Sophia Amoruso on Bootstrapping Nasty Gal to $120M Revenue, Turning Down $400M, Declaring Bankruptcy, Public Failure, Starting Trust Fund to Back Other Founders
About this episode
Sophia Amoruso discusses her journey from starting Nasty Gal to declaring bankruptcy and her new venture capital firm Trust Fund.
Sophia Amoruso is the Founder of Nasty Gal and Trust Fund, an early stage venture capital firm. We talk through her journey of starting Nasty Gal as an Ebay store in 2006 to sell vintage clothing, bootstrapping it to $28 million in revenue, raising $50 million, scaling it to $120 million and a massive team, turning down a $400 million acquisition offer, and ultimately declaring bankruptcy. She takes us inside what it was like to fail so publicly, what she’d do differently next time around, lessons from building the brand, and why she started her VC firm Trust Fund to back the next generation of founders building consequential companies. Thank you to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, and Merge for supporting this episode Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance https://www.numeral.com Flex: Sign-up for Flex Elite with code TURNER, get $1,000 https://form.typeform.com/to/Rx9rTjFz Amplitude: AI analytics, all you have to do is ask https://www.amplitude.com Merge: Every modal. One API. Total control. Check out Merge Gateway https://www.merge.dev/gateway Timestamps: (0:59) Selling vintage on Ebay while working at an art school (04:31) Lessons in marketing and perceived…
People in this episode
Host: Turner Novak
Guest: Sophia Amoruso
Topics covered
- entrepreneurship
- bootstrapping
- venture capital
- public failure
- scaling businesses
- marketing
- acquisition
Keywords
- Nasty Gal
- Trust Fund
- bootstrapping
- bankruptcy
- venture capital
- entrepreneurship
- acquisition offer
- scaling
- marketing
- public failure
Sponsors
Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, Merge
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Nasty Gal, Trust Fund
More episodes of The Peel with Turner Novak
- Cursor + Kalshi Seed Investor on Spotting Outlier Talent | Ali Partovi, Neo
- The $5B Venture Growth Buyout Playbook | Alex Israel, Metropolis
- How Agentic AI is Reshaping Science, Education, and the Economy | Karthik Duraisamy at the University of Michigan
- How US Healthcare Actually Works, the WWII Tax Loophole that Broke it Forever, and How AI Can Fix it | Nikhil Krishnan, Out of Pocket
- Footwork’s Secret Sauce | Mike Smith and Nikhil Basu Trivedi
- Inside Hanover Park: Building an AI-Native Service Business, Growing to $15B in Assets
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Peel with Turner Novak podcast page.