Welcome to Getting Rich Together. I’m your host, Shama Bunton. This show was born from my own journey. Coming out of a divorce, I reached out to 50 women to talk to them about money.

95% of them did not want to go there. That’s when I realized we need spaces where wealth isn’t hidden in silence but shared in possibilities. Here, you’ll meet women from all backgrounds, trailblazers, risk takers, visionaries, each expanding what wealth can look like. This is your place to be inspired to discover new pathways and to remember that we rise by building wealth together. Getting Rich Together is a wealth catalyst production.

At Wealth Catalysts, we bring together education, networks, and great opportunities for women to build wealth and change the world. Now, on to today’s show. I am here today with the beautiful and incredible Nell Daly from Revenge Capital. Nell, from the first moment that I met you, I realized that you are a woman who was creating an incredible life of legacy, that you have had so many wild experiences on this planet and that your career has really put you into rooms and spaces that have allowed you to become the disruptor that you are today.

Ensuring that you are moving economic power, providing opportunities for underrepresented founders and looking across sectors. The work that you’re doing today with Revenge Capital is nothing short of incredible. But today, we are going to talk about not just the incredible work that you’re doing now, but all of the things that have made you to this beautiful, brilliant woman that you are now, Daly. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. All right.

Let’s jump right in. Take me back to a young Nell, someone between the ages of eight, 10, 12 years old. Where were you? Were you always a beautiful redhead? Were you wearing take-tails, pony tails? What was life like around you and what was money like around you?

This is a great question. I have to say that I think I was a psychotherapist for many years before I became a venture capitalist. During the time that I trained at NYU and in my postgraduate training, we didn’t talk enough about money and how money affects people psychologically. We talked a lot about poverty, which makes sense as a social worker. We talk about looking at someone from a holistic perspective, where they’re from, the kind of neighborhood, how money contributes to either someone’s well-being or the lack of mental health care that they got as a child or growing up or where they live now and how that might affect them. We don’t really get into the deeper psychology around money. It wasn’t until I started my private practice and I’ve listened to 17,000 hours of people’s life stories.

I have a lot of qualitative data that I can pull from that I started really trying to unpack and understand how every single person relates differently to a dollar. Money’s made up. It’s this made-up thing, this thing called currency that we use as human beings in our modern day. It really has a huge impact on people’s lives.

This seems obvious to say, but we don’t really stop to think about it often. No one’s asked me, isn’t that crazy? I’ll be 50 in a couple of months. No one’s ever really asked me that question. I’ve asked that question to a lot of other people, but no one’s ever said, what was your relationship like with money growing up? It’s such an interesting thing.

I encourage everybody on a date or whether you’re with somebody that you’ve been with for a really long time or that you know to ask that question over a cocktail or over dinner because it’s a great one. I grew up in a, at the time, what seemed like a middle-class, upper middle-class neighborhood in Connecticut in a suburb of New York City. When you say what were you like at eight, nine, 10, I was heavy. I was like a chunky, frackly, all-burn-haired daughter who had two older brothers.

So I was the youngest of three. And my dad had grown up in a housing project in Boston. He was the oldest of six kids and was the only one to go to Boston College. He was what’s called the double eagle. He went to BC High and then Boston College by running an elevator on Beacon Street for wealthy people at a beautiful apartment building and put himself through school. Got out of Boston College and couldn’t get a job at one of the major accounting firms because he was Irish Catholic and they were still only hiring Protestant.

There was a school registered in Boston at the time against people who were named Luke Kilduff McCarthy. My father deafened one year from having the measles as a kid and not getting health care. He had a gold tooth, which to me seemed normal as a kid, but wasn’t because he didn’t have enough money and that’s what the dentist did.

They would put in gold fillings for kids back then. And my mother, my dad would always say, you think I grew up poor, you should talk to your mother. My mother was the daughter of Irish immigrants who came over through Ellis Island right at the beginning of I think around 1908, 1915, right after the potato famine and left at 15, 16 years old.

They didn’t know each other. My grandparents came through Ellis Island, met in the Bronx and my mom grew up in the South Bronx and these are children who both my mom and dad would sleep in beds with other siblings kind of saying, you know, head to toe in small apartments. And my mom graduated from high school at 16 and went directly to nursing school at St. Vincent’s in New York City to pay her way eventually through college. And I just say that because I knew growing up in the neighborhood that I grew up in that there was something different. I grew up in this Connecticut town where people had inherited wealth in the pocket that I grew up in the town. The town is very diverse socioeconomically, but where I grew up. So my parents skipped being middle class physically, but psychologically, they were still kids from the projects. My dad had a thick Boston accent.

My mom had a New York accent. They were fish out of water for sure. My dad had the sort of bigger aspirations. He was more bougie. He wanted to belong to a country club.

