childcare. As we keep saying on this podcast: childcare is infrastructure. Hi Ava is building the tech layer that finally treats it that way.
In this episode Laura talks about the motherhood crisis moment that woke her up, the identity barrier that makes mothers hesitate to ask for help even from an app, why she believes AI can become a genuine layer of care infrastructure if users are involved in shaping it, and her tip for any founder sitting with a problem they cannot unsee.
Motherhood in Motion is the podcast for mothers with ambition, hosted by Anushka Kalyanpur DeLuca and Constanze Munz. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.
26 Sept 2026
Built for Myself First: Shweta Johri Scott on AI, Mental Load, and the Mother Founder Edge
Shweta Johri Scott spent years at Amazon, built a sustainable bedding brand during long COVID, and three months ago launched Jade AI, an advisory and education company helping women executives, founders, and teams actually implement AI into their lives and businesses. She is also the mother of a nearly two-year-old daughter and a self-described introvert who has had to learn to put her face on camera, talk about her revenue publicly, and lead with radical transparency.
In this episode she talks about why motherhood did not change her ambition but made it disproportionately expensive to act on, and why that sharpened everything. About the four levels of working with AI and where most of us are stuck. About why she shares her monthly revenue publicly and what happened when she did. About the moment her husband's AI experiment changed her day so much that when it went offline she noticed immediately. And about why, if she had millions of dollars to invest, she would put every single dollar behind mothers who started businesses.
Motherhood in Motion is the podcast for mothers with ambition, hosted by Anushka Kalyanpur DeLuca and Constanze Munz. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.
16 Sept 2026
Motherhood as a Startup: Julie Nguyen on Going All In
What does it take to leave a career you love and build something from nothing — while raising two young boys?
Julie Nguyen, co-founder of Crunchmoms, joins Constanze and Anushka to unpack the "problem she couldn't unsee" after becoming a mother in a new city. She reframes motherhood as a startup (discovery phase, then operational excellence), explains why she refused to burn out to build, and gets honest about the financial trade-offs of going all in.
We talk community as the heartbeat of a business, "think big, act small," raising boys who'll grow into good men, and the co-founder partnership with Liying that began with a single LinkedIn message. Her throughline: ambition doesn't have to be rushed.
🎧 Motherhood in Motion — where ambition and motherhood live together, not in opposition.
31 Aug 2026
The Pursuit of Joy: Anita Hossain Choudhry on Raising Money, Raising Kids, and The Grand Pursuit
Anita Hossain Choudhry has always followed her curiosity. Through every unexpected turn, every transition, every season of life. And it is exactly that motion, that willingness to follow joy through every chapter, that led her to build The Grand Pursuit, a community and coaching platform for ambitious mothers, backed by Alexis Ohanian's 776 Ventures.
In this episode Anita talks about how ambition does not wane after motherhood, it gets more specific and more intentional. About what it felt like to sit on the stairs of her apartment, six months pregnant, wondering if she should walk away from everything she had just decided to build. About fundraising from the back of a tow truck with the music blasting. About the retreat she created that brought Dr. Becky Kennedy, Neha Ruch, Eve Rodsky, and Sheila Lirio Marcelo into one room for an honest conversation about trade-offs and guilt. And about why she built a space where women do not have to choose between their professional hat and their mother hat. Where they can simply be both, without explanation, without calculation, without apology.
And about the thing she most wants every mother to hear: stop mourning who you were before kids. Celebrate who you have become.
Motherhood in Motion is the podcast for mothers with ambition, hosted by Anushka Kalyanpur De Luca and Constanze Munz. Find us wherever you listen to podcasts.
13 Aug 2026
From Corporate to Founder: Ashleigh Lloyd on Flexibility, Family, and Filling Gaps
At Motherhood in Motion we keep it real. Ashleigh Lloyd is the co-founder of Baby and Kids Expo, one of the fastest-growing parenting platforms in the region. And she will be the first to tell you that founding something of your own does not automatically mean more time with your kids. In this episode she gets honest about what flexibility as a founder actually looks like: the peaks, the troughs, the seasons where it works and the seasons where it really does not. The problem she could not unsee became the business she built. But building it came with its own trade-offs. That is the conversation we love having on this podcast.
3 Aug 2026
Reincarnation, Not Recalibration: A Founder on Ambition, Trade-Offs and Why a Business Is Not a Hobby
Roshni Khemnani Mehta spent six years in investment banking after LSE before building two brands: Izaak Azanei, the knitwear label she founded with her sisters, and Little IA, thepersonalised children's gifting business that started as her COVID baby and now grows 50 to 80 percent a year. She is also the mother of three children under eight, running through the hardest growth phase she has faced yet. In this episode she tells Constanze and Anushka why motherhood is less a recalibrationthan a reincarnation, why she builds her life around accepting trade-offs instead of chasing balance, and why she will only run a company as long as it does not hinder the mother she wants to be. She is honest about the guilt, the systems she has built, and the support that makes all of it possible. Her advice to anyone thinking of starting a business is just as direct: do it only if you can do it better than everyone already doing it, because a business is not a hobby.
