“Bringing real innovation to life is equal parts leadership, mentorship, and management.”
So says Dr. Leslie Broudo-Mitts, former head of the Small Business Entrepreneurship Center for high-performance new ventures at the Wharton School. Over the course of her academic and professional career, she observed hundreds of early-stage companies each year studying not just their ideas, but the deeper organizational and leadership dynamics that determined whether those ideas ultimately succeeded or failed. As a woman operating at the highest levels of academia, finance, and entrepreneurship, Dr. Leslie became particularly attuned to how leadership credibility is built not through visibility alone, but through rigor, consistency, and trust over time.
At Wharton, Dr. Leslie taught her students to diagnose the root causes of business challenges rather than focusing solely on symptoms. When the time came to leave academia and apply those lessons directly, she was motivated by a desire to turn theory into practice. Sylvairia emerged from that decision – not as a conventional startup, but as a deliberate experiment in how innovation can be responsibly led. From its inception, the company was shaped by a leadership philosophy grounded in long-term thinking and the belief that diverse perspectives strengthen outcomes.
“Sylvairia is not just a wellness platform, or even just an ultra-luxury consumer electronic,” she says. “It is an idea whose time has come.”
From her experience as a corporate executive and venture capitalist, Dr. Leslie understood that a compelling idea alone is never sufficient. “Vision is just the beginning,” she explains. Execution requires leadership that can integrate diverse disciplines, build trust, and create momentum while uncertainty is at its highest. For Dr. Leslie, this also meant challenging conventional, often male-dominated leadership models that prize speed and dominance over integration and discernment.
From Vision to Structure: Leading in Conditions of Uncertainty
Launching a new venture, particularly one that spans science, technology, design, and wellness, requires more than inspiration. It demands the ability to align people across disciplines and help them remain confident through ambiguity.
Dr. Leslie understood early that Sylvairia would require leadership across engineering, biotechnology, design, and finance and that success would depend on both mentorship and management infrastructure.
“At the beginning,” she says, “everyone is understandably nervous.”
“Will this work? What is the evidence? Does anyone believe in us?”
She emphasizes that people invest more than time in a new venture; they invest identity and purpose. “People are giving their soul, and they need to be acknowledged in terms of who they are, not just what they can do.” This emphasis on identity and psychological safety reflects leadership patterns often associated with women-led organizations, where retention, trust, and long-term commitment are treated as strategic assets.
Equally important was building a management foundation capable of evolving alongside the company. While early-stage teams are often tempted to focus exclusively on product development and sales, Dr. Leslie insisted on establishing the legal, corporate, and operational structures necessary for long-term sustainability.
“A new venture,” she notes, “wants to just chase the production and sales of the product. But it’s important to lay the foundation correctly to pay attention to the legal details, and to the corporate structure, and make sure to integrate the qualitative and quantitative expressions of the business otherwise the structure will not be sustainable.”
Central to this leadership approach is decision-making under conditions of incomplete information. In emerging categories, leaders rarely have the luxury of full data or established benchmarks. Dr. Leslie describes her role as one of discernment separating meaningful signals from the background noise of opinions, projections, and assumptions. Rather than rushing toward premature certainty, she encourages the team to articulate what is known, what is hypothesized, and what remains unknowable. This clarity, she believes, reduces anxiety and allows the organization to move forward with confidence even when outcomes are not guaranteed. This deliberate pace runs counter to stereotypical startup leadership norms and reflects a leadership model that values judgment over bravado.
Disagreement, particularly among senior experts, is treated as a resource rather than a liability. Dr. Leslie does not seek consensus for its own sake; she seeks clarity of reasoning. Conflicting perspectives are surfaced deliberately, examined rigorously, and resolved through structured dialogue. In her view, leadership is not about eliminating tension, but about holding it productively until a better decision emerges. For a women-led organization, this approach also serves as a corrective to cultures where dissent is suppressed or misinterpreted.
Identifying the Opportunity: Wellness, Sleep, and the Role of Air
Sylvairia was born from a clear market observation. Dr. Leslie recognized a significant gap in the wellness landscape, particularly around sleep and stress. Despite widespread use of sleep medications and the growing popularity of meditation practices, many people continued to struggle with rest, recovery, and anxiety especially in increasingly urban, always-on environments.
She also became curious about underexplored pathways into the body, particularly air, as a more natural conduit for wellness.
“This is where I was grateful for my range of professional experiences,” she says. “I felt capable to operate at the intersection of wellness, culture, and business, and to bring something really new into the market.” That confidence, she notes, was hard-earned in professional environments where women are often expected to prove credibility repeatedly.
