While everyone knows the big names, Tesla, Musk, Bezos, women have been inventing and leading just as long. After all women were the ones who invented the washing machine, Monopoly, windshield wipers, the list goes on. But you can read a history book if you want to learn more. Knapp is seeking to put a spotlight on the current-day CEOs who’ve been overlooked in today’s media and top 10 lists.

These female CEOs should be more visible, after all you can’t be what you can’t see as the saying goes. Plus statistics show that females who do lead businesses tend to outperform men which is why venture capitalists are searching for the next female talent and female-led start-ups.

Now some whose brands should sound familiar like Spanx, 23AndMe, Soul Cycle, and PopSugar. She has split the book into thirteen sections: Fashion, Food, Jewelry, Makeup, Flowers, Stationary, Tech, Media, Fitness, Home, Packaging, and Construction.

Knapp takes readers through the triumphs, hardships and business-planning, showing that you don’t have to be extraordinarily smart or special to rise in the ranks. You just have to have a vision and a drive to succeed in the face of failure and obstacles. And there will be obstacles and lots of learning along the way but Knapp makes the path a bit easier as her interviewees offer helpful tips and vital information on how to start up a business and get your foot in the door by cold-calling and networking among other things.

But that’s not all, in the last few pages of the book, Knapp provides a “Ultimate Business Survival Kit” detailling how to create a business plan, thinking of market sizes, competitive advantages, how to fundraise and other lingo to help jumpstart your work. She clarifies the difference between copyright and trademark, shows an example of the Spanx patent, the elevator pitch for Stitch Fix and more.

Knapp also emphasizes the important of becoming financially literate and gives an example of the Yellowberry Bra Business to demonstrate how to calculate your operating expenses, profit margin and income statement. It’s a well-done explanation in summarizing a daunting concept to something palatable even if you aren’t a math person. Now if someone could just do that with taxes. . .

Overall, it’s a pretty great book though some of the sections like Flowers and Construction only had one profile shown so I felt like it could have been somehow smushed into one of the other sections.

Anyway, I’ll leave readers with a few interesting CEOs I had never heard of.

Natasha Case, Co-founder and CEO of CoolHaus: CoolHaus is available nationwide, selling unique and delicious flavors of ice cream like Coffee & Donuts, Buttered French Toast, and Milkshake & Fries. Her industrial work is unique as the average ice cream machines only have one swirl-in and one mix-in while hers are designed to take two of each.

Kara Golden, Founder and CEO of Hint: Needing to be more healthy but hating the bland taste of water, Goldin used fruit oils to make bottled water with a fruity taste and without harmful perservatives. She does so by using a special heating process in her bottles to act as perservatives, thus keeping it fresh on the shelves while remaining healthy. You can buy it at Whole Foods or with the Hint subscription service and has expanded her business to creating non-toxic sunscreen, free of oxybenzones that affect bodily and cancer hormones.

Nina Tandon, Cofounder, and CEO of EpiBone: EpiBone is working to create human bones from stem cells to assist in facial deformity surgeries and prosthetic surgery. Currently, they’ve been successful with pgs, and rat cells and they’ve begun their process using human stem cells. She’s currently applying for FDA approval before going commercial.

Jane Chen, Cofounder and CEO of Embrace Innovations and Little Lotus: She helped to create a nonelectric baby warmer that has saved the lives of 300,000 premature babies in underserved countries. This works by finding a material that shifts between liqued and solid state at a perfect 98 degree temperature, keeping babies warm and stablized. Embrace Innovations is a for-profit, hybrid model where her big customers like governmenent agencies and world Health Organization pay for her products and the money from those sales go to her nonprofit that sends Embrace blankets to those in need. Her Little Lotus company creates similar temperature-regulating items like swaddles and blankets in the U.S.

Beatriz Acevedo, Founder of Mitu: Beatriz know what she wanted to do and vied for a DJ job at a local station. Her pitch arguing that she was the demographic they were playing for, so she should be djing so impressed the station owner she got the job. She was 8. As she got older she worked for the Mexican equivalent of Entertainment Tonight and broke into US mainstream by creating content for Discovery, PBS, MTV and USA Network. Once she was independent, she created her own network, Mitu, digital shows made for the growing Latin American audience, selling shows like Chingo Bling, They Can’t Deport Is All and Mom’s Movie Review.

Jessica O. Matthews, Founder and CEO of Uncharted Power: Creator of the Sockett ball where just 60 minutes of kicking around a bal provides 72 hours of light and electricty, Matthews has expanded to harnessing kinetic energy from suitcase wheels, shopping carts, jump rope, bikes road bumps and more so improverished countries can have easy to access, renewable energy.

Maci Peterson Philitas, Cofounder and CEO of On Second Thought: Do you ever make a stupid text you wish you could take back or autocorrect ruins your thoughtfully written texts to make you look like an idiot? Inspired by this common problem, Philitas created On Second Thought, a technology that delays your message so you can delete or fix it. Brilliant right? It went off the hook in a matter of days with thousands of people buying her app and big companies vying to buy it. Currently she has licensed it out to a large unnamed company so people can’t use the app anymore but she’s still working on growing her company and is thinking of what to do next.