Brydge Club by Ruffin Mitchener

Mallory Contois is the founder of Old Girls Club (OGC), a curated Slack community of more than 3,300 ambitious women, and she now builds community at Lovable. Her career has taken her from starting the product operations team at Pinterest, to LinkedIn, to serving as COO of a Series A gaming startup, to building community from the ground up at Mercury, Maven, and Lovable. She also recently launched her own talk show, Good Work.

In this episode, Mallory talks about the hardest stretch of her time as a Series A COO. From the outside she was succeeding. Inside, she felt panicked and isolated. She explains how one honest LinkedIn post led to a free Slack group, and how that group grew into OGC. She describes why she designs virtual community the way she would host a dinner party, how building for introverts changes the experience, and why selling is banned everywhere except one dedicated channel. She also shares why she chose slow, sustainable growth over scale, why referral rate is the metric she trusts most, and the bold email that got her hired as Mercury’s head of community even though her resume didn’t fit the role.

Mallory also explains how community as a product differs from community as a distribution strategy. She covers how to show the ROI of community without tying it to a sales number, and how she structures her days around a full-time role while running a portfolio of side projects. She closes with her advice for building a career in the age of AI, why being a “personality hire” is a strength, and what she hopes the next generation of women takes away: just keep moving.

I hope you enjoy!

More on Mallory Contois:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallorycontois

Old Girls Club: https://www.jointheogc.com/

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

Deborah Benton is the Founder and Managing Partner of Willow Growth Partners, a fund that writes $2 to $4 million checks as the first institutional capital in early consumer brands. Willow’s portfolio includes Coterie, the premium diaper brand that sold to Mammoth Brands for $1 billion, and Goodles, the better-for-you mac and cheese recently acquired by Barilla. Before investing, Deb spent years as an operator. She was COO of ShoeDazzle and President of Nasty Gal, where she helped scale the business from roughly $20 million to $100 million in revenue.

In this episode, Deb explains why tech venture capital and consumer brands are a fundamental mismatch, and what she learned raising at sky-high valuations during the growth-at-all-costs era. She shares how six years of angel investing shaped Willow’s thesis, why she backed Coterie after tech VCs refused to fund a diaper brand, and how baggies of noodles and a long-awaited cheese sauce won her over on Goodles five months before launch. Deb also gets candid about the metrics she actually looks at, why there’s no magic LTV to CAC ratio, when celebrity partners help a brand and when they become a risk, and why a valuation is not what your business is worth. She closes with the impact she wants to have: more women building generational wealth.

I hope you enjoy!

More on Deborah Benton:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/debenton

Website: https://willowgrowth.com

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

Elizabeth McCluskey invests in fintech for a living as Managing Director of the TruStage Ventures Discovery Fund, and backs early-stage founders with her own money as an angel investor. In this episode, she breaks down how venture capital and angel investing actually work, from SPVs and cap tables to the fund math that decides which companies a VC can back, and why a “no” from a mega fund often has nothing to do with your business.

Elizabeth shares her path from investment banking at UBS to wealth management, business school and impact investing, and why, after a decade of pitching deals to investment committees, she decided to become an investment committee of one. She explains what she looks for in a founder’s inner circle, why she won’t invest in a 6 out of 10 founder, the partnership slide red flag that ends a deal for her, and how to read between the lines when a VC says “too early.” Plus, the story of how a single LinkedIn post about a decaf coffee brand turned into an oversubscribed Brydge Club deal.

Connect with Elizabeth McCluskey:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethcmccluskey

TruStage Ventures: https://www.trustage.com/

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

Natalie Barbu is the Co-Founder of Rella, the social media management platform that helps brands and social teams plan, approve, and publish content in one place. Natalie started her YouTube channel in 2011 at just 15 years old, studied industrial engineering at NC State, and quit her consulting job at Accenture after nine months to create full time. She has since earned over $1 million as a content creator and raised a $1 million pre-seed round for Rella from investors including Charge Ventures and Liquid 2 Ventures.

In this episode, Natalie breaks down how creators actually make money, why a unique point of view matters more than follower count, and why creators with around 20K followers convert best for Rella as a brand. She gets candid about pitching over 200 VCs, waiting seven months for her first check, and watching the first version of Rella top out at roughly $5,000 a month. Natalie shares how the team scrapped the product, rebuilt it for businesses in two months, and still ended up telling investors they were shutting down with $25,000 left in the bank. Days later, a single skit took monthly revenue from $3,500 to $21,000 and put Rella on the path to profitability. She also covers founder-led content, why content is revenue, and her goal of reaching $50 million in revenue.

