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- Trust fund. Sophia Amoruso, the founder of Nasty Gal who coined the term "girlboss," is now almost a year into her latest endeavor: a venture capital firm with the tongue-in-cheek name, Trust Fund.
Amoruso announced the launch of the firm in January 2023 with plans to raise $5 million. (Unlike most funds, Trust Fund was incorporated under Rule 506(b) of the Securities Act, which allows Amoruso to raise in public and from a wider group of investors.) She decided to launch a fund after spending "way too much of [her] own money" as an angel investor.
While Amoruso popularized the term "girlboss" with her memoir and a Netflix show of the same name, the phrase took on a life of its own. It became less inspirational and more of a put-down. "I'm exhausted by the girlboss narrative," Amoruso says.
So, this time, she's avoiding gender-specific terms and restrictions. Trust Fund is not exclusively investing in female-founded companies; Amoruso wants to invest in all opportunities available to her. Or as she puts it: "I'm happy to ride on a man's coattails." "I'm not going to double down on my disadvantage," she adds.
Amoruso had a nontraditional path into the tech industry, starting Nasty Gal as an eBay store for secondhand clothing; she bootstrapped the company to $28 million in annual revenue by the early 2010s. But fast growth led to a fast fall, and the brand filed for bankruptcy and sold to retailer Boohoo for $20 million in 2017.
Now, she says that her understanding of the challenges of entrepreneurship—in the days before Shopify—will set her apart as an investor. Amoruso is especially interested in B2B products and services for entrepreneurs, which she views as consumer products. "They're products that the average person who's starting a business can understand and use that demystify business ownership for everybody, including the person I was when I was a community college dropout at 22," she says.
Trust Fund has made nine investments so far. They include a social commerce platform, a gig economy marketplace for the dental industry, a creative operations tool for creators and marketers, and Gift Shop, a site where small businesses like restaurants can sell their merch.
She has other potential investments on her wish list, including an idea for an "Etsy for services" that would allow non-professionals to monetize their hobbies—to make and sell a one-off floral arrangement without launching a full-blown business.
As Amoruso moves more behind the scenes as an investor rather than a founder, she's not abandoning the marketing savvy that helped launch Nasty Gal into the zeitgeist. "I don't like operating companies," she admits. "[Now] it's my job to invest in companies that drive revenue instead of drive revenue for myself."
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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