It’s the hottest day of the year and Nell Daly is lying, fully clothed, in a bath full of water. It’s like Lana del Rey is playing Ophelia in a Jamie Lloyd produced fever dream, and such is the surrealism, the Talking Heads famous refrain is on a loop in my mind: “and you may ask yourself… how did I get here?”. ‘Here’ being what is surely the – well, sexiest shoot you’ve ever seen about venture capitalism. Nell, and her fund, Revenge Capital, burst onto the scene last year, promising to lift up women (and underdogs of all varieties) by investing in their businesses. Any sector, any experience level, any race, creed or gender – if you have a good idea, and you feel you’ve been overlooked, they want to hear from you… and to get the message across, she’s not averse to putting herself forward for an iconic, eye-catching image or two. Hence, the bath.
But Nell has never done things the conventional way, and the merest glance at her CV – which could be subtitled ‘Tales of the Unexpected’ – confirms this. She has a Masters degree in both Fine Arts from Columbia University and a second one in Social Work from NYU. While treating patients for more than 20,000 hours in her private psychotherapy practice, she continued carving out a role as a journalist and political commentator on Fox News (not for the faint-hearted). She then became the Chief Content Officer at The Female Quotient, before changing lanes again at the start of the pandemic into venture capital. In just a few short years, she went on to raise her own fund. Time for another Talking Heads moment: how did she get here? Which one – if any – is the ‘real’ Nell?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is complicated. “I haven’t really shared this before, but since my father passed away a few months ago, I feel like I can share my personal story more fully. I grew up in a home with a lot of domestic abuse,” she reveals. “And as a girl, there’s an erasure that happens when you grow up in a very masculine, male-dominated, and at times violent home. My father was very chauvinistic and an alcoholic; my voice, my opinions, how smart I was – it just didn’t matter. My brothers and their achievements mattered to him more. This made me both quietly angry and fiercely competitive.”
Nell breaks momentarily to sip at her Earl Grey, before continuing, a smile suddenly warming her face. “My mother though, she believed in me. I absolutely loved and adored her. It broke my heart that she was in this relationship where there such a power imbalance… she felt like she couldn’t leave, with three kids, because even though she worked full-time as a nurse, she was financially dependent on my father.”
Luckily, her mother was resolute that the young Nell do as she said, not as she did. “She always told me not to take shit from anybody. But her lived experience was… that she did, from my father.” Nell, already a driven and talented student, remembers a lightbulb moment came at 10 years old on the school bus going home one day. “I thought, I better get really good fucking grades, because my only way out (without marrying money, as my father always assumed I would), is through education’.”
So, despite dyslexia so severe she could have received government funding to go to college, she became a chronic over-achiever and early social justice activist. It is that need she has inside of her – to stick up for those who lack agency and a voice – that is the through line of her varied career moves.
To this day, politics and being “political” infuses everything she does. Although Revenge is strictly party-politically agnostic, Nell’s hope is that she gives entrepreneurs the help they need to make money, and then those founders have the ability, one day, to write cheques out to the political candidates and causes they believe in. Then, those founders go back into their own communities and lift others. “I want more people to have more power than they do now. All citizens should have the right to life, liberty and happiness. We need to make sure everyone gets a fair shot.”
Nell’s been on the record in the past expressing similar, ‘flying the flag for empowerment’, sentiments, but her decision to open up about her childhood sheds new light on why she does what she does with such passion and conviction. Not only did she pull herself up by her bootstraps, she is unwavering in her pursuit of creating a world where no woman is left behind. It’s impressive stuff. Still – impressiveness can create a distance, an impression that you have to be someone ‘extraordinary’ to follow your dreams and make a success of them. Won’t most women look at a high-flyer such as Nell and think, ‘But I could never do that’? Doesn’t the look – the sharp tailoring, the manicure, the sense of having it all together, only add to that?
When I ask her about relatability, she shoots back: “I’ve always felt like an outsider. I was a chubby, freckly, Irish-American tomboy type in a very blond, WASPY Connecticut town. I wasn’t what people, especially boys, were looking for – at all. I struggled.” She continues: “I didn’t have a boyfriend in high school, I had a hard time finding one in college. I always felt, deep down, like the character Molly Ringwald plays in Sixteen Candles. I still do, every once in a while, even though people who know me call me Beth from Yellowstone.”
She laughs, before continuing: “After my divorce, I fell in love with a guy, a trader, and while we were dating, he said, ‘Nell, you want to get as close to the money as you possibly can’. And I said, ‘Close to the money? I’m a social worker and an artist, I couldn’t be further from the money!’. When he dumped me, in Grand Central Station of all places, in my head I said ‘Fuck you. I’m not going to get close to the money. I’m going to BE the fucking money’. And I think we really need provocative leadership to make some noise. Women need to step into that white space, and I can take the hit.”
