Strategy & Tragedy: CEO Stories with Steph Melodia is the best business podcast for curious entrepreneurs featured in the UK's Top 20 charts for business shows.
Hosted by Stephanie Melodia, Strategy & Tragedy features candid interviews with entrepreneurs who have scaled - and failed - their businesses - sharing their lessons in entrepreneurship along the way. From Nick Telson-Sillett who achieved financial freedom after selling DesignMyNight (on The Wildest Exit Day in History™) to Emmie Faust, the founder of Female Founders Rise, who opened up about her breakdown on the road to discovering her mission in supporting female founders.
This is one of the best podcasts to listen to if you're looking for educational and inspirational content on Spotify, Apple, Google, Amazon, YouTube or watch the clips on Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts
In this episode, Stephanie Melodia interviews Nell Daly, Founding Partner of VC firm, Revenge Capital. We discuss starting a fund not having come from the world of finance, Nell's experience in media and what led to her "going dark," overcoming adversity & practical tips on how to actually be the outlier, how her training as a psychotherapist makes her a better investor, the power of manifesting, and what to watch out for; the importance of dreams and working towards your purpose; and finally; what her VC fund is looking for in fundraising startups.
Fundraising? Apply for investment here: https://b1jxsdtzi9t.typeform.com/revengecapital?typeform-source=revenge.capital
Watch on YouTube via the link below or keep reading for the transcript:
SM: Nell, my absolute pleasure. She's actually just flown in from New York. Very jealous. She doesn't have any jet lag. Thanks so much for joining. Let's kick off with revenge capital, your investment thesis. Tell us more about what you're looking for.
ND: We are looking to invest in founders that have been traditionally overlooked, but we're truly inclusive. So I always say if like two bros come to me with a great idea that has impact, I'll say yes to it if I think it's a good idea and it's solving a major issue that we're facing because I want to be totally inclusive. I don't want to exclude anybody.
SM: So can you give us a bit more detail on how you're defining overlooked?
ND: People who are not well-networked, who haven't had the ability to raise capital in the past. So let's talk about women. Let's talk about the disabled community.
LGBTQIA+. We like to look at founders who are, and I'm not strict about this guideline, but who are younger and older. So people who are under the age of 25 or perhaps over 50, which I'm approaching at this point.The BIPOC community, which we say BIPOC in the U.S., but the BAME community here. So those are sort of the general overarching groups.
SM: Yeah, amazing. So you've recently announced this. What was the official... I think it was the official date of your birthday.
Yes, it was. December 2nd.
SM: So I'm genuinely curious. How did you set up your fund? How did you secure that $50 million? Thank you. Again, you're not from that world of finance. You're not the male pale and stale. Like, where do you begin?
ND: So do you want to know the story? Let's tell stories. Let's tell stories. Stories are always the most interesting things to hear.
So yeah, I was in the UK and it was a year ago, and I was searching for money for a beauty founder. I really believe in her product. I still do.
And I flew over to the UK on my own to sort of do a tour of venture capital groups, even as somebody who had already been in the space, because this is technically a second fund for me. It's not my first fund. And I can tell you about my other endeavor before I did revenge that kind of got my feet wet in the space before I launched my own fund.
I was over here and I could not raise capital in the UK for her. I was like, where is this money? I called on 248 venture firms, high net worth individuals or family offices, by creating Excel spreadsheets. And are we allowed to swear on this bypass? Are you clean? It's okay.
It's okay. Are you sure? I'm like asking you at the MFI. So it's just much more efficient if I'm myself.
So yeah. So I was on Pitchbook and I create spreadsheets. Like I don't think that there's like some sort of magic to this.
People make you think there is, but I literally got on Pitchbook. And for those of you who don't know Pitchbook is, Pitchbook is software that a lot of investment banks use or people can use to look at who invests in deals. It's just software.
It's very, very easy to use. It's kind of can be expensive. I had a subscription to it through somebody I knew.
And so I was on Pitchbook and I looked up lists of venture capital groups that invested in beauty. I couldn't find anybody after calling everybody to see who invests in the beauty space still in the U.K. in particular. So U.S. venture capital firms typically won't make investments across the border, especially early on.
And there's various reasons for that. So the pool of capital is much smaller in the U.K. that you can dip into. And I had been trying.
It was exhausting. And I thought, I know the climate's changed from two years before that. But why is this so hard? So I came over and I started trying to meet with venture firms actually and say, like, what are you investing in? I would take detailed notes on these spreadsheets, right? Like, this is their mandate.
This is what they're looking for. This is their investment thesis. This is the checks that they write out.