He was ashamed of his background. My mother proceeded to carve a life for herself where she didn’t take very much time out to be a stay-at-home mom. She didn’t enjoy going to the country club. She wanted to be a nurse and she ended up working at Brickport Hospital, which is now Yale New Haven for many, many years.

And she was one of the oldest living nurses when she died on the floor there of leukemia six years ago now. I just say this because my relationship to money and to working and to kind of class was strange and I knew something was weird about it from a very young age. I knew I wasn’t like the same like the other girls at the country club. I knew that there was something that felt immediately displaced about my family. I think that translated into always a certain drive to achieve because there was always a big underlying insecurity about money because it’s very hard when you grow up poor to shake that feeling. And I also grew up and whether this was a generational thing, which, you know, when I talk to other people who are my age, they say that a lot of them were raised in the same way.

And part of this is cultural. Like I didn’t come from an Italian family. I didn’t come from a Greek family.

I didn’t come from a Jewish family. My parents really raised us to feel like the minute you left for college, that was it. You were done. You know, I remember getting in the car to go off to Trinity and my dad said, you don’t come home now.

You know that, right? You can come home for holidays, but that’s it. There was never a sense of that you could rely on them for money besides them helping you pay for your education. And thank God, my parents did help me pay for some of my education and were very interested in my academic career.

So they really pushed that. They saw that as a way out, but they were not, it was not like, you know, they helped with small things like giving me a hand me down car when I was 16. But from the time I was 14 years old, I always had a job. What did you start to do when you had those early jobs? Was the inclination and making money, I need to save it. You know, was the inclination like I need to pay for the things that I want? Like, how did you start to relate in high school to those first jobs? I think that, yeah, it was it was certainly you save your money and I didn’t get spending money to go to college from my parents. It was what I brought to college that I had. My friends used to call me the poorest little rich girl I ever met.

So like I came from Fairfield County, and which is part of, you know, where Greenwich, Connecticut is, the people who know Connecticut would understand that. And I my parents never bought me a computer to go to college. I think I brought a sleeping bag to sleep at. Maybe I had a comforter.

I should say that I think she got me a comforter from like Marshall’s. They were frugal in their own way. And so if I ran out of money by the time I was it was the spring because you work so hard over the summer, but you’re working a lifeguarding job.

How much are you going to save? I had friends who had cars and they could get gas in their cars and they could get their hair done at the mall. Even back then get their nails done. And I just had no extra money to do that unless I had a job on campus. The rule of thumb in my house was that at least for me was that if you’re not playing a sport, you have to have a job after school. So I was either doing one or the other. And in the summer we worked.

There was no question about that. So I always, I think besides that, there was a deeper question really about women and money, I think is how money translates to power and how in a patriarchal, still misogynistic society, what happens in family dynamics that is playing out in larger society and vice versa, what’s happening in society and then plays out in families that creates women being in a situation where they’re quite vulnerable with children. And my parents had a very difficult marriage. My dad was an active alcoholic. He was abusive.

And even though my mom had a job, and I think that kept my mom in her job because she knew she needed that in case she ever wanted to leave the marriage, which she eventually did when once we were adults. But that really was a kind of if it’s okay to swear on the on the show, that was really a mind fuck early. You know, and I saw that being played out and I saw that it was very gendered, right? Like who had power and who didn’t have power. My dad ended up having kind of a very rocky career in part because of his alcoholism and part because he was incredibly charismatic, very good looking life at the party, but probably didn’t know how to play politics very well.

And in a way he probably would have made a much better entrepreneur than trying to work for people because he was very, I’m sure pretty hard to manage would be my guess. And yeah, it was just so I always knew that for women, money was so critical to our health and safety, but then they didn’t make me feel safe. So I went to abroad my junior year and I remember like staying in hostels and having like no money and having like $300 in a bank account, like things I would never do to my own kids.

I would just never put them in that situation. And I think I had a credit card in my wallet, but it was like really for emergency situations. Like if I ended up in the ER, like there was definitely a fear that I couldn’t like buy a pint on that credit card. It was just a no.

And so there was no comfort in the fact that they might have saved or had a little bit of money for me at least. It was always like you’re on pins and needles. And I was in the career counseling office my senior year, got recruited and started working at Sherman and Sterling, which is a major law firm in New York City right after I graduated. You know, I think I took a week after graduation and I moved into literally the closet of a sorority sister who was older than mine, who lived on the Upper West Side. And I started working in a law firm. And I think my starting salary was $25,000, maybe $23,000.