“WHEN YOU’RE FACING A MOMENT OF BRAVERY, THERE’S BEEN A THOUSAND SMALL DECISIONS LEADING UP TO THAT POINT, SO IT’S NOT REALLY BRAVERY AT ALL… YOU’VE BUILT THE PATH THERE ALREADY, YOURSELF”
To Nell, the personal is political, and Daly made it professional as well, often referring to giving female founders their ‘fuck you money’. Hence a ‘Revenge’ that aims to combat the horrifying stats around female entrepreneurs’ ability to raise capital – they receive just 1.8 percent of VC money in UK at last count, with that number staying pretty static from year to year (the US stats are not much better).
With the relatability-factor rising, Nell goes on to recount how, after the breakdown of her first marriage, she found herself and her three children moving in with her mother to make ends meet. During the same period, she was asked to be a commentator on Fox News, hoping to bring a touch of balance to the polarised political output there. Instead, she ended up receiving death threats after reporting on seemingly progressive news events. “I was very naïve,” she muses. “I thought, it must be possible to have open debates on national television. But then you start getting death threats, people calling your personal phone and saying the most horrible things. I had three kids at home. I started to get scared I was putting them at risk. I was learning, yet again, that when a woman uses her voice, serious consequences can come from it. Men in that profession don’t have to deal with this like women do.”
As someone who’s learned this the hard way, though, surely it would be easier to fly under the radar, to not speak out? “But I can’t be any other way! In the past, I’ve definitely fucked things up – for myself and other people – by not being myself, because I wanted to be more like what was expected of me. But when you pretend, people aren’t buying something real and it eventually all goes wrong.”
“Now, I’m just me. And every time I’ve put myself out there, I’ve been surprised at how many beautiful messages I get on social media, people saying, ‘You inspire me, you encourage me’. And so, I now know there’s going to be a community to catch me, even if some out there, who don’t want women to have a voice, are trying to shut me up.”
It’s easy to imagine someone so driven not needing community encouragement; au contraire, she protests. “My strength lies in my vulnerability, my ability to talk about how I’ve had some really dark nights of the soul. And still now, I don’t wake up every day psyched. I’ve had moments where my heart is in my throat, or I don’t know what I’m doing, or what the consequences will be. But I’ve also learned that when you’re facing a moment of bravery, there’s been a thousand small decisions leading up to that point, so it’s not really bravery at all… you’ve built the path there already, yourself. I often need to remind myself of the Joan of Arc quote: ‘I was built for this’.”
I go on to ask Nell for advice for women who are trying to start or grow a business. She goes big-picture, and is refreshingly open. “It takes discipline and dedication. I was out running at six o’clock this morning – jet-lagged, but I was out there. Anybody working at a high level who says they don’t have a lot of discipline is lying.” But aside from being a natural workaholic, she is a problem-solver, an activist to the bone, who saw the change she wanted to make in the world, and ‘did the work’ in order to make it happen. “Sometimes when you start to make time for yourself, it’s very inconvenient to the rest of the family. It can cause tension… you have to have a stomach of iron to take the heat in your own relationship and say, ‘No, I’m not watching the kids all day Saturday. I need this time to work on my business’, or whatever it is you’re passionate about. When you’re a disruptor, especially as a woman, it feels like you’re doing something risky… but we only have one wild and precious life to live, so… what, are you just going to live it in service of other people?”
Beware, though, of falling into the trap of thinking that someone so passionately pro-woman is automatically anti-man. “Oh, yeah… if you’re an outspoken woman, people always think you don’t like men. I love men! I’m raising two of them. I love how they build, how they push, their energy. And the men who have come into my life and opened a door for me… the ones who said, ‘I think we need to listen to her and see what she can do’. Without them and their allyship, I wouldn’t be here. And I love helping men when I can, too.”
One such man would be Andrew Antonio, her business partner and the person who saw straight to the heart of her mission and facilitated her first fund of £50 million. Antonio is another multi-hyphenate, with interests across multiple industries (finance, film and TV production, music management), and one suspects that as well as her drive and the mission itself, it was that enigmatic thing, ‘star quality’, that he saw in her. He’s backed that up ever since by standing staunchly with her in her values, which has made them a formidable team. Because it goes so much deeper than just ‘making money’: hearing the call towards activism and ‘making a difference’ and acting upon it in the quest for a meaningful life. That psychotherapist’s urge to forge connections (with individuals, with entire sectors of society) is what appears to drive her most.
I came to meet Nell somewhat intimidated by the enigmatic, confident over-achiever she undoubtedly is. Yet as I leave, as well as admiration by the bucket load, my overriding feeling is one of protectiveness. It turns out the only role she’s playing is the only one she can play, that of being 100 per cent unflinchingly and unfailingly herself. The rest of us may not be flying so high anytime soon, but that’s a lesson we all can, and should, start living as of today.
