Sophia Amoruso on Bootstrapping Nasty Gal to $120M Revenue, Turning Down $400M, Declaring Bankruptcy, Public Failure, Starting Trust Fund to Back Other Founders
The Peel with Turner Novak
Turner Novak
4.6 • 11 Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2026
⏱️ 92 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
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Timestamps:
(0:59) Selling vintage on Ebay while working at an art school
(04:31) Lessons in marketing and perceived value
(12:38) Knowing when to make your first hire
(18:31) Borrowing from others to build a unique brand
(25:17) Growing to $120m revenue in seven years
(27:24) Sharing the pitch deck that raised $50m
(30:17) Mistakes scaling to 100’s of employees too fast
(34:48) Downsides of raising at too high of a valuation
(39:56) Why being a CEO is fun
(42:57) Declaring bankruptcy
(50:38) How it feels to fail publicly
(54:41) Writing a book, Netflix series, starting the Girlboss movement
(59:13) How to create a new brand in 2026
(1:05:34) Starting Trust Fund to invest and help founders
(1:13:45) Raising $5m from a poker game
(1:18:47) Sophia asks for Turner’s LP pitch
(1:26:53) Traits of the best founders
Trust Fund: https://www.trustfund.vc/
Pitch Trust Fund: https://www.trustfund.vc/pitches
Nasty Gal: https://www.nastygal.com/
Follow Sophia
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sophiaamoruso
Twitter: https://x.com/sophiaamoruso
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiaamoruso
Website: https://www.sophiaamoruso.com/
Follow Turner
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak
Subscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sophia, welcome to the show. |
| 0:04.6 | Hi, Turner. |
| 0:06.4 | Excited to have you. |
| 0:07.8 | Yeah, finally. |
| 0:08.7 | You made it happen. |
| 0:10.0 | I know. |
| 0:10.3 | I was going to say it's been two years. |
| 0:12.9 | I don't know. |
| 0:13.6 | We've been trying to figure this out. |
| 0:15.9 | You, I guess you had invited me. |
| 0:17.7 | And then I forgot you invited me. |
| 0:19.8 | And then I was like, when's he going to have me on his podcast? |
| 0:42.6 | Like, am I not good enough? And then I was like, hey, I want to be at your podcast. And you were like, dude, I asked you a long time ago. I feel like I asked you multiple times too. I feel like this was just a like broken communication. We just... I just probably memory and ADD and, you know, cognitive load and, you know, all that stuff. |
| 0:43.8 | Yeah. |
| 0:49.1 | So I think we're going to talk about you started a pretty big company, a movement. |
| 0:51.7 | You build a lot of brands. You sold some companies. |
| 0:56.6 | Started a fund doing a live investing. I think probably like one of the most interesting ways to kind of brands. You sold some companies, started a fund, doing a live investing. I think probably like one of the most interesting ways to kind of start it, you initially wanted to go to art |
| 1:01.6 | school way back in the day. So how did you try to do that? How did that get started? I mean, I still |
| 1:08.8 | kind of want to you, but I really wanted to be a photographer. |
| 1:12.6 | I, and I shot this amazing portfolio and applied to California College of the Arts, which is in |
| 1:21.6 | Oakland and San Francisco Art Institute, North Beach, which is unfortunately no longer there. Beautiful campus. |
| 1:28.4 | And I got into both. |
... |
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