I hope you enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta's Agentic Trust Platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you’re pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

Go to http://vanta.com/ruffin for $1,000 off Vanta today!!

More on Natalie Barbu:

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/nataliebarbu

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nataliebarbu

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nataliebarbu

Website: https://getrella.com

Use code BRYDGECLUB for 10% off Rella annual plans

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

Victoria Thain Gioia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Perelel Health, the doctor-formulated supplement brand that supports women at every stage, from conception and pregnancy through postpartum and perimenopause. Her daughter was born with a cleft lip linked to a folic acid deficiency, and that sent Victoria deep into prenatal nutrition. She found a category where the word "prenatal" isn't regulated, most formulas were one-size-fits-all, and nearly everything was built around the baby rather than the mom. She launched Perelel in September 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. Since then it has become one of the fastest-growing companies in women's health, approaching $100m in revenue for a 90% subscription business, 20 supplements, and a recent $27 million growth round led by Prelude Ventures.

In this episode, Victoria explains how her path through J.Crew, investment banking, private equity, and Harvard Business School prepared her to build Perelel, and why bringing on an OB-GYN as medical co-founder shaped every product. She describes how Perelel third-party tests every lot and runs clinical studies. She also shares how answering every customer service ticket herself for two years led to pregnancy-safe greens, hydration, and protein powders, and how longtime customer Mandy Moore became a brand partner. Victoria talks openly about raising through a thousand no's with a personal loan and angel checks, why she first said no to the $27 million round, and the business school advice to raise as little as possible at as low a valuation as possible. She also covers building a profitable consumer brand and Perelel's $10 million pledge to close the women's health research gap.

I hope you enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta's Agentic Trust Platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you’re pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

Go to http://vanta.com/ruffin for $1,000 off Vanta today!!

More on Victoria Thain Gioia:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoria-thain-gioia/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vat26/?hl=en

Website: https://perelelhealth.com/

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

Christina Cacioppo never fit Silicon Valley's picture of a tech founder. She didn't grow up coding, spent two years in venture capital before teaching herself to program, and sold her first startup for $20,000 after none of its products found a market. Today she is the co-founder and CEO of Vanta, the compliance automation company that raised a $150 million Series D at a $4.15 billion valuation and, as of April 2026, has passed $300 million in ARR. Vanta now serves more than 16,000 organizations, including Snowflake, Duolingo, Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, with just 1,000 employees across five offices.

In this episode, Ruffin traces Christina's path from running a Beanie Baby business on eBay at age 11, to meeting hundreds of founders at Union Square Ventures, to learning how real product teams work as a PM at Dropbox. The episode walks through the ideas that didn't work, including a voice assistant for lab biologists with a market "the size of my thumb," and the customer discovery rule that finally led Christina to Vanta: no code until you truly understand the problem. You'll also hear how Vanta started as a SOC 2 consultancy run out of a spreadsheet, won its first 600 customers without a real website, and waited until $10 million in ARR, ten times the usual benchmark, to raise its Series A from Sequoia.

It's a story about resilience with discernment: staying committed to the ambition without getting attached to the wrong idea.

I hope you enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Get $1,000 off at https://vanta.com/ruffin

More on Christina Cacioppo:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ccacioppo

X: https://x.com/christinacaci

More on Vanta:

Website: https://www.vanta.com

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

Jenny Duan is the CEO and Co-Founder of Clair Health, the world's first wearable for continuous hormone monitoring. She started Clair as a junior at Stanford after a class on the women's health ecosystem showed her how little data women actually have about their own bodies. While studying abroad at Oxford, she worked nights and flew to the US three times in ten weeks to pitch investors and build out the team. Clair has since raised an $11 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures with participation from a16z speedrun and Brydge Club, built a waitlist of 25,000 women, taken 6,000 preorders, and signed early B2B contracts with fertility clinics.

In this episode, Jenny explains how Clair infers hormone levels from the wrist using ten novel sensors and machine learning models trained on female physiology, and why blood draws and daily urine tests leave such a big gap. She breaks down why most wearables filter out female body data as noise, what Clair is already seeing in its own data around perimenopause and cycle phases, and what goes into the Harmony clinical study and the path to FDA clearance. She also shares how the team is protecting sensitive women's health data, what the Mayo Clinic partnership unlocks for their research, how they created early demand almost entirely through community and word of mouth, and why she believes all of healthcare is women's health.