And that I had to get taxes taken out of that and pay my own rent and sort of like figure it out. And I remember the partners at the firm asked me to go down and drop off documents in Washington, DC. And I remember being too embarrassed to go to my boss and say, I can’t expense this. Like I have so little in my account that I don’t know how I’m going to actually get into a car from the basically, I think it was like the SEC where I was dropping off the document in DC to back to the airport. I didn’t know how to do that because I didn’t have enough money for the taxi ride saved in my account.

And I think I did it, but I think I like got back to New York and I had like three bucks on until I got paid and like to submit my expenses and I was too embarrassed to say anything about it. So I always lived with kind of a deep insecurity about that. And I want to preface that there were things about our lives that were felt very middle class, like our upper middle class, like we belong to a country club, even though my dad was unemployed for three years, he never gave up the membership. I ended up going to private high school and my dad went on the payment plan to pay for that.

My brothers went to Fairfield Prep, which was a private high school as well. So there was some money there, but it was sketchy. Like it didn’t, it never felt safe. Now, how did you transition or move away from this early career that you were finding for yourself in law?

I’m sure it seemed like getting this opportunity. Most people I talked to who were like, I’m going to go work at a law firm. They, they put their eyes set on it because of some financial security and stability.

And they’re like, there’s a clear path here to, to shore up my resources. But you certainly took some different routes and decided to, to express and do something different with the next steps in your career. How did you sort of embody your experience, your time working at a law firm?

And how did you decide on what you were going to do next? The law firm came up because if you were an English major, there was consulting jobs, and then there was law firm jobs. And I interviewed for the major consulting firms that came in to recruit. I didn’t get any of those job offers. And I was a presence fellow.

I graduated, loved school. I’m not one of those people who test off the charts at all. Like I have to work my ass off to get straight A’s.

I’m the girl in the library at 3am. And I didn’t get offers from those big firms because they would ask you like logic word problems when you were in the interviews. And my dad thought that me becoming the lawyer was like the feather in his cap.

And I think in kind of fairness to my father, who also has passed away now, he passed away in January. I think he believed that that would be a really secure degree for me. If I got a law degree and it was a great path, any new partners who are women who could make a million bucks in New York a year. So I went to a law firm and I knew the first week it wasn’t for me. And I just knew. I walked around so confused.

Like how is it that people spend their time doing this? They put me in a room that had no windows. I had boxes all around me of documents that I needed to do diligence. I started in corporate finance. I ended up back at the firm to put myself through art school. I ended up working there again after quitting for a time. But yeah, it just was like, this is not the way I want to spend my life.

I tell people this all the time. People are born with three major fears, right? We’re born afraid of how we’re going to die.

We’re born afraid of what’s going to come afterwards. Or we’re born with like a ticking clock in our heads. And I, I fall in the camp of the ticking clock. So anytime I get into a situation where I feel like this isn’t right for me, all I hear is the ticking clock really loudly.

So I knew I needed to get out of there. That was not going to be my path. And I do think that the benefit of growing up the way I did, what did I have to lose? Like I didn’t have anything to lose. Like I was already broke.

You know what I mean? And in many ways broke in because my parents had such a difficult relationship. And we were exposed to it as kids. I think I was just such a born entrepreneur because I was like, fuck it. I mean, definitely had the nervous system to handle that kind of insecurity.

Like I guess for some people it could have driven them the other direction where they’d want all that security finally as adults. I intended to go in the opposite direction where I’m like constantly touching a hot stove through experiences and going, oh yeah, that shit still burns. Oh yeah, that’s still painful. Oh, that still feels like it did in my gut when I was a kid and made me afraid.

But I’m used to that feeling. The real truth of what happened to you at that job was that a girlfriend of mine who I shared a locker with in high school died of carbon monoxide poisoning in Prague right after she graduated from college. We had all just graduated and she was meeting her mom who would just beat breast cancer in Prague to go on a bit of a trip after she graduated from RISD.

She was an artist three months into the job. I get a phone call that Alicia had died in a tragic accident when she went to turn on the heat in the apartment waiting for her mom to land and I quit the next day. I don’t even think I quit the next day.

I actually think I quit that afternoon and I was like, life is too short. Like this isn’t for me anyway. I’m out.

Like I’m out. And I called a professor of mine at Trinity and I ended up taking a job with Trinity College out in San Francisco and waitressing for six months waiting to see if I would get into any kind of graduate programs back all across the country. I applied to PhD and MFA programs all across the country and I got my MFA at Columbia, which I only got in just two schools. I applied to like 14 of them. We could take a road trip across the United States and between my college applications and two graduate degrees, we could go to a thousand schools I’ve been rejected from. So rejection doesn’t really bother me as we can tell and I ended up at Columbia. And the funny thing about money is that I was getting a fine art degree. And I had a moment where I started at Columbia at the School of the Arts and I took the train home to my parents and I said, listen, I think this is a bad idea. I’m never going to make any money as an artist or a writer.

