Rachelle Morris’s mother pulled her off the reduced-lunch program the summer before sixth grade. Her father brought home a box of Wrigley’s gum from a trade show. She sold it at school, made seven dollars, and paid for her own lunch from then on.

She ran that operation out of her backpack and locker through middle school and high school. Everyone knew where to get their gum.

Second of seven kids in Houston, money tight, and she describes the specific moment of looking around at classmates’ families and deciding she wanted to figure out money the way they seemed to have. Lifeguard at fifteen. Call center at sixteen, doing outbound political polling, getting a seventy-year-old woman in Austin to stay on the phone for forty-five minutes — chasing the gift cards for top performer. She says she didn’t know then that she’d spend the rest of her life calling strangers to make things happen.

She was the first woman on her mother’s side to get a college degree. Information Systems at BYU, where she learned she wasn’t the person who could code for six hours straight — and learned instead to be the person everyone wanted in their group, because she could take what the team built and explain why it mattered.

Then Goldman Sachs, right before the financial crisis, starting in mutual fund operations and talking her way into the Dallas private wealth office. Twelve years. Then a call from JP Morgan in 2018 asking her to move to Utah and open their office. She says she thought that was the entrepreneurial leap. Looking back, it wasn’t.

The actual leap came from a panel. Asked about women founders receiving only around 2% of venture capital nationally, she reframed the question — the gap she saw wasn’t in who gets funded but in who sits on investment committees. Six months later she got a cold call from Darren Hill at RevRoad asking why investors weren’t committing to his fund. She gave him the honest answer. He paused, then asked her to come run it. Her response: I’m not a VC. His: not yet.

She’s now a partner at Stalwart Ventures, fourteen investments in, hundreds evaluated. Thirty percent of the fund’s limited partners are women, which happened because they dropped the minimum to $100,000 regardless of net worth — she’d found that most of these women had never been pitched by a VC firm before.

There’s a lot in here for anyone early in a career. Her warning to high achievers that she’s more concerned about their mental health three years after graduation than she is right now, because results are a different game than grades and people you thought were less sharp will navigate it better. Her advice on walking into a room where you know nobody, and why “I’m new” has a short shelf life. And the 401(k) advice from her Goldman bosses in Dallas that she credits for the financial freedom to take risk now.

Plus a plain-language explanation of what venture capital actually is, why founders should be interviewing VCs rather than the other way around, and what a fund owes the investors who hand over money for a decade.