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

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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She started selling vintage on eBay with no business school, no business plan, and no idea what a P&L was. She built it into a $350M empire. Then it was gone. No co-founder. No safety net. Just instinct — and the brutal lessons that came when instinct wasn't enough.

In this episode, Sophia Amoruso — founder of Nasty Gal, author of #Girlboss, and now investor at Trust Fund backing the next generation of founders — breaks down what really happened inside one of the most public rises and falls in modern business.

In this episode:

◼️ How she turned vintage eBay flips into a $350M empire — and why obsessing over taste, not revenue, is what made Nasty Gal impossible to copy

◼️ Why she turned down a $400M+ Urban Outfitters offer — and how listening to her investor instead of her gut cost her the entire company

◼️ How venture capital broke a profitable business — hiring 100+ people ahead of growth, chasing billion-dollar valuations, and trying to lead a company on financials she couldn't read

◼️ Why the "Girl Boss" backlash happened — and what she learned about hustle culture, public failure, and who actually shows up when it all falls apart

◼️ What she looks for as an investor at Trust Fund now — the founder red flags that make her pass, the AI tools she uses every day, and how she'd use AI to run Nasty Gal today

New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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She built Peanut while raising her son, funding the early product with her own savings. Today it's used by 5M+ women across fertility, pregnancy, motherhood and menopause. But that's not why she's here.

She's here because professional mothers are doing everything right — and still falling behind. Men are syndicating deals amongst themselves, sharing investments, making each other rich. Women aren't getting in on the action. And she's not staying quiet about it.

In this episode of Hot Girl Finance, Michelle Kennedy, founder and CEO of Peanut, former Deputy CEO of Badoo and inaugural board member of Bumble, takes on the financial conversations professional mothers aren't having — and why that silence is costing them.

In this episode:

◼️ Why men are syndicating deals amongst themselves and what she's learned about getting mothers in the room

◼️ How she went from corporate lawyer to Deputy CEO of Badoo and what running a profitable tech company taught her about money

◼️ Why the pension gap is the financial crisis nobody's talking about and how stepping out of work to raise children is silently costing mothers their financial future

◼️ Why she wishes she had just the confidence of a very average man and what actually closes the gap for working mums

◼️ Why your money is dying in a savings account right now and what to do about it instead

Her real lesson? Confidence comes from doing the reading. And the network you build today writes the cheques tomorrow.

New episodes weekly. Powered by Aave.

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She left school at 15, sold vintage from a market stall at 14, and opened her first shop in Ibiza at 19 with €200 and zero backup plan. No investors. No loans. Just a vision and the relentless energy to build it.

In this episode, Annie Doble, founder of Annie's Ibiza — the brand with fans including Kate Moss, Zendaya and Taylor Swift and stores in Ibiza, London and New York — breaks down what it actually takes to build something real from nothing.

In this episode:

◼️ How Annie built a global fashion empire from €200 with no degree and no backup plan — and why starting with nothing was her biggest advantage

◼️ How her first employee has stayed for nearly a decade — and the leadership philosophy behind a team that never wants to leave

◼️ Why never going on sale and going direct to consumer built one of the most coveted fashion brands in the world

◼️ How avoiding wholesale gave her total creative freedom — while the industry's model fell apart

◼️ How she opened the New York store in 3 days and what it actually takes to pull off the impossible

New episodes weekly. Powered by Aave.

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The Hot Girl Finance podcast is owned and produced by Aave. Episodes may include discussion of Aave products, services, or related financial topics. Content is provided for educational, informational, and promotional purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. For more information, go to aave.com/legal/podcast.