This is going to be a hard path. I wasn’t even in the School of Journalism. I was doing nonfiction creative writing at the School of the Arts. And I think I want to do medicine. I think I want to do my post back in pre-med and then go to medical school because I’ll be able to support myself as a woman. And my dad said, listen, do the degree. You’ve never done science before.

And if you hate it, then you can go back and do medicine. And I was like, all right, I guess I’ll kind of like battle my way through this. And I think about this all the time.

And I think we all still struggle this, especially women. I think when we hear these impulses, there’s a great writer named Elizabeth Lesser who talks about the knocking of the soul. I think if you hear a knocking at your soul and you ask people in power, especially men, their opinion, and they tell you something different than what you’re hearing, you need to double down on yourself. Because you know what’s going to happen.

You’re going to course correct. You’re eventually going to go back to what you really wanted, but the suffering that ensues and the time that you lose as a human being on this planet. And it’s like your one precious life by not, and it can be over small things. Like when you know there’s a hire you should do, but you’re capitulating to somebody because they don’t think you should.

And you’re like, I know I need that person and I know they’re worth paying this much money for. Or for me, there was a couple of points in my life where I went to Harvard summer school in college and I wanted to drop out of Trinity and try to get into Harvard as a transfer student. And I went to see my dad and he was like over my fucking dead body. Am I going to let you take a semester off from Trinity and try to get into Harvard? A, I don’t think he believed I could get into Harvard and B, I think it was just so outside of his thinking, especially during that. In that generation of like a gap year or in where he was from, it was like, no, this is what you’re going to do later on in his life as he was dying. We talked about that and how I always regretted that.

And he regretted that he pushed me into that, that he didn’t listen to me. Because I think my life would have turned out differently. And I knew that I had the capability to do something like that. I ended up, you know, going to art school and finishing this degree. And then the funny thing is, is that if you could think of one degree on the planet that you’re going to make less money at than being an artist, it’s a social worker. And I ended up getting a social work degree after I ended up from two of the most expensive private universities. When you got your social work degree, I mean, how was your sort of experience? And you mentioned that you had two other siblings. And were they sort of taking this very traditional path? Or did you find that all of you were sort of exploring and wayfinding in these different ways?

It’s a great question. I have one brother who went to Amherst College and also studied English literature. And I have another brother who studied polyps and history and went to Trinity.

And my oldest brother has two master’s degrees and is a firefighter in Las Vegas. And is running for a government position now. He’s a born politician.

He’s incredible. He’s an Eagle Scout. And he can walk the walk and talk the talk because he’s given his life to service. And then my other brother helps raise funding for an incredible nonprofit organization in Harlem and decided to go into grant writing and funding nonprofits for his career. So there are two men who could have made the choice to go into finance. But I think we very much felt, and I think our liberal arts education had a lot to do with this too, because none of us measured in economics, was that your life should be of service. And my mother was of service. And she didn’t, when she was forced to stop nursing because she got leukemia, she talked about being an oncology nurse and that it was a calling. It was a vocation. And so I think that there was always a spiritual underpinning in our minds and our hearts around how do you give back to your fellow human being.

And that’s going to be the thing that actually adds an incredible amount of value to your life and meaning. I think if I had to look back, I just didn’t know how fucking hard it was going to be to make a dollar. I think I was naive about putting myself into situations that were incredibly vulnerable, especially when I became a single mom with three kids, and how hard it was going to be to transition out of basically being in the Peace Corps.

You’re kind of in the Peace Corps when you’re a social worker and an artist. And these were choices I made. Like I constantly made those choices and had a great private practice on Fifth Avenue, but not one that was ever going to be lucrative enough to send three kids to college or make sure that I lived in a school district that I felt like had good public schools for them to go to. I ended up moving back in with my mother. My parents got divorced and I ended up moving back in with my mother after I had my third child and getting divorced. And I lived with my mom up until she died, which is not the sexiest thing, by the way.

P.S. No one sort of says the dream is going to be your, you know, basically smoking weed outside your childhood bedroom with three of your own kids. And like, you know, bike from when you were six, you know, in the garage. And there’s like a whole host of family pictures shoved in a closet. And you’re still using the same towels that you had when you were 10.

It was really like I was back in it. But doing what I love to do every single day was always so much more important to me than anything else. And being a mother of three, that’s just what drives you and you just have to be responsible. I don’t get to take a day off.

I never had a maternity leave. I always tell people, like, when do I get to fall apart? Like, when does that happen after they go to college? But now kids like really don’t go to college and stay in college. Take some bath.

Not because they have to because they won’t. I would want to too. And by the way, I wanted to as my mom. Like, I’m very good friends with my first husband. I’m still great friends with him. It wasn’t always easy, but we’re good friends now. But I really loved being with my mom. In Irish American culture, in Connecticut, it’s not cool.

