Two Influential Women, One Mission.

Tory Burch & Katie Couric

In April 2018, the Tory Burch Foundation held its first Embrace Ambition Summit at Lincoln Center in New York. Onstage, Tory Burch sat down in conversation with Katie Couric. It was a fitting pairing: two women who built defining careers in industries that did not always make room for them, and who have both spent years talking openly about what that cost.

Burch opened the day with a line that could serve as a thesis for both of their careers. “Here’s the thing: women aren’t the problem. Our attitudes are.”

One of them built a global fashion company from a single downtown boutique. The other broke one of the last glass ceilings in American television. Both decided that success meant little unless they used it to change the odds for other women. This is the story of how they did it.

Tory Burch: Learning the Business

Burch was born in 1966 in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988 with a degree in art history. She moved to New York and learned the fashion business from the inside, working for the designer Zoran and at Harper’s Bazaar before moving into public relations and advertising at Vera Wang, Polo Ralph Lauren and Loewe.

Those years gave her something rare: a view of how great brands are built, marketed and sold, from the people building them.

One Boutique on Elizabeth Street

In February 2004, Burch launched her label with a boutique at 257 Elizabeth Street in Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood. The store nearly sold out on its first day.

A year later Oprah Winfrey featured the line on her show and called Burch “the next big thing in fashion.” The company’s website drew eight million hits the next day. Customers were soon placed on waiting lists.

Her signature Reva ballet flat, named for her mother, became one of the most recognizable shoes of the decade. In 2008 the Council of Fashion Designers of America named her Accessories Designer of the Year. In 2011 she staged her first runway show at New York Fashion Week. Today the brand has around 400 stores worldwide. Since 2019, Burch has served as executive chairman and chief creative officer, with her husband, Pierre-Yves Roussel, as CEO.

Owning the Word

Around the time of her launch, a reporter asked Burch whether she was ambitious. The question made her uncomfortable, and a friend later noticed she had dodged the word entirely. It took time to name what had happened. “I realized that I had bought into the stereotype that women shouldn’t admit to being ambitious.”

That realization changed the way she thought about her platform. She has said she is “so tired of women having to limit themselves and their ambition,” and she argues that the real barriers are often invisible. At the 2018 summit, she said the goal was to “shine a light on the sometimes-hidden biases and barriers that all women face.”

Building the Foundation

Giving back had been part of Burch’s plan from the very beginning. She founded the Tory Burch Foundation in 2009 to support women entrepreneurs through access to capital, business education and networks.

In 2014 the foundation launched what is now its Capital Program with Bank of America. Through it, the foundation has provided $57 million in affordable loans to 3,500 women. It has helped more than 10,000 women write business plans, and it backs 50 fellows every year with mentoring and grants.

In 2017 the foundation launched #EmbraceAmbition, a global campaign urging women and girls to voice their ambition and own their power, with support from figures including Gayle King, Gwyneth Paltrow and Anna Wintour. The campaign also tackled a quieter problem: the double standard that rewards ambition in men and penalizes it in women.

The campaign was practical as well as inspirational. Burch laid out concrete ways to challenge the stereotype: talk openly about your ambitions, check your own reactions to ambitious women, define success for yourself, support other women, bring men into the conversation and take the #EmbraceAmbition pledge. The point was not simply to admire ambitious women. It was to change the everyday habits that hold them back.

The campaign video, directed by Sophy Holland, featured voices including Reese Witherspoon, Kerry Washington, Sheryl Sandberg, Melinda Gates and Billie Jean King, a signal of how widely the message resonated.

Katie Couric: Breaking the Anchor Desk

Couric knows the attitudes Burch describes from the inside. After earning an English degree from the University of Virginia, she started in 1979 as a desk assistant at ABC News in Washington. She then joined the young CNN, reported for local stations in Miami and Washington and moved to NBC News in 1989 as a deputy Pentagon reporter. In 1990 she became NBC’s first national correspondent.