And through another deal that I was working on, there was a guy sitting at a table. And a few months before that, and I privately WhatsApp'd him and I said, is there any way you could have lunch with me? Because I was having trouble getting meetings for some of those venture firms and thought this guy might be able to help get me into one. He said, of course, I'll have breakfast with you, very polite.
And through that breakfast during it, I said, you know, I'm here because I need introductions into a certain amount of venture firms. Assuming he's a tax accountant, would you be able to help me? You might know somebody there. And he said, which one? And I said, one particular.
And he said, I started that 30 years ago. And then he said, no, what do you need? Why are we having breakfast? And immediately I had to switch into, oh my God, this is a moment that I could take. And I basically said, I need $10 million, plus I'm leaving the UK.
I said, I cannot find money for women here. And I've gone to syndicate groups and angel groups and they're mostly just investing in tech. You know, I can't see where they're looking at consumer.
I don't even really see it. It was very hard for me to find as an outsider. And I was sort of using my journalist's hat to do research on the space.
And he called me the next day and said, I'll give you $10 million. And I essentially said, and this is not a slight to the UK at all because part of my home is here now and my heart is very much here, is that I could do more business in New York and Miami and LA in a day than I was being able to do in the UK. Yeah, and I feel badly saying that.
But then after sort of raising the fund and getting it secured, and then it ended up, you know, now it's a $50 million fund with money for follow on capital. And we set up the documentation to do fund two already, which will be institutional capital because so many people came to us and said, while you're doing this, can we come on? And we wanted to keep fund one private and fund two will be institutional. That starting to do sort of deeper research into this space, I realized that women in particular in the UK last year got less than 2% of funding.
We all kind of blew in the face with like repeating the same sort of statistics over and over. By the way, it's not much better in the US. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so yeah, yeah. It's double. But like, what are we saying here? And I think, I think, yeah, and I was at the House of Lords yesterday.
I think, was it yesterday? Yeah, yeah. They did a meeting about the women's initiative that they're kind of starting to roll out, which is very interesting. Yeah, yes, yeah.
And we can talk more in depth about that because I've actually learned quite a bit and had a nice call with Debbie about it. But what's interesting there is that, you know, you sort of look at what's happening in the UK and you think how much forward movement has there been over the last 10 years and the same is happening in the US. That we're all kind of like beating the same drum, but what's really going on here? I think you are so uniquely qualified to actually comment on the state of both the US and the UK having your direct experience and doing the same kind of work in both places.
I'm not at all surprised to hear it. You've been to the punch on that story because I did my research and I was going to ask you about that one particular breakfast meeting that changed everything. So I love how these things happen.
I think it's also testament to getting out there, networking. I loved also how you mentioned putting on your journalistic hat and having that sort of researcher and just being a detective and finding stuff out in information gathering. Did you feel like you needed that first validation, that first person to say yes to then kind of open the flood dates to everything else? Was that kind of a real validation that everyone else needed to have? Or was it just simply like, right, okay, there's no going now? You know, the fund is just one LP.
So I didn't have to go out and source more capital on the back of that. I've have had to do that in previous deals before. In this particular case, that's not the case.
And when we start to go for institutional, depending on how big we want to fund to be, an institution could come in for quite a bit of money or we might have to pair a couple of institutions together to raise the fund too. I want, make no mistake, and I'm a huge believer in A, saying things out to the universe and B, even more writing things on a piece of paper. And I think you have to be very careful what you write on a piece of paper to be careful what you ask for because that shit comes true.
And it might not come true on your timeline. Like the universe might have a different timeline for it, but as a psychotherapist, I saw this over 12 years of sitting with people and listening to their life stories, how things played out. Do you have a crazy instance of that where you've written something? Oh, 100%.
What's a crazy one you've written? 100%. Oh, God. One's very personal.
Yeah, I mean the fund, just the fund in general. You wrote that down. Oh, 100%.
Did you go into specifics with like $50 million? I didn't necessarily put a money number on it, although I did put a money number on a book deal that I want. And I'm very curious to see how that's going to go out. And I wrote that five years ago on a piece of paper.
And that book deal didn't kind of come in to play at that point, but I have a feeling coming up there will be one. And I'm curious to see what the number will end up being on that. But I have found it with kind of everything if you write it down.
And I believe I was listening to the founder of Spanks recently and she gave a graduation speech. And again, I haven't gone back to the original study that was done, but Harvard did a study many years ago and they looked at a class and those that wrote down their goals were the top 5%. Have you heard about that? Which I thought was really... And I think I recently heard from my business partner, Andrew, that Jeff Bezos is in that cohort of who was studied.
