In 2017, after twenty years running multibillion-dollar banking divisions at HSBC and J.P. Morgan, Cate Luzio sat down with a mentor who asked her a question no one had posed in two decades: “Is this what you want to continue to do for the rest of your life?” Two weeks later, she had her answer. She left banking entirely.
What she built next was Luminary: a a gender-inclusive professional education and networking platform she self-funded with her own savings, designed to give women the infrastructure that banks and corporations had never prioritized. Seven years in, she has thousands of members, more than 100 enterprise partners, three acquisitions, and no outside investors. Most leaders in this series renegotiated the terms of their exec contracts. Cate created one from scratch.
Luzio had mentors and sponsors throughout her banking career. The one who catalyzed her departure refused to let her stay in tunnel vision and pushed her to examine whether the terms of her role still matched what she cared about.
“He put it back in my court around what was important to me.”
For twenty years, her priorities had been the institution’s priorities. But what really motivated Luzio was impact — specifically supporting women. This realization happened when someone outside the role named what she couldn’t see from within it.
Everyone told Luzio to raise venture capital. She self-funded instead, a decision she calls “stiletto-strapping,” a term she trademarked. The conventional read is that bootstrapping is scrappy and slow. Luzio’s argument is the opposite: chasing investors would have cost her time she didn’t want to spend.
“If I went faster, if I did it myself, I could go to market faster. I could also go to market the way that I wanted.”
Self-funding kept the terms in her hands — and her members’ hands — instead of an investor’s. Seven years later, the company is profitable and still hasn’t taken outside capital.
Luzio’s brother was an entrepreneur before she was. If he’d given her the full inventory of what building a company actually requires, she says she wouldn’t have listened. Probably wouldn’t have done it at all.
“If I had not been as naive as I was, I wouldn’t have done it.”
I’m living a version of this right now. When Luzio and I first spoke in 2020, I had a full production team around me. For this show, I’m the producer, the technician, the editor, and the host. Her point isn’t that the costs don’t exist. It’s that a full accounting of them would have talked her out of the thing she’d already decided to do.
Every episode of this series examines how a leader has renegotiated one of six structural terms of work: scope, pace, evaluation, visibility, risk, and exit. When I asked Luzio what term of her old career she would never accept again, her answer went straight to voice. She would never again work somewhere that treated advocacy as pageantry—where the company championed a cause without putting its money behind it. The leverage point she renegotiated wasn’t pace or pricing or scope. It was visibility: the right to say what she actually thinks, in her own name, about the things she actually believes.
“Someone not allowing me to use my voice for good—that’s my non-negotiable.”
Know a leader who is charting a career path on their own terms? Reach out so I can consider interviewing them for this series. And if you want this in your inbox for free, subscribe here.
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