Like other families, they have that kind of family maternal system where it’s like no one would care if you’re living with your mom or your kids are growing up with their grandmother in the home, but that’s not sort of the culture or class I come from. So it was a weird, it was definitely an odd choice. How did you sort of end up having this private practice and then also finding yourself on TV? When I think of your career, I feel like I can see like these different parts of your soul that are like expressing themselves in these different ways throughout different times of your career path. But how, what was that sort of decision like and holding the duality of those two practices? So the TV thing, it happened very organically for me. It had all three of my kids living in the West Village, which was just a really beautiful time of my life. I was married for 12 years and we lived in the West Village for a big chunk of that. And it was beautiful.

It was like just such a beautiful life. I work now basically a block from where I had all the kids in Meatpacking District. That’s from my office and I chose that on purpose because that really feels like my home is an adult. And when you live in the West Village, you hang out a lot in your street park and your kids go to nursery school down the street. And most of the, a lot of the women I knew either were in PR or they were in fashion or especially my generation. These are the careers we were pushed into or they were in television.

They were producers. And so one would say like, hey, now could you just do a stint on the Tyra show? And then that would be to one of them jumping over to entertainment tonight. Can you do something on entertainment tonight?

I became the social and political commentator and I’ve always felt incredibly comfortable speaking in front of large audiences. Like that’s easy for me. I don’t get nervous doing that. I don’t actually get nervous very often. And I honestly don’t feel that feeling.

But yeah, I just started doing television and Fox was the network that kept calling back the most, which was really interesting. As a therapist, you’re a very moderate person in a lot of ways because you fight for social justice. We have to sign actually an oath as social workers in the United States. There’s licensing around what our job requires and our job requires beyond doing clinical diagnosis for people. You have to do no harm.

You have to fight for social justice causes if you want to become part of the National Association of Social Workers. And so we’re very tolerant people and you can’t bash somebody for their political opinions if they’re coming into your office in the throes of grief. Like that’s not our job, right?

Our job is to explore things and to try to dismantle prejudice in the United States. But you still didn’t hold space for people in their opinions as a therapist. And so for me, it didn’t bother me being on Fox because I also was trained through my education at Columbia and at Trinity to report on the facts, kind of like a BBC journalist would.

I didn’t ever want to consider myself like a talking head. I just wanted to talk about a case. And so I would really give my own kind of personal opinion, which is what they want you to do more on cable news than when I was probably comfortable with the time. The issue is the tickers at the bottom, if they say anything inflammatory, which they’re trying to drive ratings generally does. And so I ended up getting quite a few death threats from being on Fox and the phone would be on the desk and I’d finish.

And then it would just start to rain. And because I was definitely reporting on stories that were trigger issues for a lot of people, for example, the transgender community, which now with the second Trump election and presidency has become a major trigger point for people. So anything around gay rights, women’s rights, civil rights, mental health, sexual rights, abortion rights, they were asking me to comment on. So I had to take a step away from that because I had the three kids, my mom was dying of cancer. So I stepped back from television at that point. And I think now I can go back to it. I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve started to do a little bit of stuff again. It was just really painful to work so hard at my career and to work so hard through my education to get to that point, only to be shut down through threats of violence. And it happens to a lot of female journalists and reporters and it happens to a lot of women in sectors that our voices are deemed very threatening.

So then of course, as I do touch the stove, I ended up going into venture, which is totally male dominated. I did ayahuasca before doing ayahuasca. It was cool because we were studying it through Johns Hopkins and Harvard and people were starting to look at it for their pedigrees. And so I got talked into doing it by a colleague and I’ve done it a couple of times. I did eat a party once. I did mushrooms way back actually when I was doing self-sufficiency at Harvard. But I’ve never done cocaine. I’ve never done heroin. No one needs to see Nell on cocaine.

Like Nell’s enough and she is. That is not fair for me to do the world. I’m like, knowing where I’m going to place anyway. And so what I do, I make that reference because it’s like going into venture is like, oh, well, I’ve already done cocaine. Might as well just do heroin. Like might as well pick stuff very, very fucking hard and just go there.

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Now back to the show. What was the, but like how did the world, because at this point, your world doesn’t seem to be filled with venture capitalists and investment bankers, entrepreneurs and this economic ecosystem that you really jumped right into. How did that industry lure you in? And it certainly has really been such a big part of now how you then have created a lot of change and how you’re looking to shift and move things. But how did you start to get into this world of venture? It’s so interesting because when people ask me this question, they’re like, what, what is this career? And for me, the through line is so obvious.