I hope you enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta's Agentic Trust Platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you’re pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

Go to http://vanta.com/ruffin for $1,000 off Vanta today!!

More on Jenny Duan:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jennysduan

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jennysduan

Website: https://wearclair.com/

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

Welcome to the Brydge Club podcast! I'm your host, Ruffin, and today I'm going solo to break down one of the most misunderstood startup stories of the last decade: how Payal Kadakia built ClassPass.

Fewer than 1% of funded startups reach $1 billion. Only 7% of unicorn founders are women, and women of color lead even fewer. Payal is one of them. But the ClassPass we know today, with 100 million hours of workouts booked across 30,000 partners in 28 countries, is not the company she set out to build.

In this episode, I trace the full arc: from an MIT grad and lifelong dancer who couldn't find a single ballet class in New York, to spending $500,000 on a booking product that generated about ten reservations a month. I get into why the "OpenTable for fitness" thesis was built on a false parallel, the five distinct business models ClassPass cycled through, the $99 unlimited era that grew 50x while quietly bleeding money, and the decision to kill it in 2016 and lose 10% of the user base overnight.

I also dig into the part of the story that matters most to me: the rooms full of male VCs who sat in silence after every pitch, the fellow South Asian woman who wrote the first meaningful check and told her to bet on herself, and what that representation gap actually costs when you measure it in billions.

I hope you enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta's Agentic Trust Platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you’re pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

Go to http://vanta.com/ruffin for $1,000 off Vanta today!!

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

Eve Halimi and her co-founder Anam wrote a 100-page business plan on Saturdays while working full-time on Wall Street. Today, Alinea Invest, the AI-powered investing app they built, is used by roughly 1% of the U.S. population. In between: a Y Combinator acceptance won on founder-market fit alone, two years of iteration before anything worked, a $10 million Series A led by Play Ventures, and a $20 million cohort-financing facility that fuels their growth without touching equity.

In this episode, Eve breaks down the onboarding rewrite that took Alinea from near-zero to $80K in a single month, and the founder-led TikTok strategy that turned one 60-second story video into 50,000 downloads in a day. She gets specific on the mechanics of debt financing for consumer apps, why they waited far too long to charge for the product, how "Gen Z messaging" ended up converting 40-year-old construction workers, and what an AI investing companion that "thinks and acts for you" actually looks like.

I hope you enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta's Agentic Trust Platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you’re pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

Go to http://vanta.com/ruffin for $1,000 off Vanta today!!

More on Eve Halimi:


LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eve-halimi

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/genuine.jew/?hl=en
Website: https://www.alinea-invest.com/

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:


https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:


Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.

Welcome to the Brydge Club podcast! I'm your host, Ruffin, and today I'm joined by Laura Modi, Co-Founder and CEO of Bobbie, the infant formula company she started after a moment of shame in a pharmacy aisle. Laura built her career at Google and Airbnb before leaving tech to take on one of the most highly regulated, capital-intensive industries in America. Bobbie has since raised nearly $150 million, surpassed $160 million in revenue, and bought its own manufacturing facility in Ohio.

In this episode, Laura talks about the emotional reality behind Bobbie's founding story, what she learned about sugar and formulation by cold-emailing 20-30 experts a night, and the FDA labeling issue that pulled her product off shelves for 18 months when she had only 100 customers. She explains why she turned off new customer growth during the 2022 national formula shortage against investor advice, how she convinced her board she'd been wrong about owning manufacturing, and what responsibility every formula brand carries when a recall hits the industry. Laura also shares how the Molly Baz Times Square billboard came together, why she hires the atypical candidate, the work Bobbie for Change is doing on federal paid leave and the Black maternal mortality crisis, and the moment with her daughter that finally loosened her grip on mom guilt.

I hope you enjoy!

This episode is brought to you by Vanta. Vanta's Agentic Trust Platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you’re pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

Go to http://vanta.com/ruffin for $1,000 off Vanta today!!

More on Laura Modi:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauraclairemodi/

Website: https://www.hibobbie.com/

Bobbie for Change: https://www.bobbieforchange.org/

More on Host Ruffin Mitchener:

https://beacons.ai/ruffin

About Brydge Club:

Brydge Club, hosted by Ruffin Mitchener, aims to bridge the $1.7 trillion financing gap for female founders. Every Wednesday, the show features in-depth interviews with industry leaders and innovators, educating and empowering women in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Through insightful discussions, Brydge Club seeks to inspire listeners to break barriers and achieve success in the business world.