Aphelion, and What Comes Next
How women are reshaping capital, innovation, and leadership on a global stage.
What Comes Next
Last month, Earth reached aphelion—its farthest point from the Sun for the entire year. And the ocean is at its warmest.
In San Clemente, we've had a powerful breeze coming off the ocean. I sleep with the door open, and the ocean becomes my backyard. At dawn, we chase it to the shore.
This is the place where I dream about what comes next.
In the spring, it was the Global Women in Innovation Summit.
Orange County had been talking about taking its place on the global stage—mostly as a hub of innovation and a strategic corridor for foreign investment. This conversation had come up in Orange County before.
Unity had been presented as the unspoken puzzle yet to be solved: How do we bring together 34 cities, dozens of cultures, and a dozen major industry clusters?
I built the Summit around this and presented a question:
Who allocates?
Power comes from what we choose to allocate—and where we direct it.
Attention. Capital. Time. Authority.
Allocation, not expenditure, determines our outcome.
What We Allocate
As women, we are celebrated for driving 70 percent of consumer spending. Then we're taught to interpret this as power.
Spending is what moves wealth outward.
Like power, wealth isn't something we buy.
Wealth is what we allocate.
The largest wealth transfer in history is already underway—roughly $124 trillion by 2048, with women expected to receive most of it. By 2030, women in the United States are projected to control some $34 trillion in financial assets, nearly double what we held a decade ago.
Where women are funded, we return 78 cents of revenue on the dollar, compared with 31 cents for male counterparts—two and a half times the efficiency rate.
And yet, all-women founding teams drew just one percent of U.S. venture capital last year.
Anywhere else, this would be labeled a mispricing.
Capital holds a gravity all its own.
Right now, it is pulling toward women.
Where Leadership Stands
Women hold 34 percent of S&P 500 board seats. We hold 17 percent of the CFO chairs across the largest American companies. We run 11 percent of the Fortune 500.
We represent one in nine of the investing partners who decide which companies get funded. And most venture firms don't have a woman in that seat.
The top companies for gender diversity on leadership teams are 40 percent more likely to outperform their peers.
In 2025, many of these numbers stopped climbing for the first time in years.
Women own 42 percent of all businesses in the United States. We launched 49 percent of new businesses in 2024—the highest share ever recorded.
Women invented agriculture, developed the first crops, created the first pottery, and developed the first woven textiles.
Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program.
Grace Hopper helped give machines human language.
Hedy Lamarr co-invented technology that became foundational to Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth.
Twenty Vietnamese refugee women built an $8.3 billion industry.
Innovation was never the question. Recognition was.
My father used to say, "Women are going to solve this. Women are the true leaders."
What I Built
In October 2024, I created OC Women in Business, growing an exclusive women's initiative from just 42 attendees to 217 in a little over two months.
Though surrounded by doubt, I knew I could.
In 2008, I had accomplished something similar for writers, taking a highly competitive "red ocean" writers' group with 140 members, renaming it Poets and Dreamers™, and developing a peak-performance team-culture model as its foundation. I then grew it to well over 2,400 members.
In 2013, CBS Los Angeles recognized me as a community builder.
Poets and Dreamers™ had become a global initiative built on "Uniting Cultures and Continents"—and to this day, it continues to thrive.
This spring, I brought that proven approach to the Paul Merage School of Business at UC Irvine for the Global Women in Innovation Summit.
I believed something that hadn't been said:
Women belong at the center of capital investment, innovation, and leadership.
Hundreds of leaders, founders, investors, students, and global voices filled the hall.
Founders and professors. Trade strategists and artists. Voices that had never before shared a stage.
I brought them together around the questions that will shape the next economy:
- Women-led innovation.
- Enterprise AI—and who gets to build it.
- Cultural intelligence as strategy.
- Global trade, market entry, and foreign direct investment.
Andy Cunningham—the Macintosh launch publicist who founded and led Cunningham Communication and represented some of the greatest technology companies of her time—headlined live from Silicon Valley.
CCI, where I began my career, is where I learned the science and discipline of strategic positioning.
The summit was proof that innovative leaders build our own spaces.
On our terms. Intuitively.
After 27 years of seeing what we most need, we build it.
What Comes Next
The gathering was never the destination.
Bringing leaders together is simply the beginning.
The money is arriving faster than the authority.
Closing that gap is the next act.
On October 1, the OC Global Leadership in Innovation Summit launches at the UCI Cove, where we will release the next book in my Redefining Leadership series, Thought Leaders and Innovators, and bring its subjects to the global stage.
- Power Women and the Great Wealth Transfer.
- Optimism as an Operating Model.
- Jazz Bands for Peak Performance.
- Cultural Intelligence as Strategy.
As I complete this forthcoming book and build my next summit, I open the doors and breathe in these defining moments of August.
Aphelion.
The moment when we sit farthest from the Sun and the water runs warmest.
I keep the windows open, face the shore.
And I listen to the quiet beneath the surface—the tide that has already turned, affecting us long before it reaches the sand.
It pauses before it guides us to the far coast.
Toward October.
To the place where I dream up what comes next…
Anne Tammel is a Fortune 100 leadership and strategy advisor and author of the Redefining Leadership series. A Silicon Valley native, she began her career at Cunningham Communication, the firm that positioned Steve Jobs and launched the Macintosh, and has since advised leaders at Google, PwC, Citi, and Deloitte. She is the founder of the OC C-Suite | CEO Collective and OC CEO Women. Her next volume, Thought Leaders and Innovators, releases October 1 at the First Annual Global Leadership in Innovation Summit.
Silicon Valley roots. Orange County stage. Global reach.