And I’m always so surprised that it’s not obvious to everybody else. So we look at the statistics around how many women get funded. And then you take me, who’s a woman who on a personal level has grown up in a home where she saw crazy behavior because of power dynamics that certainly had to do with money because mom didn’t feel like she could leave. Then I go into private practice. I’m treating patients who come in, they’re New Yorkers with all kinds or their transplants. They come in with all kinds of anxiety and hang up over money. How their career is going, women who can’t leave relationships, everyone who’s ever been in New Yorker and moved there without a fucking trust fund cohabitates with somebody that they shouldn’t be because they’re saving on rent and feels like they can’t leave, right?

Like we all have done that. We make decisions because we don’t have our own autonomy. We don’t have economic freedom. Women become massively vulnerable.

And men as well, when you’re under utilized in your job, when you aren’t being given opportunities, when you’re not allowed to live out your dreams, let’s just talk about like the spiritual idea of living out your dream. That’s what America, that’s the America I drank the Kool-Aid of when I was a kid reading the Declaration of Independence. Like I fucking ate that shit up. I’m from an Irish immigrant family. I bought into the American dream. Hookline and sinker. I’m a double major. My English major, history major and an African American literature minor. My undergraduate thesis was comparing the Irish Renaissance to the Harlem Renaissance.

Like I’ve studied language and dialect and how powerful that can be to fight oppression. And so for me, the through line was always like, okay, something’s kind of fucked here in the system. I’m treating the symptoms every single day in my private practice.

How do I start to treat the root causes? And unfortunately, like the dirty word is money. And then how do I create political change?

And I quickly realized that I needed to help people make money who fell aligned with me. And I’m not talking about their politics. You could be the most conservative Republican.

If you’re a founder, I’ll see you. I’m not a conservative Republican. I consider myself very moderate in terms of where I sit politically, like right in the middle. I’m a journalist like at heart, right? We’re like that. I’m a therapist at heart.

We’re like that. And but I want to make sure you as a human being have the ability to not only make money so you can live out your dreams, so you can have economic freedom so you don’t have to eat shit from anyone in your life. And then if you so feel like it, you can write out a check to a political candidate, or you can run for office yourselves that can help make changes that you think would be good for society. And love that lands so deeply. We all have different values because we’re all really different. And it doesn’t mean that any one of us shouldn’t be able to see the vision of the world that we want. We all deserve to live in pursuit of the vision of the world that we’re here to create. Economic stability and the power to write checks and the power to walk out of relationships and the power to finance the people, the businesses, the ideas you believe in. That is how I believe we can truly exercise our vision and our power on this planet while we’re here.

Yeah. And I think that after having worked so deeply in the UK for six years, so I also was represented by William Morris Entertainment for Books. And I would sit in the meetings at William Morris or CAA and anybody who’s been talent knows what that feels like. Being talent’s amazing. Sitting on someone’s podcast, incredible.

I love the conversations. I have a lot to offer. I have very expensive clinical training. I’m licensed in several states to actually still practice psychotherapy. I’ve raised a lot of money now in my career. It’s great to be talent, but I also was like, shit, I want to run this company.

I’m like the actress who also wants to be the director, who also wants to write the movie, who also thinks I should executive produce. And I think that is a new attitude that women in my generation, you look at like Reese Witherspoon. She’s a great example of it.

Oprah, what she did early on, which was she created Harpo Productions and once her basically deal ran out, she created the production company that then produced the show. I was always looking at those case examples as like lighthouses for me. And I think also women in my generation who are especially later stage Gen Xers, fall in this really strange gap where we’re not millennials. So we can be totally millennial, but we’re not really Gen Xers. There’s like a group of us. And I think that’s why our divorce rate is also really high.

Because if we married anybody who feels like more Gen Xers as much as Gen Xers was raised in the political correctness movement of the 90s, they still live out very traditional marriages. And so I just was like, I think I want to create an agency that can then produce the content I want to see in this world. As I was doing more television, as I was doing early podcasts, I got to deal with Facebook to do a show with a company. And I was so is starting to produce a little bit. And I just thought, damn, I kind of want to build that.

And I met some guys right before the pandemic who were on the journey and taught me that you don’t have to build it. You could buy it. So they were raising money to create a holdco where we were going to buy creative agencies and wrap them up into that holdco. And I was like, it seems so obvious, but if you’re not a banker, you don’t think about M &A. And even a lot of founders I work with think they have to build everything themselves.

And I learned from those guys that you don’t, you could buy something. I raised with alongside them during the pandemic, sitting on the phone when most of my friends were getting drunk on shard and eating gummies and figuring out like how to get their kids rid of Lynn. I was on the phone through seven in the morning till midnight systematically calling every fucking person I ever knew from Connecticut, Trinity, Columbia, NYU, trying to raise capital for this thing called the Together Group.

