About The SWELL
The name is a promise
SWELL stands for Seattle Women Expanding, Leading, and Lifting. It is also the picture we keep coming back to. A swell is the energy that gathers before a wave, the rising water that lifts every boat around it.
That is what we are building. A rising tide of women, lifting each other, building on their own terms. The next wave starts here.
How The SWELL started
The SWELL began with a conversation. Seaton Gras founded SURF Incubator seventeen years ago, and has spent that time building a home for founders who did not fit the usual mold. I am Sally Revell. I led teams at Google Cloud and AWS before becoming an executive coach, and I spend my days working with women building businesses.
We got talking about a gap we had both seen in Seattle for years.
There are plenty of women here building companies with real heart and real substance. A business with a head and a heart. Profitable, meaningful, built to last. But because it is not chasing the kind of scale that interests a venture capitalist, almost nothing in the city was built to support her.
For some founders, raising venture capital is the right path, and we will always cheer them through that door. For many others, it was never the fit. They want a profitable business they own outright. They want to build at a pace that fits their lives, including the caregiving that rarely comes up in a pitch meeting. Very little existed for them.
So we started meeting. And then more women pulled up chairs who saw the same gap and wanted to do something about it. Out of those conversations, The SWELL took shape.
What we believe
You should get to define success for yourself, and then get real help pursuing it.
Keeping your equity is a legitimate, ambitious choice.
A business can have a head and a heart. Profit and meaning are not opposites.
Caregiving is a fact of building a business, and it belongs in the design, not the fine print.
Community works best in a real place, with real people, over time.