Yeah. And there was one group that actually wrote down what their goals were and they were like the 5% most successful in that cohort. What do you think the explanation is behind that? Like, how do you rationalize? I can't.
I can't. Except like a... I think there must be some sort. I mean, we could get so woo-woo here and I'm not opposed to doing that.
And I can tell you, yeah, I mean, I think... Listen, I think when you... It's a really weird thing to be a psychotherapist because you're sitting in people's souls day in and day out. You're like, it's soul work. And so you kind of have to tap into the spiritual... Not kind of, you do.
You have to tap into the spiritual side of who people are. You're dealing with grief. You're dealing with loss.
You're dealing with transition. You're dealing with people's deeply personal symptoms that they're facing. And we can talk about mental health too in terms of entrepreneurship and what that means for women in business or people who have been traditionally marginalized because let's face it, like if you don't get to fulfill your dreams, that eats at your soul.
And that is really probably at the core of why I'm doing what I'm doing. But I think that I had the unique perspective of, again, watching people manifest or not manifest things in their life. And I think those people who kind of have a clear direction when they write it down.
And I haven't always known like the exact vision, but I think if you just write it down, there's some sort of like natural alignment that you're moving towards it in a different way. And I also just believe that the more you speak it, the more you believe it, and the more people around you believe it, and then the more that the collective energy sort of supports that work and the tide rises to you, as opposed to you just like swimming wherever it takes you. Unsurprisingly, what struck me listening to you there is the feminine intelligence and the feminine energy, which is just you are clearly such an outlier with what you've achieved and this fund you're operating in this male-dominated space.
But it's really refreshing, you know, that you need to hear this more. And by feminine energy, I don't mean obviously being a woman. We've all got the masculine energies.
The intuitive side. Right, all of that. You talk about soul, the intuition, and the manifestation piece.
You know, I think I want to, by the way, you can either go woo-woo, which is sort of where you're leaning towards. I know the neuroscience that backs it up. I know the focus, it's the same thing, right from different angles, but just how it focuses the mind.
If we can try and unpack and break down, what were the ingredients that helped you get to where you all know? There's a few things. I will say that there's always, I don't really believe in, I don't really believe in a work-life balance at all. I believe that if you find something you're passionate about, it doesn't feel like work.
And I'm sorry, that sounds so corny. But I am hugely driven by being intellectually stimulated. And I have an insatiable level of curiosity.
And not everybody does. And I can't tell you how many times I sit at my desk and go, die, ambition, die. Because ambition in itself is inconvenient.
Yeah. It's very inconvenient. Yes, yes.
Am I ever going to be satisfied? And it can be very inconvenient to your personal life, to motherhood, right? To the people who don't believe in you. It's like very irritating, right? Who want you to stay in a box and not evolve as a human being. And so if we were to really have a heartfelt conversation, let's talk about how women's ambition can destroy family relationships or cause a lot of friction in society.
I think women breathing is an act of protest, to be honest, especially in certain countries. We know that now. So I think that having that curiosity, I have a lot of drive.
So I think if you had asked me a year ago or two years ago, I'd be like, oh, I don't know. Maybe like a more meek answer. But the reality is I've worked my ass off for this.
But I honestly feel like the cause needs more leaders. And I've crossed that age gap where now you can kind of go back into the community as an elder and say, no, I can do this. And I can make sure that we can secure a better future for our children, essentially.
So it's working around the clock. It's curiosity. And I think the other piece of this that's so important is the openness to networking.
Like, if I could give one piece of advice, and I could get crucified for saying this, I don't want to get canceled for saying it. But in the UK, I have found that the women are much more open to networking than men, just naturally. They share their contacts more openly.
They're free with it. They're like, let's meet for coffee. Let's meet for lunch.
There's just, yeah. And I think that comes from, like, there's a need, right? Like, our backs up are against the wall. If you want to make something happen, you're going to have to go out there and actually make connections and see how you can open up a pathway forward.
Where I have found, in other circumstances, with generally European men and UK men, it's more difficult. Where in the US, if you go to the Bitcoin conference in Miami, if you go into any conferences in California, Silicon Valley, LA, you know, Chicago, San Diego, everyone's exchanging cards. There's just, like, a level of general enthusiasm that I think, you know, when I meet Brits, generally, they're like, fuck, like, her light.
Like, what is she? Is she on something? And sometimes I'm in a restaurant here, and I actually have to tone my, yeah, I have to tone it down, right? I mean, there is this, whenever you don't know, it's like, so she didn't hear it. Yeah. There's one loud voice.
It's an American. It's often an American accent. Yeah.
I hear two. Yeah. I'm in line at the airport going, oh my God, really? It's so embarrassing.