20 Jul 2026
Motherhood Is a Leadership Development Program
What if motherhood isn't the thing slowing your career down - but the most intense leadership program you'll ever complete?
This week, Constanze and Anushka sit down with Alexa Starks - founder of Executive Moms, editor-in-chief of Mothered Magazine, and CEO of Mothered Media. From the Netherlands (via Dallas, two toddlers, and one big rebrand), Alexa has built a research-and-media company redesigning the data behind working motherhood. Her Maternal Strengths Report measured twelve leadership skills - and mothers reported that every single one improved after having kids. The biggest jumps weren't the “soft” skills everyone expects. Time management rose 123%. Negotiation, 83%.
We get into why the operational skills surprised everyone, how survival mode forges capability nobody names, why flexibility only counts when there's “no consequence attached,” and what companies actually have to change beyond a workshop. Alexa also shares the raw tip she's held back from her TEDx and Forbes features - about what you're really building when you're just trying to get through the day.
It maps closely onto Motherhood in Motion's own two waves of UAE research on motherhood and ambition - 70% of mothers held or grew their ambition after kids, and ambition froze, rather than disappeared, when infrastructure collapsed.
Find Alexa's reports and National Working Motherhood Week at motheredmedia.com, the magazine at motheredmagazine.com, and her Substack, “Like a Motherfucker.”
Full episode on Spotify + YouTube
9 Jul 2026
She Kept Moving Anyway: Our Season One Finale
For the first time, Anushka and Constanze sit down in the same room to close out Season One, a season recorded across continents, time zones, and a regional war. They named this season's arc "she kept moving anyway," and in this finale they trace how it played out: two very different situations, one that froze and one that grew, and the survey work that pulled ambition back into view.
They revisit the moments that stuck, from Liying's "my ambition is not rushed" to Lucy's have the joy, drop the guilt, then show how they turned that research into something real: the in-person Nannies & More event where the survey findings became a live panel and roundtables on the infrastructure mothers actually need. They close on Season Two, "the problem she couldn't unsee," and its founders who saw something missing and built it, gentle and fierce at once.
Motherhood in Motion is the podcast for mothers with ambition, hosted by Anushka Kalyanpur DeLuca and Constanze Munz.
11 Jun 2026
You Cannot have Joy If you are holding guilt with Lucy Bruce
Lucy Bruce came to Dubai at 21 with a plan to teach for a year. Twenty-six years later, she's the co-founder of Homegrown Nursery — one of Dubai's most loved early years schools — and the founder of Harmony House, an NGO in India supporting 1,200 children with education, nutrition and welfare services.
In this episode, Lucy talks about the journey from corporate life to nursery founder, what it really takes to run a business with your best friend, and why Beverly and I have had exactly one argument in 15 years. She shares how Homegrown navigated the Dubai floods, why they've turned down every investor who's come knocking, and what it means to build a business around joy instead of growth.
Lucy also gets honest about the guilt that follows working mothers everywhere — and why letting go of it is the single most important thing she wishes she'd done sooner.
"You cannot have joy if you're holding guilt."
4 Jun 2026
Ambition, Alignment, and What We Model to Our Kids by Harriet Mandak
What happens to your ambition when the version you've been handed no longer fits?
This week, Constanze and Anushka sit down with Harriet — Dubai-based coach, strategic advisor, and founder of the Connected Collective — who walked away from her corporate career after becoming a mother, only to discover that the drive didn't leave with the job title. What followed was a deeper question: what do I actually want to build, and what do I want to model to my children?
Harriet talks candidly about the expectation-reality gap that hits so many mothers, why she believes ambition — properly understood — is a gift to your children rather than a trade-off, and how most conflict (at home and at work) comes down to a values misalignment. She also shares why she thinks we shouldn't be questioning whether mothers should be ambitious at all — we should be questioning the version of ambition we've inherited.
"Ambition isn't a job title. It's not a business. It's the decision to live a life on purpose, whatever form that may take."
28 May 2026
Stability from within: Liying Tay on motherhood, geographic motion, and ambition that is not rushed
What holds you steady when geography, ambition, and motherhood all keep shifting? Co-founder of Crunchmoms and mother of two, Liying Tay has been an expat since the age of eight. She has spent a lifetime rebuilding home wherever she lands. In this episode, she brings that lens to motherhood: why stability lives inside you and not in your address, why ambition is most sustainable when it is unrushed and aligned with your values, and why intergenerational living gives a child something AI cannot teach.