And that company now has, I think somewhere between 18 and 20 creative agencies that we’ve rolled up into it. So I ended up learning M &A through Google. Literally, I learned how to raise capital. I learned the language. Just during the pandemic, I gave myself the hardest MBA by just Googling every term I didn’t know and raising money.

I don’t even think before the pandemic, I really understood equity or debt or how any of it worked. And then I raised my hand after being there for a couple of years and said, I think I can go out and raise my own fund and actually invest in things where I’m not doing it by committee. And I love what they’ve done, but I wanted to go back to my roots.

I sort of needed to cut my teeth and then go back to what my original plan was somewhere deep down. I always tell people there’s the dream that they’re acting out and then there’s the secret dream. Like what’s really this good dream? And I think the power that you learn from being a psychotherapist or a patient in a therapist’s office or a coach’s office is just say your dream. Just speak it out loud because there’s 80% of therapy is just hearing yourself say, only 20% is really what the therapist says back.

And I think so often, so many of us are keeping a secret, we’re so afraid. Like I want to win an Oscar at some point. I don’t know if it’s for writing something. I don’t know if it’s for acting or something.

I have no idea. I’ve just started speaking it out loud because I believe in that. And so I just started to speak out loud that I wanted to raise my own fund. I wanted to invest in all people.

I wanted to create a company that didn’t just invest in women or didn’t just take a specific part of the population because I wanted to build a world that I wanted to see, which was fully inclusive. I was really lucky. I found my first, my partner in this is a man named Andrew Antonio. I serendipitously had breakfast with him and pitched him the idea without even knowing it was going to be a pitch session.

And he very quickly latched on to it and said, I want to do this with you. And I’m very grateful that I’m a woman and he’s a man and we’re running this together because I think that adds a dynamic. I love diverse teams. So we’ll look at anybody.

I always say two white dudes with a drink brand want to come in and pitch me. I’ll look at that. I didn’t want to just focus on one population, but I wanted to absolutely flag to the market that if you’re a female founder and in your country, i.e.

the UK, 1% of all venture dollars has gone to you and in the US it’s only 3%. We will look at you. If you’re a black founder, if you’re a gay founder and you feel like you’ve been shut out because you don’t look or sound like the people that have power, I got you. I’ll look at your idea. And that’s, yeah, that’s just what we’ve been on the journey doing for the last year and a 10s. Obviously, you are trailblazing your pay being the way for founders, for new emerging managers, creating a different archetype of who’s allowed to be a fund manager. What that background can look like, what the thesis can look like, how you do things sets a new archetype out there in a new model for how others can see themselves. But certainly, I imagine, as it is with most people, the ways in which we have our children and create life for them is often really different from the ways in which we were raised and how those conversations manifest. What’s it like at home? What’s it like having these conversations with the kids?

What do they think of mom and all the stuff that you’re up to? I mean, if you Google me a podcast I did on sex and relationships. It was on intimacy and marriages to get legs. They called me a sex therapist and my kids saw that early on and were embarrassed and still like joke with me about it. I have a one is about to be 21, one who’s 16 and one who’s 14. I think that my kids have seen me struggle and they know the kind of family I’ve come from. The journey of being an entrepreneur because like that’s the other through line here, right? I was an entrepreneur.

I kept doubling down on myself. I always have had my own business. I very rarely have worked for other people.

I think I could count on one hand the months I’ve worked for somebody else. I didn’t come from an entrepreneurial family. When we were going to a college there wasn’t entrepreneurial studies. There wasn’t even the fucking internet.

Let’s just be honest, right? That didn’t exist until I was like a sophomore in college. So when I was doing all of this, I didn’t have a lot of family support and I honestly didn’t have a lot of friends who understood what I was doing because it was always so outside the box, everything.

And that creates a lot of social isolation. It’s not even that they didn’t understand it. It was their people often judged it as being irresponsible. But I felt like absolutely the most irresponsible thing for me to do was to stay in a job where as a single mother, I was going to only make a certain salary that would always keep me in this situation of being almost like the working middle class poor.

And we don’t talk about that enough. It’s like you’re making enough to not qualify for services. You’re exhausted and you’re never making enough to save anything if you crash your car and you have $6,000 worth of damage on it. Let alone like how do you save your kids to go to college so they’re not in massive debt when they come out?

How do we do that? There was years I was paying more in childcare than I was myself. My babysitter made more money two years than I made. So my kids, I think, have not understood the path always because they don’t understand the nuances behind what I’ve done. But I hope that I’ve taught them to be brave, like super brave. And no idea for me is off the table.

Any idea that they come to with me, I just am like, absolutely. I don’t run it like you have to go to college. You have to graduate. I want you to go to a good school. They pick up a guitar and start playing and they start going down the rabbit hole of learning guitar or they want to go into the arts or they want to think about maybe dropping out for a semester. I listen.