Yeah. You mentioned saying kind of like, oh, a couple of years ago, you might have given a bit more of, like, a meek answer. We touched on just before we started rolling, you having exploded onto the scene, seemingly out of nowhere.
You went dark for five years. So what happened there? Two things happened, coincidentally. So I, as a someone, so I have a, I have a master's in fine art and creative writing from Columbia.
And I only talk about this because they have a very good journalism school. So some of what you do is in the journalism space. And I always toyed with, do I want the MFA so I could teach on the college level? I do, I literally pull myself out of academia.
I'm very academically minded and love academia. I could study, I could have like a thousand degrees. I could sit in a library all day long.
So I, I decided to get my MFA and then I got a teaching job at NYU. And when I was at NYU teaching, writing, I ended up doing my MSW and social work. There was a decision I had to make, whether I was going to try to go back to do post-bac, to do medicine and become a doctor or do something that was slightly less intensive.
I started, I wanted to start to have a family, so it wasn't really going to work out. So I did my MSW. And I naturally took those two disciplines.
And as I knew people in New York, they would say, can you commentate on the networks for us? So it started with like The Tyra Show and then it led to Entertainment Tonight and then it led to CNN. And then I ended up being on Fox quite a bit. Fox was really interesting for me because I am sort of, I'm much more of a, I would say like a British journalist where I just believe in reporting the facts, not necessarily on commentating like you do in cable news in the States, which by the way is illegal here.
You guys don't have this. We have this whole thing called cable news. And I really liked it because people would naturally think that I'm very progressive.
I'm actually an independent. So in Revenge the Fund is a nonpartisan organization. We don't align with either party, whether it's in the UK or in the US or globally.
We will take conservative founders and we'll take liberal founders. Like we do not discriminate. That's the whole premise of Revenge, right? It's a non-discriminatory fund.
So I started doing a lot of television on Fox, which I thought was cool because you could kind of slip in this different sort of messaging. And I wasn't afraid to have nuanced debate. And I really like that about myself.
I like the fact that as a psychotherapist, you're incredibly tolerant of people's opinions. You're incredibly tolerant about the way they choose to live their life. In the Times article, I talk about learning to sweat down my back.
There's things I had heard in my office for 10 years that were like, I didn't even know people could do. Let's talk about like sex parties or things that, you know, I started when I was pretty green in New York and you heard all kinds of stories and some that you might actually like have a problem with, but you don't show that because you're holding space for someone to experience their own story in front of you and you're there just to listen and to help sort of put the pieces on a table together of their story so they can make sense of it. And so I started doing Fox and with that, no matter what I said, what they do on Fox is on cable news.
They have a bunch of younger people in production writing the tickers underneath what you're saying. And it's very effective. So sometimes the tickers don't even match what the host is saying, but they're a bit inflammatory.
And it can happen on any network, any cable news show, any actual show in particular. And I ended up starting to get quite a few death threats from doing that. Oh, yeah.
Because of the inflammatory. It just, yeah. Because that's how you sell, right? That's how you sell.
You get the ratings up. It's contentious. It seems contentious, even if it's not a contentious conversation.
I was sort of there to be the counterpoint generally on most stories, even if there was no counterpoint, even if I was just reporting on sort of legislation that came through about the LGBTQIA community. And yeah, I started getting quite a few death threats. This was when Trump was starting to run for his first presidency.
And they were generally around sexual violence. So many times when women are threatened privately to take a step back. And it's quite effective in silencing someone.
Because as a woman, as a single mom, I had three kids and my mother at the time had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. So I was living with my mother. And I would lie in bed at night going, oh, my God, I've just been on Fox.
These things are coming through my phone. These things are coming through my phone. My social feeds.
What would I do? And so you can put yourself on the radar of the local police. And you can call the authorities that you need to and report it. But ultimately, you're incredibly vulnerable as a woman.
And so at a certain point when my mom started to get very ill, I said, I'm going to back off TV. I didn't know at that point that I would back off completely from social media because I had spent quite a bit of time sort of building community and believed in it and believed in the profile and the messaging that you could do through social media. When she passed away, I really honed in and said to myself, to accomplish the next set of goals that I have, which is to go into venture capital, I have to just be so laser focused.
And so many women, so many people know that social media, as much as it's crucial, is also a massive time suck. And it can cause an enormous financial burden to people, especially fledgling entrepreneurs. And so I just cut out the fat.
Anything that I felt like was going to detract me from doing what I needed to do to accomplish this fund, I was just going to let it go. So I got really zoned in on that. And if you ask me one regret, there's probably a bit of regret that I didn't go back to it earlier because I do believe in the power of a personal brand and continuing personal messaging.
