Valerie Chapman Wants AI to Earn Women’s Trust

Valerie Chapman has been laid off twice. The second time, she decided she was done waiting for someone to hand her the next thing.

She moved to San Francisco, cold-emailed 600 people, and three weeks later threw a hackathon. That was in November. By April she was at Hearst Tower in New York doing it again. She is fully bootstrapped, funding an AI company on her creator income, doing the work of ten to fifteen people with a team of two.

None of this is despite her circumstances. It is because of them.

A conviction, not a pivot

Chapman is the founder and CEO of Ruth, an AI platform in beta designed to help women build financial power — negotiating salaries, navigating careers, closing the gaps the industry has spent decades ignoring. The company is built around the belief Chapman has held for years, long before she had data to back it up: women aren’t just underserved by AI. They’re being left out of the rooms where it gets built.

At AI events in San Francisco, Chapman kept doing the same informal count. Ninety, maybe ninety-five percent men. The numbers she'd later commission with Harris Poll confirmed what she already knew: women use AI roughly 25% less than men. The gap is not an accident. It is a design problem.

"Women aren't using AI as much as men because we don't have the right spokespeople," she says. "They're primarily men. We need more women as the face of AI to actually move the needle on adoption."

So she decided to become one. Not through a campaign. Through a company built in public, before the product is finished, on the belief that trust cannot be added at the end.

Radical optimism as an operating principle

This is where the radical optimism comes in. Not the motivational poster kind. The kind you develop when you’ve lost a job twice and decided the only rational response is to build something so necessary it cannot be ignored.

Every morning, Chapman chooses gratitude. She has written about how it shapes the way she emails, leads, and shows up. It sounds like a wellness habit. In practice, it is a survival strategy for a founder betting her livelihood on a conviction the AI industry has yet to fully reckon with.

“To be a founder you have to be so radically optimistic,” she says. “People think we have a really large team, but what we have is a lot of optimism, a lot of faith, and just the willingness to show up every day and tell our story.”

That optimism is also what keeps her from amplifying the stories that would be easy to tell — the VC rejections, the hostile comments, the particular skepticism reserved for young women building in AI. She gets them. She doesn’t feed them.

“I try to be vulnerable. I got laid off twice – I’m not afraid to, at the right time, say the difficult thing,” she says. “I try to put out optimism because I think that comes back to you, and I don’t want to perpetuate negative narratives that would ultimately not help the ecosystem of women builders.”

Good intentions don't close gaps

When Chapman asked Sam Altman at an OpenAI builder town hall how AI could be used to solve long-standing economic gaps like the gender wage gap, his answer was immediate: AI should be an equalizing force in society.

She agrees with where he landed. She disagrees with the present tense.

Right now, AI is making the gender gap worse. Women are 16 percentage points less likely than men to use generative AI tools for work. The gender wage gap already costs American women $1.6 trillion annually. If that adoption gap holds, women will be excluded from a disproportionate share of whatever value AI creates next. The math is not complicated. The industry's good intentions are not doing the work.

So Chapman decided to.

The Harris Poll research came through a LinkedIn connection, an opportunity she hadn't planned for and said yes to before she knew where it would go. "I didn't seek out initially to put out research or to survey over 2,000 Americans," she says. "But I think when an opportunity presents itself, I just took the opportunity and said, we don't know where it could go."

The hackathons work the same way. Women-only, held in buildings that signal seriousness, deliberately designed to feel nothing like a typical tech event. The New York edition drew 150 applicants for 25 spots, women traveling from Harvard and Tufts to attend. An audience of 100 to 150 investors, founders, and creators watched the presentations. The event reached over a million people online.

"Hackathons are typically so lame," she says. "So we were like, how do we make this something that can be mainstream. We're basically trying to change the narrative around women shouldn't just be using AI, they should be building it, too."

Ruth's design thesis is specific: AI built for women should deliver complete, actionable outputs. Finished negotiation scripts, not suggestions. Personal brand strategies, not prompts. Embedded in community, accessible by voice, built to reduce the friction that has kept women's adoption rates low in the first place.

Altman said AI should be an equalizing force. Chapman is building the version that actually is.

The window is now

“For decades, business was built on golf courses, inside private clubs, and through networks that often excluded women,” she has written. “Those rooms still exist, but they are no longer the only places where opportunity happens. Today, deals begin through DMs, emails, texts, online communities, and increasingly, AI agents.”

That shift is the "why now" behind Ruth. AI is reshaping how business gets done — how companies find customers, how deals close, how careers get built. The habits, tools, and trust being established in this window will be sticky. Platforms accumulate. Communities compound. The founders who earn women's trust now will not have to re-earn it.

Which is why Chapman is building community, research, and proof before the product ships. Trust is not a feature you add at launch. It is not a campaign you run after the fact. It is either in the foundation or it isn't.

"We are investing in community, research, and narrative before launching the product because trust cannot be added at the end," she has written.

The window for getting this right is open. Valerie Chapman is not waiting for it to close.

About HubSpot for Startups

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Ruth AI is growing with HubSpot for Startups. Learn more at hubspot.com/startups.

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