Cofounder Paqui Lizana has spent two decades building things before the category existed: before there was a team, a budget, or a name for it.
First holding a university degree from a family that came from the field, and learned early that imagination + conviction are a real superpower. Her career started in a research lab in Barcelona, where she fell in love about solving customer problems and what tech could just about do. From 3D printing and AR to connected cars and new mobility models, then to retail at IKEA, where she helped establish the company’s first innovation network and first AI Lab.
Today she advises leaders on innovation and human-centred AI strategy, and co-founded Brilliant Failures AI Studio with Jenny, which asks what intelligence becomes when trained on the voices usually left out: caregivers, mothers, living systems. Through Brilliant Mothers she helps working mothers lead in the age of AI. Part club, part sanctuary, part spellbook, part a telescope towards the future.
She is a Board Member of TEDx Amsterdam and sits on the steering committee of the IEEE Global AI Systems Flourishing Initiative. She mentors founders through Google AI Program and All Tech Is Human, and has spoken at MIT, the European Commission and the UN AI for Good Global Summit. Her work has been featured in Forbes and Fast Company.
43y old, Spanish-born, based in the Netherlands, she holds a Master’s in Aerospace Engineering and an MBA from IESE. Neither taught her as much as the two PhDs she is still enrolled in, as a mother of two amazing kids, Kai and Lima.
Why I’m excited to be part of WIN Awards: Two reasons.
1- JENNY. Brilliant Mothers exists because two strangers that became friends kept building across an ocean. If that is all anyone takes from this nomination, I would be happy. I want other women to see that distance is not a reason to not start something together.
2- WIN itself. We are deciding, right now, who gets to act without asking. So far the answer is machines. I would like it to be women. That is what WIN means to me.
Cofounder Jenny Nicholson has spent twenty years working in the sweet spot where creativity, humanity, and technology collide — gamifying poverty, using video game technology to prevent gun deaths, and teaching financial literacy by letting teens cosplay as a con man. She’s currently Head of Creativity at WALDO, an agentic AI platform for agencies and brands, where her job is teaching AI models how to tap into their latent creativity. (Yes, really.) She also co-leads Brilliant Failures, a studio focused on how emerging technology can help us stay human.
Why I’m excited to be part of WIN Awards: If we want a good future, we NEED women to be part of building it. It’s an enormous honor to be surrounded by powerful female leaders doing just that.
