The Business Behind Victoria's Secret's Fastest-Selling Bikini, with Melissa Odabash

The Business Behind Victoria's Secret's Fastest-Selling Bikini, with Melissa Odabash

Anna Wintour ordered from her personally. Jennifer Lopez wore the first thing she ever designed. But Melissa Odabash started out selling bikinis from a bag backstage, barely making a dollar on each one. Twenty-five years and 70 countries later, she's never taken outside investment and still owns every bit of her brand. Melissa Odabash MBE is the founder and designer of her eponymous luxury swimwear label. A former fit model for Valentino and Fendi, she turned everything she absorbed backstage into one of the most iconic names in swimwear. In this episode: ◼️ How a Victoria's Secret catalogue took her from 70 pieces a week to thousands ◼️ Why she's never taken outside investment, and the first hire she says every founder needs ◼️ How she got her collection into Harvey Nichols with one very bold phone call ◼️ Why every penny she makes goes into property ◼️ How to stick to one thing when everyone tells you to expand ◼️ Why she says you should never start a business for money Subscribe for new episodes every week. 💜 Stream on Spotify: https://tr.ee/hgfspotify 💜 Stream on Apple Podcasts: https://tr.ee/hgfapple 💜 Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hgf/ 💸 Powered by Aave App. Start saving smarter: https://aave.com/app [https://aave.com/app]

Blockchains, AI, and the Future of Finance, with Amanda Cassatt

Amanda Cassatt helped bring Ethereum to market as CMO of ConsenSys, then founded the web3 firm Serotonin, co-founded NFT platform Mojito, and wrote a book on web3 marketing. She makes the case that most of us are quietly losing money without realising it. Our savings sit in accounts earning next to nothing while the bank keeps the difference. In this episode: ◼️ Why she thinks the economy has become so "calcified" that wealth now only flows from young to old, and how early crypto briefly flipped that ◼️ What crypto actually is, in plain English: blockchains, bitcoin vs ethereum, stablecoins, and why holding your own money matters ◼️ The wild bit of history: the internet was meant to have money built into it from day one, and why it took crypto to finish the job PayPal couldn't ◼️ How to spot a solid, battle-tested platform from the projects that don't make it ◼️ Her contrarian take on AI: revolutionary, or just "glorified autocomplete"? And why she thinks it's quietly homogenising how we all think ◼️ How to make big decisions without agonising, and the Japanese idea of ikigai she swears by Subscribe for new episodes every week. 💜 Stream on Spotify: https://tr.ee/hgfspotify 💜 Stream on Apple Podcasts: https://tr.ee/hgfapple 💜 Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hgf/ 💸 Powered by Aave App. Start saving smarter: https://aave.com/app [https://aave.com/app]

A Beginner's Guide to Crypto

Crypto talk. Most of us are quietly nodding along with no clue what any of it means. So today it's a crash course, we're going back to basics. Crypto, blockchain, bitcoin, ethereum, web3, defi and tokenization. By the end, you'll actually know what it’s all about: ◼️ Why crypto is built on cryptography, the same math that keeps your messages and bank login safe ◼️ Why "on the blockchain" means no single person, company or government can tamper with it ◼️ Why bitcoin is like a calculator and ethereum is like a smartphone ◼️ Why web3 is called the next internet: your accounts, content and data would live on a blockchain and actually belong to you ◼️ How defi and tokenization could change money for everyone, and why BlackRock's CEO compares it to the internet in 1996 Subscribe for new episodes every week. 💜 Stream on Spotify: https://tr.ee/hgfspotify 💜 Stream on Apple Podcasts: https://tr.ee/hgfapple 💜 Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hgf/

Sharmadean Reid: How to Build a World, Not Just a Brand

Sharmadean Reid built a beauty empire from a nail salon in East London — and she's done it again from scratch. She grew up on free school meals in Wolverhampton, started working for entrepreneurs at 14, and turned a £20-a-week cash-in-hand job into a career building cultural phenomena. WAH Nails. Beautystack. And now 39 BC, a bathing brand that went from idea to nine stores across three countries in six months. In this episode, Sharmadean Reid — founder, author of The New Girl Code, and one of the most respected brand builders in the UK — breaks down exactly how she raises money, builds brands people obsess over, and designs a business around the life she actually wants to live. She shares the parts most founders keep to themselves:◼️ Why fundraising is really just sales, and the CRM and signalling system she uses to de-risk herself in investors' eyes long before the pitch ◼️ Why women can raise a first round but rarely a second, and how that second hurdle quietly kills female-founded businesses ◼️ How she builds a whole world instead of just a product, and why story beats the formula when what you're selling is mostly water ◼️ Why how you show up directly affects how much you can raise, and the brutal investor logic behind it ◼️ How she thinks about the stock market, why she treats investing as generational wealth and not a savings account, and how she clocked Nvidia years early New episodes every week. 💜 Stream on Spotify: https://tr.ee/hgfspotify 💜 Stream on Apple Podcasts: https://tr.ee/hgfapple 💜 Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hgf/ 💸 Powered by Aave App. Start saving smarter: https://aave.com/app [https://aave.com/app]

Amazon’s First Investor: Nick Hanauer on How the Rich Rigged the Economy

Nick Hanauer was one of Jeff Bezos' first investors. Now he's telling other billionaires they have too much money. He grew up working in his family's pillow factory, helped start Amazon before anyone believed people would shop online, and sold a single company to Microsoft for $6 billion. By every measure, the system worked perfectly for him. That's exactly why he wants to tear it down. In this episode, Nick Hanauer, venture capitalist, first non-family investor in Amazon, and the man behind the viral essay "The Pitchforks Are Coming" - explains why the rich getting richer isn't just unfair, it's the thing quietly breaking the modern economy. In this episode, he says the parts most billionaires never will: ◼️ How selling pillows taught him more about Amazon's future than any expert and why he backed Jeff Bezos when people thought the whole idea was nuts ◼️ Why the top 1% have grown $21 trillion richer and how 50 years of economic policy made the bottom 90% poorer every single year ◼️ Why not one of America's 11,000 economists backed his $15 minimum wage and how the real-world results proved them wrong ◼️ What he really thinks of Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos and why he believes the economy now rewards the people who care least about everyone else ◼️ How AI could power the next wave of innovation or trigger a massive crash, and the simple policy changes that could shift $2 trillion back to working families New episodes every week. 💜 Stream on Spotify: https://tr.ee/hgfspotify 💜 Stream on Apple Podcasts: https://tr.ee/hgfapple 💜 Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hgf/ 💸 Powered by Aave App. Start saving smarter: https://aave.com/app [https://aave.com/app]