The Gratitude Loop: How Mentorship and Collaboration Shape Women’s Leadership
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
By Kristin Thomas
Founder & CEO, Marble Collective
When I think about gratitude in leadership, I think about the women who said “yes.”
Yes to a conversation when I had only an idea.
Yes to investing in a vision before it had a product.
Yes to mentoring, introducing, and believing-in me, and in each other.
That’s how Marble Collective was built: one “yes” at a time.
Marble began as a personal realization that even
extraordinary legacies can disappear if they aren’t preserved and shared. After my grandfather, one of the most recognized narrators of his era, passed away, I found his life’s work scattered across the internet. In piecing it together, I saw how easily remarkable stories fade without a dedicated home. Years later, after two decades in luxury real estate and leadership, I saw the same truth in the women around me, brilliant founders, executives, and creators who served as role models and inspiration to me, but whose impact wasn’t easily accessible, or being captured and amplified.
I wanted to change that.
Today, Marble is an AI-powered platform that centralizes and amplifies the media, ideas, and legacies of remarkable women leaders, making them easier to find, follow, and even booked. But behind the technology is something more fundamental: a network of women lifting each other and their life’s work up by sharing information and opportunities, by collaborating and showing up for each other.
When I began fundraising, after learning about the deeply inequitable venture capital ecosystem that invests 98% of capital into startups led by men, I made a deliberate choice not to pursue or waste time on that route. With 300 women leaders onboard as Founding Members, and more than 250 applicants, I invited the very women Marble was designed to serve to become our first investors. Seventy-five women said yes. They wrote checks ranging from $1,200 to $25,000, not just funding our platform, but becoming co-owners in the infrastructure of their own visibility. That experience not only validated the timing, and demand of Marble Collective, but illustrated for me the power of women joining forces to collectively drive and direct impact, capital, and the future they want to see.
What I’ve learned through building Marble is that gratitude is ignited through collaboration. Every introduction, every conversation, every piece of shared visibility has a ripple effect. The women in our network don’t just consume inspiration, they compound it. They nominate one another to become featured leaders they feel the world deserves to see more of, can be discovered and booked seamlessly by event coordinators, and are empowered to role model at scale. It’s a collective form of gratitude that keeps giving back, a living network of reciprocity and amplification.
Mentorship, for me, has never been hierarchical. It’s circular. I’ve learned as much from the emerging founders I mentor as from the advisor, women leaders, and investors who guide me. True mentorship is about stewardship, not status. It is harnessing the superpowers, expertise, and knowledge that each of us hold, and sharing it with those who can benefit or find inspiration from it. It’s the understanding that the wisdom we’ve earned is only meaningful when it’s shared.
I think often of the French salonnières who inspired Marble’s design – women like Gertrude Stein and Madame Geoffrin, who convened rooms of thinkers, artists, and innovators. They created space rather than compete for it. That’s what collaboration looks like to me. Gratitude in leadership is active inclusion. It’s choosing to open the door wider, to bring others with you, and to thank those who did the same for you by paying it forward.
I like to think of Marble as a glass house, connecting the women at the forefront of leadership, influence, and innovation so that they can collaborate and move faster collectively inside glass walls, while their life’s work, wisdom, insights, and stories can be discovered, explored, and followed with transparent visibility — more accessible than exclusive private communities that are gated and inaccessible until you reach a certain level of success and accomplishment.
Every woman who joins Marble brings her own story of mentorship and gratitude to the women before them that helped them get there. One member, a scientist, told me she mentors girls in STEM because a woman scientist once pulled her aside and said, “You belong here.” Another, a CEO, now invests in women-led funds because of the pivotal impact a female-led fund investing in her own company had on her company’s success. These aren’t random acts of kindness; they’re acts of strategy and intention. I believe gratitude is the quiet architecture behind most women’s success stories.
As leaders, we can’t control every barrier, but we can control how we respond, and who we bring with us. Gratitude turns competition into collaboration and legacy into community. And that’s the flywheel I want to keep building upon: women amplifying women, mentorship evolving into partnership, and gratitude transforming from emotion into action.
Because when women invest in one another, with their capital, their time, their support, or by using their own networks and platforms to amplify them, we don’t just change each other’s lives.
We change narrative.
Connect With Kristin