She learned early what it costs to be judged rather than heard. At 26, after a CNN executive commented on her appearance, she wrote a letter demanding an apology, and got one. “I was all of 26 years old and I was humiliated,” she later recalled.

In 1991 she became co-anchor of “Today,” beginning a 15 year run that made her one of the most trusted faces in America. In 2006 she moved to CBS to anchor the evening news, becoming the first woman to solo anchor a weekday network evening newscast.

The Interview That Defined a Campaign

At CBS, Couric delivered some of the most consequential journalism of her career. Her 2008 interview with Sarah Palin became one of the defining moments of that year’s presidential campaign and earned her an Alfred I. duPont Award. The “CBS Evening News” won the Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Newscast in 2008 and 2009, and in 2009 she received the Walter Cronkite Award.

Over her career she has won Emmy and Peabody awards. In 2011 she joined Disney and ABC, launching the daytime talk show “Katie,” and she has since built her own media company.

She has also made a point of passing on what she learned. In 2011 she published “The Best Advice I Ever Got,” a collection of hard-won lessons from leaders across many fields, with the profits directed to Scholarship America.

A Platform With Purpose

For Couric, ambition has also meant using the platform to save lives. After losing her first husband, Jay Monahan, to colon cancer in 1998, she underwent a colonoscopy live on “Today” in 2000 to push viewers to get screened. Colonoscopies reportedly rose 20 percent afterward, a jump that became known as “the Couric effect.” As she has put it, “I wanted to save some lives, and I had the potential to do that.”

That same year she co-founded the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance. In 2004 the Jay Monahan Center opened at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. In 2008 she was part of the first Stand Up To Cancer broadcast, a movement that raised nearly $200 million for research in its early years.

Done Being Likable

In her 2021 memoir, “Going There,” Couric wrote candidly about the pressure that follows so many women at work: to be agreeable, to be liked and to stay in their lane. Discussing the book, she described setting that pressure down for good. “My goal in life isn’t to please people anymore.” She goes further: “I think if you’re just likable, you’re not very interesting.”

Her advice to the next generation has the same edge. “Now more than ever, you need to have chutzpah,” she told one commencement audience. “You need to do something that sets you apart.”

Two Paths, One Argument

On the surface, Burch and Couric could not have taken more different routes. One built a company, a product line and a global retail footprint. The other built a career in front of the camera, in one of the most scrutinized jobs in American media. Yet their stories rhyme in ways that are hard to miss.

Both learned their industries from the bottom. Burch worked in public relations and advertising for other designers before she ever put her own name on a door. Couric started as a desk assistant, answering phones and fetching scripts, before she ever sat in an anchor chair. Neither skipped the apprenticeship, and both have credited those early years with teaching them how power actually works.

Both also faced a version of the same question: how much ambition is a woman allowed to show? Burch flinched when a reporter asked if she was ambitious. Couric spent years managing the expectation that a woman on television should, above all, be likable. Each eventually decided the question itself was the problem.

And both turned personal experience into public good. Burch built a foundation that has put capital and training into the hands of thousands of women entrepreneurs. Couric turned private grief into a national campaign for cancer screening that changed behavior across the country. Their influence is not just what they built. It is what they made possible for others.

The Ambition Playbook

Their careers offer a set of habits any woman can borrow, whatever she is building.

None of these lessons require a fashion empire or a network contract. They are choices, and they are available to anyone willing to make them, starting with the simplest one: refusing to make yourself smaller so other people feel more comfortable.

The Shared Lesson

Burch is careful that embracing ambition never becomes another box to check. Success, she argues, is defined by the woman pursuing it, whether that means running a company or raising children with integrity. “Whatever someone’s ambitions are, it’s not our place to judge them.”

Couric, for her part, has spent decades showing what it looks like to stop asking permission. Together, their careers make a simple argument: ambition is not something women should hide, soften or apologize for. It is something to say out loud.

What both women ask for is simpler and harder than it sounds. Say what you want. Back the women around you while they do the same. As Burch puts it, “When we support each other, we all do better.”