Drawing in part from her training as an anthropologist, Dr. Leslie began to examine how humans have historically interacted with air and breathing as sources of vitality. This led to Sylvairia’s core insight: the wellness properties of forest air could be reintroduced into modern indoor environments.
“The focus on air as a pathway into the body,” she explains, “came in part from my training as an Anthropologist. I understood the significance of air and of breathing air with wellness benefits derived from nature to improve sleep, relaxation, and mood.”
Today, Sylvairia delivers hydrocarbon molecules found in forest air into spas, hotels, homes, and personal spaces.
The company’s mission became clear:
“To deliver the wellness properties of forest air directly into the home and other personal spaces to promote sleep and relaxation.”
As Dr. Leslie puts it, “Not everyone can spend their days in the literal forest: We (Sylvairia) bring the forest to them.”
More broadly, Sylvairia’s approach reflects a growing recognition that indoor environments have quietly become one of the most significant determinants of human health. Modern populations spend over 90 percent of their time indoors, yet air quality has historically been treated as an engineering or regulatory concern rather than a wellness asset. Just as light, sound, and water have evolved into intentional design elements, air is now emerging as the next frontier of functional wellness.
In this context, Sylvairia positions itself not as a lifestyle enhancement, but as part of a deeper rethinking of how built environments support human biology. The company’s focus on air reflects a shift from reactive health interventions toward ambient, preventative solutions that operate continuously and unobtrusively in daily life.
Leadership Shaped by Culture: A Middle Eastern Perspective
Dr. Leslie views entrepreneurship in the Middle East through the lens of her Egyptian heritage. She describes the region’s fluidity as both reflective of and complementary to her leadership style.
“I really don’t buy the ‘straight line’ fantasy of some entrepreneurial approaches,” she says. “The world changes every day and, in the Middle East, this is implicitly understood.”
In this context, adaptability is not a deviation from strategy but an essential component of it. The challenge, she notes, is knowing “when to stand still and when to move.”
“Our true north,” she explains, “and this I believe comes from our culture, is that there is nearly always a way forward.”
Operating in the Middle East has also shaped Sylvairia’s strategic posture. The region’s comfort with complexity, long-term relationship-building, and appreciation for luxury as a multisensory experience aligns naturally with the company’s mission. Rather than prioritizing speed alone, the company emphasizes durability building partnerships, brands, and technologies intended to endure. This emphasis on endurance over urgency aligns with leadership patterns increasingly associated with women-led organizations globally.
Dr. Leslie also notes that the Middle East’s growing focus on wellness, hospitality, and quality of life has created fertile ground for innovation at the intersection of health and design. In this environment, Sylvairia is not introducing an abstract concept, but responding to an emerging cultural readiness for functional luxury that enhances everyday living.
A Day of Strategic Gear Shifting
Dr. Leslie is an early riser who values uninterrupted time for deep thinking. The early morning hours before global teams and partners come online are reserved for strategy, reflection, and planning.
The remainder of the day involves constant transitions: legal reviews, technology discussions, hiring conversations, market research planning, and public relations strategy. Technology enables this pace, but it also creates pressure to react quickly.
Dr. Leslie intentionally resists that impulse. “There is no need to make a decision at 6pm at night,” she says, “when no one is going to read it until the next morning. Sleep on it, and then make the decision and communicate or send the email in the morning, after enough processing and reflection.”
This discipline helps the team balance short-term execution with long-term objectives, reducing unnecessary pivots and reinforcing confidence in how decisions are made. It also models a leadership cadence that normalizes reflection—an approach still too often mischaracterized as hesitation when practiced by women in leadership roles.
Sylvairia’s Foundation: Values That Scale
Sylvairia’s mission is to improve wellness through ambient indoor air is supported by three foundational values.
Trust and Integrity
These values underpin the company’s science, research, and operations. Credibility is non-negotiable.
Impact
The team believes that the air people breathe every day can meaningfully improve wellness outcomes, including:
• Enhanced relaxation
• Greater sleep wellness
• Better anxiety management
• Enhanced cognitive functioning
• Improved immune response
Global Scalability
While luxury hospitality serves as the company’s initial market, Sylvairia is building a platform designed to improve indoor air quality across diverse environments and populations.
“Our foundation,” says Dr. Leslie, “trust and integrity, a commitment to achieving real impact, and a vision to building a scalable and global platform for growth builds strong relationships for the future. It also offers a commercial success for shareholders.” She adds that values-driven scalability has been central to her leadership identity as a CEO operating in global markets.
