Actually, I don’t think people will ever stop asking about Nasty Gal. I think that it’s much harder to manage people than perfecting your investor pitch or finding a product market fit, because those are all very controllable.Īre people still asking you about Nasty Gal everywhere you go… like I just did? Humans are the wild card they are the most unpredictable thing in business. But I’d definitely say there’s nothing harder than managing a large team, except perhaps harder things that happen in your personal life.

So, which one is harder-raising fund for an early-stage startup or managing a big team like Nasty Gal? If anything, I’m a seasoned entrepreneur now, and often it’s in the second business that an entrepreneur really gets it right. It’s a learned skill, and it brought a lot of questions to the surface, which felt like a very healthy thing for the business. So it’s my first time going out pitching in my career. At Nasty Gal, people just threw money at me. I think fundraising is difficult regardless of what you have done in the past. Was Nasty Gal’s bankruptcy an impediment in your fundraising for Girlboss? Cindy Ord/Getty Images for Sophia Amoruso Sophia Amoruso’s 2014 memoir, ‘#Girlboss,’ was adapted into a Netflix series with the same name in 2017. To me, that feels like a really natural next step, especially because I wish I had this when I was building my first company. Nasty Gal was about making women feel confident through fashion or style, and Girlboss is more about connecting them to one another, providing resources, tools and education for them to advance.

This is the first time in my career that my purpose and my opportunity have aligned, which is empowering women. But this time is very different: you have money from selling Nasty Gal and you are famous.Ībsolutely. You were selling things on eBay in order to pay bills. Is this something you’ve always wanted to do? I mean, when you started Nasty Gal, you didn’t have many choices. By the time I started Girlboss, it was already a strong brand. So, it was natural for me to continue that conversation and create more content for our already highly-engaged audience. The book, by the sheer nature of it, was a piece of media my podcast, Girlboss Radio, which came after that, was also a piece of media and so was the Netflix series. I picked up pretty quickly after I left Nasty Gal.

Sophia amoruso book