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Fortune
Emma Hinchliffe, Joseph Abrams

The best insights from female founders and CEOs at Brainstorm Tech

Zoox CEO Aicha Evans wearing a green blazer and speaking onstage (Credit: Stuart Isett—Fortune)

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Angel City Football Club becomes the most valuable women's sports team in the world, AI researcher Fei-Fei Li earns a $1 billion valuation, and female founders and CEOs wowed the crowd at Brainstorm Tech. Have a terrific Thursday.

- Top tech. We just wrapped Fortune's Brainstorm Tech—and while Broadsheet readers have already heard from San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly and Fearless Fund founding partner Arian Simone, I'd be remiss if I didn't share more from the powerhouse women in technology who joined us in Park City, Utah this week.

— Aicha Evans, the CEO of Amazon-owned robotaxi business Zoox, has been slower to market than some of her competitors (or "fellow travelers," as Evans calls them). "In tech, sometimes being first has been good. And sometimes it hasn’t,” the CEO said in an interview after her onstage session. Still, she calls New York the "holy grail" for autonomous vehicles and says she expects broad deployment in the city within a decade.

— Forerunner Ventures managing partner Kirsten Green gave a presentation on consumer sentiment and generative AI. "People are feeling overwhelmed, if not burdened, by the level of information and hyperconnectivity they have," Green explains. A key opportunity for AI startups will be to provide relief from that hyperconnection.

Zoox CEO Aicha Evans spoke at Fortune Brainstorm Tech on July 16, 2024.

— Jenny Fleiss, cofounder of Rent the Runway and former CEO of Walmart's JetBlack, says her relationship with Rent the Runway cofounder Jenn Hyman was critical to her mental health during her years building a business. "The idea that you’re not in this alone because your cofounder implicitly cares just as much as you do…that’s what kept me afloat in a very sane way amidst losing my mom and having three kids while being at Rent the Runway,” she told Bonobos founder Andy Dunn in an onstage conversation.

—Salesforce AI chief Clara Shih says that many companies are frustrated by the still-unreliable nature of generative AI, from spouting incorrect information to "hallucinations." The frustrations are holding back businesses from widely releasing products that use the technology.

—Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson, the former chief of Magic Leap, says her company's humanoid robot Digit is already at work at a factory in Georgia that makes Spanx. That's thanks to a deal with logistics provider GXO Logistics.

That's all from Brainstorm Tech this year. Thank you for following along!

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Broadsheet is Fortune's newsletter for and about the world's most powerful women. Today's edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.

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