How Did Sylvairia Go Global?
At the intersection of engineering, design, and cultural awareness, Sylvairia is on a path to becoming a global symbol of wellness.
Early on, Dr. Leslie recognized that developing proprietary deployment technology from scratch would require significant time and capital. To reduce uncertainty, the company explored strategic acquisition.
“The goal,” she explains, “was to find a company that would accelerate the timeline, reduce technology risk, and integrate the skills and know-how of a talented already-existing team.”
The acquisition transformed Sylvairia’s trajectory, enabling faster market entry and shifting the company’s focus toward differentiation, marketing, and customer acquisition.
“Chance favors the prepared mind,” she reflects. By leveraging equity and clarity of purpose, Sylvairia created value for both organizations and established a model for innovation-led growth.
Empowerment in Ethics
Dr. Leslie believes guiding a company’s ethical future is one of a leader’s most important responsibilities. “Leading the technocratic or business side, which I love, is still second to the role of the leader in guiding our ethical and moral future.”
She advocates for embedding ethical inquiry within the CEO’s office and treating it as a core component of leadership reporting.
“This is not to slow down innovation,” she says. “Rather, making our potential ethical challenges transparent helps share the burden and responsibility of our leadership, and lays a foundation for the next generation.”
In the context of functional air and wellness, ethical questions are both inevitable and evolving. As technologies enable increasingly personalized environments, leaders must consider issues of access, responsibility, and transparency. Dr. Leslie emphasizes that while specific future dilemmas cannot always be predicted, organizations can prepare by establishing principled frameworks for decision-making.
Rather than seeking definitive answers in advance, Sylvairia focuses on clarity of values and process ensuring that when new questions arise, they are approached thoughtfully, collaboratively, and with a long-term perspective on societal impact.
Pillars in the Leadership of Innovation
Though Sylvairia is still fully emerging, it operates at the center of a new category combining nature, wellness, and luxury design.
To integrate multiple disciplines efficiently, the company relies on “fractional employees” supported by a highly engaged advisory board.
Equity-based incentives allow Sylvairia to attract world-class talent and build a virtuous cycle of value creation.
The company builds in parallel technology, marketing, and finance developing simultaneously to prevent blind spots and missed opportunities.
“We build from every direction,” says Dr. Leslie, “and then converge on an opportunity that already has been well vetted.”
Internal synchronization has led to innovations such as the company’s portable “on-the-go” solution, housed in an Italian-designed handbag opening new markets and reinforcing brand identity.
Nurturing an Entrepreneurial Culture
“Resilience, creativity, and inclusivity,” Dr. Leslie remarks, “are hallmarks of our entrepreneurial culture.”
At the same time, she is candid about the challenges of managing highly entrepreneurial teams. To balance creativity with coordination, Sylvairia follows a set of guiding principles including encouraging dissent, enforcing role clarity, and learning openly from failure.
Only through this balance, she believes, can entrepreneurial energy remain productive.
Driving Impact and Cross-Industry Collaboration
Sylvairia is contributing to social impact while reshaping perceptions of the Middle East’s role in wellness innovation.
The company’s cross-industry collaboration blending biochemistry, engineering, design, and hospitality enables differentiated solutions for luxury clients.
“I love that we are putting a solution into the market that is natural,” Dr. Leslie says. “Not just sustainable, but truly developed from nature, from the forest air.”
The Personal Rules of Mentorship
Dr. Leslie’s leadership is guided by personal principles shaped by her experience as a professor and entrepreneur. She prioritizes consistency, accountability, listening, respect for personal identity, and steady momentum toward long-term goals.
“Leadership is definitely something that needs to be continuously learned and improved,” she reflects. Mentorship, she believes, is where that learning happens.
Recalling early encouragement from her Wharton mentor, David J. Reibstein, she describes that validation as “a turning point… It gave me confidence and real wings to fly.”
Validation and the Visionary Horizon
Recognized as one of the Middle East’s most empowering business leaders to watch in 2026, Dr. Leslie views Sylvairia as an ecosystem innovation transforming how people experience indoor air.
Looking ahead, she is energized by the promise of personalized air environments designed for sleep, calm, or focus.
Grateful for the opportunity to create generational value, Dr. Leslie sees Sylvairia as a contribution not only to wellness, but to ethical leadership and long-term regional growth.
Connect Dr. Leslie on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drlesliebroudo/
For more information, visit: https://www.sylvairia.com/