I just listen and I’m with them. Not to mention that it was my son who named Revenge. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it’s a great question because once we had raised the fund, we were trying to come up with names and I went out to him and I said, listen, you guys aren’t really going to understand this, but you know the show Shark Tank and they were like, yeah, we know the Shark Tank.

We watch it sometimes. And I said, my oldest is super, just amazing with words. And I said, well, imagine moms like the woman now who gets to rent out the check because I always want them to be the money. I always want women to be the money.

You want to get as close to the money as you can, but the power sits in being able to rent out the check. Co-sourcing capital is the worst. Trying to find people to invest in something else is really, really hard work. It’s much easier to just be the one with the checkbook to be able to write out the check. And so I said, I now have the checkbook and I’m going to invest in people who are entrepreneurs and a lot of them are going to never have had the chance to have someone take a look at their idea.

What do you think I should call the company? And my son Dusty said, well, that’s easy, mom. What do they all want? And I said, I don’t know. What do they want? And he said, they all want revenge.

Don’t you think that really the thing that they all want deep down, but no one’s saying is they want revenge? And I was like, yeah, Dusty, Mike drops. Oh my gosh. This was so amazing.

Now I have one, one last question. And I know you’ve been so generous with your time today, but you are up to really big stuff. You are changing the economic systems. You’re doing it with a lot of love and compassion and wisdom.

So thank you for that. As you are sort of building right now, what are you calling in? What is it that the audience can do to support you?

And what do you need right now? I think on a practical level, we need to see deal flow outside of how we normally get deal flow. I think probably a good venture capitalist is embedded or has people embedded in all kinds of communities and cultures and subcultures all around the world. And so I just want to make friends and network.

I’m very extroverted with people from all over. And so that’s what I’m calling in. I’m calling in the person from Kansas. I’m calling in the person from Nigeria. I’m calling in the entrepreneur from Sweden. And to really form bonds with people from other places who then say to me, you should talk to so and so. We have some venture scouts that we started to work with.

So that’s been really fun. I think I need that. I also think I need to keep getting the message out there that when I want to resonate about my own story, or one of the things I want to resonate is that anyone who tells you you can’t do something unless it’s something that’s going to harm somebody else is BS. So for example, when patients used to come to me and say, I want to do this thing, but it’s totally outside of what I’ve been trained to do, I would always say to them, well, if there’s if trying it isn’t going to cause them to die on the table, why not try it? Meaning you can’t be a brain surgeon overnight.

You kill somebody, but you can do so many of the things that we’re told you can’t do. I don’t understand a world in which we live, especially in America, because again, working with British companies, Americans are lucky because it’s kind of in our blood. It’s almost like a birthright. It’s almost like they give us something in the hospital from the minute we come out where we have this incredible belief, despite how you feel about the political climate now, which is difficult, a belief in ourselves, a belief in like the nation, a belief in the ability to create and innovate. Other countries, even European ones, don’t have that. They don’t have that enthusiasm.

They don’t have that optimism. And so I just want to encourage people to tell my story because there’s value of changing your career mid-paths. There’s value in I look at things completely differently than somebody who went from investment banking to private equity to venture. With that all being said, we need more women later in the food chain. We need more women writing the checks, and we need more women later stage private equity. And we need to create cultures at those places where those women want to stay and work there. Because if I interviewed one more girl or one more woman who’s come to me in tears saying, I took the job at the private equity firm, I worked my ass off to go to Columbia or University of Kansas or Indiana, and I finally got to that dream job. And the culture was so male dominated, and I felt so shut out that I’m leaving it now.

That is heartbreaking because all I see is that girl drinking Starbucks at midnight studying for her exams, doing everything right, only to get to a place where she doesn’t feel welcomed, but she’s super talented. We need allyship, right? We need other men and people in power standing up and creating systematic change within organizations, within communities, within culture that make us feel like we all belong. I don’t understand a world that would want to make it exclusive because innovation and power comes from thousands of ideas being tossed down on the table.

Literally makes no sense to me, except it comes from this idea that some of us can hoard power and some of us know how to share it. So that’s my jam. Beautiful. Yeah, well said. Now, thank you for an explosive interview for sharing your story, for being so vulnerable and open.

Our infallibility is in our vulnerability, and there’s something really incredible about sharing and inspiring others to double down on themselves and live those secret dreams and speak them into fruition. Thank you so much for being here today and getting rich together. Thank you, Sir. Thank you for the work that you do.

It’s huge to give each other platforms to talk about this kind of stuff and be truthful. So I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me today. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Getting Rich Together. My hope is that you leave every episode feeling more inspired, more powerful, and more connected. Until next time, remember, you have everything it takes to create wealth on your terms.