21 May 2026
Clarity, Strategy, Support: Taking Control of Your Money When Everything Feels Uncertain — with Kalyani Seth Soni
39% of mothers in our recentfollow-up survey said they are experiencing financial anxiety as a result ofthe current UAE context.
In this episode, Constanze and Anushka sit down with Kalyani Seth Soni — founder of She Invests, coach, and advocate for women's financial confidence — to talk about what money really has to do with ambition. And the answer is: everything.
Kalyani grew up watching the women in her family hold the wealth — managing, protecting, and growing it — whilequietly not counting that as worth. Her own journey through redundancy, a new baby, a misaligned business, and eventually finding herself in the financial markets taught her something she now teaches others: money isn't the goal.Worth is. Clarity comes first.
We talk about why women only reach for their finances when a crisis arrives — and why that has to change. We talk about the three basics every mother should have before she thinks about investing. And we talk about what ambition looks like when the ground shifts underneath you.
As Constanze says in this episode: ambition doesn't stop. It freezes. It doesn't surrender.
14 May 2026
Don't Wait to Be Invited: A CFO on Ambition, Motherhood, Mental Load and Redesigning the Workplace From Within
Laura has spent 22 years in the corporate world, nine of them at a major media group where she is now CFO. She is also the mother of three, an expat in Dubai with no family support nearby, and someone who has quietly redesigned the system from the inside. In this episode, she speaks to what our research found starkly: when the current context hit, it fell almost entirely on mothers. She saw it in her own team and pushed back hard. She also talks about why balance is a myth she stopped chasing, how she learned to put herself at the centre of her own week, and what she would tell any woman looking to re-enter the corporate world after a pause. Her advice is direct: find the companies where women are already leading, reach out to them before you sign anything, and stop waiting to be invited to the table.
7 May 2026
Built It Anyway: AI, Ambition and Motherhood with Irmak Atabek
What does it mean to build a startup while raising a child alone, through COVID, through crisis, through connectivity dropping mid-sentence? Irmak Atabek, founder of Kids.ai and single mother of one, built anyway. In this episode, Irmak brings her lens as a media professional, AI researcher and solo parent to three questions we keep coming back to: how AI actually changes the workload (spoiler: it increases efficiency, not ease), what it means to prepare your children for a world you're still figuring out yourself, and why her daughter is her moral compass for every professional decision she makes. Our research shows that 80% of mental load was already on mothers before any crisis hit. Irmak's story is what it looks like when ambition refuses to freeze.
30 Apr 2026
No Lost Time: Leilani Rooks on Ambition, Partnership, and Holding Steady Through Uncertainty
What does ambition look like when the season shifts beneath you? Family counsellor and mother of three Leilani Rooks has spent her career working with the relationships inside families: between partners, between parents and children, between who we are and who we’re becoming. In this episode, she brings that lens to the current moment in Dubai: why crisis exposes the gaps in partnerships that calmer times let us ignore, why ambition in motherhood is more feeling than deliverable, and why no time spent steadying a family is ever truly lost.
23 Apr 2026
The Community Is the Infrastructure
What holds mothers together when everything else shifts? Not systems. Not institutions. The people who show up. Doula, community builder, and mother of four Lala Langtry White has spent over a decade building the invisible networks that carry mothers through their most vulnerable moments: birth, NICU, loss, the raw early weeks. In this episode, she brings that lens to the current moment in Dubai: what the current situation reveals about who we rely on, why community is not a nice-to-have but a load-bearing structure, and what it actually means to ask for help before you desperately need it.
14 Apr 2026
The Care Redistribution: Magnified During Crisis
Motherhood in Motion is built on one core finding, ambition doesn’t disappear after motherhood. For most women, it stays the same or grows. But what happens when crisis hits? When routines collapse, support systems are stretched, and the mental load intensifies? Our initial mini series will explore exactly that. We’re opening with the structural lens. Every crisis follows the same pattern. The care burden snaps back to women. To mothers. To whoever was already holding the most. Gender in emergencies specialist Isadora Quay has documented this across fragile and conflict-affected contexts worldwide. Together, we explore what that framework reveals about Dubai in the current context in March 2026: resilient and well-resourced, and yet the redistribution is happening here too. What does that tell us about how structural this problem really is? And what does it mean for mothers navigating this moment?
10 Apr 2026
Motherhood in Motion: The Podcast for Mothers with Ambition
Motherhood in Motion explores what happens in the moments of movement between roles, identities, seasons, and geographies, when mothers are actively navigating what it means to build lives that work for both their families and themselves.
Ambition does not halt after motherhood. It recalibrates. It clarifies. These conversations in our podcast surface patterns, connect research to real stories, and contribute to redesigning the systems that mothers and families actually need.
This is not about doing it all. It is about defining what your “all” means, and finding the support to get there.
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