And I miss the people that I had in the community and I had built some really great things that you sort of let die. But on the other hand, it worked out. It did work out and it's going to say, you don't have too much regret on that because you have made a splash and the people who are hanging out, they're still there.
And you've made this huge comeback and I think you're more than making up for it now with the press and everything else. Now, what a crazy story. I was not expecting any of that.
How gut-wrenching, just going back to just these death threats, I'm so curious, especially with your psychotherapy background, how did you mentally and emotionally cope with that? You know what was unfortunate about it is that I didn't have, I think if you're a woman in journalism, you probably have other journalists just naturally in your network that you can call and talk to in their support, whether it's through network or through CNN. For some reason, I really internalized it and I was quiet. I didn't reach out to anybody and say, the producers knew it was happening because they would see my phone blow up the minute I finished being on air.
They would see it start to happen. But I never reached out. I never said like, I just don't even think it occurred.
Yeah, and I have three kids and you leave the studio and the next thing you know you're in a car and you're heading home and you're making hot dogs and hamburgers for your kids and you're answering phone calls for clients and you're working on other things. So I think I just sort of parked it and it would be late at night when you'd sit there looking at the ceiling and I ended up getting a teaser flashlight. I never got a gun, which we can have in the U.S. I was too afraid to have a gun in the house and I also did a lot of psychotherapy for people who were part of the Sandy Hook tragedy so we could have a whole other podcast on guns in America.
And for the listeners who don't know, Sandy Hook was a tragedy that happened where a middle school boy went into an elementary school in the state of Connecticut where I'm from and lived near and killed quite a few children and teachers and school administrators about, I can't remember the exact date when it happened, but about a decade ago now. And so I would lie in bed at night going, what am I going to do about this? And as much as you can alarm your car, I mean sorry your house, going out to your car, going to the grocery store, it only takes one. And to layer that, I'm a psychotherapist, so I know the fragility of someone's mental health deeply, right, is what I did for a living for over a decade.
So I was very conscious that this could be really tragic for people involved if something, if that 1%, you know, decided to act upon their impulse and do something to me. And so I said, until I'm better equipped to do something like that, I've got to peace out. And that's what the system does, right? So like that is an exact kind of great case example of how misogyny in our society and chauvinism, yeah, can absolutely win.
Because they took a voice, by the way, that wasn't necessarily a voice that was conservative, which this would mostly happen when I was on Fox, not the other way, and they took it off air, which is a shame. Kudos to you for bouncing back, because I can only imagine, I just empathise with just how scary, just as a woman to begin with, as a mom on top of that, and the list goes on and on, the psychotherapy experience helps you. You've got the head as well as the heart going on as well, so it just sounds so incredibly scary.
And we need to pick ourselves back up again afterwards, right? We can only be silenced for so long. So coming back to revenge capital, how does your psychotherapist background make you a better investor? Oh, that's such a good question. Yeah.
How does that happen? I think that I'm so relationship driven, and our investment thesis is about investing in people. And I know that sounds so cheesy and people say it all the time, but I really think that an idea can be, you can have a great idea, but you can be a terrible operator or a terrible human being, or you can be a great person and not such a great operator. As a therapist, you have the, I don't want to make anybody feel like who comes in to pitch us an idea that I'm psycho-analysing them at all, because you don't do that.
And that's like, cut me back. No one told me in school, people are going to be kind of afraid of you because they're going to think you're psychoanalyzing them. And by the way, it doesn't work that way.
When you're in practice, you're deeply in practice, and when you're out of it, it's like, it's as dramatic as sort of like having a bathing suit on to go swimming and then like having all your clothes on and not by a pool, right? It's like a totally different scenario. So when people come in, I do think though that I have the ability to develop rapport pretty quickly with people because that's what you do as a psychotherapist. You have to gain their trust, and you have to create a space where you're really listening to their story and you're taking it in, and you're able to ask questions to really derive the information you need to be able to give a baseline of how somebody's doing.
And so I think I can apply all that strategy to a founder that I'm working with, and I can teach my team how to do the same thing. So I think that that's probably the most helpful part of it. And I think also just having like a very strong passion about helping the underdog, about being a fund for the people.
And that's not bullshit, right? Like I've lived and breathed in eating this for my entire career. When you go into social work, you work in populations that have gotten the short end of the stick. You work with, I started my career early in HIV AIDS.
I started working in, you know, housing projects in Red Hook, Brooklyn. You start working with the poor, the disenfranchised, the traditionally marginalized. People have gone through a lot because of just...
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