What do you actually get paid to write a Hollywood film? Can someone steal your script if you put it online? And why does the man who worked for Leonardo DiCaprio's production company say talent alone won't get you hired?

Franklin Leonard is the creator of The Black List, the platform where any writer in the world can upload their script and get it in front of Hollywood.

We walk through the money side of an industry most people only know from the red carpet. If you work in a creative field, or want to, this one is a masterclass in protecting yourself financially when you never know where the next paycheck is coming from.

In this episode:

◼️ How Franklin Leonard turned a problem at work into The Black List, the platform that changed how Hollywood finds scripts

◼️ Information is power: why knowing what things pay, what's in demand and what the other side wants puts you ahead in any negotiation

◼️ What screenwriters really get paid, and what's left after agents, managers, lawyers and tax

◼️ Why the writers went on strike, and why Franklin says writers are working class people, not red carpet celebrities

◼️ His number one rule for creatives: always be writing something you own

◼️ His Hollywood Finance 101 for creatives: save your money and stay where you are

◼️ His unfiltered take on AI in Hollywood

◼️ Why your net worth should never define your worth

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The publishing industry pays writers last and cuts them first. Substack pays 50 of its creators over $1 million a year. One woman edited Women's Health, Cosmopolitan and Elle, saw where it was all going, and left to build the other side.

In this episode of Hot Girl Finance, Farrah Storr, Head of Substack International, breaks down exactly how the platform pays, who's getting rich, and why the industry that underpaid writers for a century is being replaced.

In this episode:

◼️ The Substack business model, explained in one breath, who sets the price, who takes a cut, and where the money actually goes

◼️ The answer to "but how would anyone find me?" and why you don't need to bring an audience to start earning

◼️ What Farrah makes from one piece of writing a week, and how it compares to her editor's salary at Women's Health

◼️ The story behind The Free Press: built on Substack, sold for a number that changed how writers think about the platform

◼️ Why almost everyone starts as a side hustle, and the exact signal it's time to go all in

◼️ The one way writers should never use AI, and why readers can always tell

◼️ Why she says you haven't missed the boat, Substack is only just launching in France, Italy, Brazil and Japan

The boat hasn't sailed. It's waiting for you.

Subscribe⁩ for new episodes every week.
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Should you be using Klarna, or is Buy Now, Pay Later just expensive debt dressed up in millennial pink?

We decode Klarna's origin story, who actually pays for "interest-free," the five ways Klarna makes money (late fees included), the psychology trick behind the pink button, and how to play it smart if you use BNPL anyway.

In this episode:

◼️Where Klarna came from, a Burger King friendship, a lost uni competition, and a valuation rollercoaster from $45.6B to $6.7B to the NYSE

◼️Who actually pays for "interest-free" 

◼️Klarna's five revenue streams, including the one nobody talks about: your late fees

◼️The psychology trap: how present bias makes four small payments feel like not spending at all

◼️The stats: 68% of BNPL users say it's made them overspend, and 29% now use it for groceries

◼️What actually happens when you miss a payment — late fees, collections, and your credit score

◼️The hot girl BNPL strategy: five rules for using it without letting it use you

Subscribe for new episodes every week.

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Venetia Archer is the founder and CEO of Ruuby, the app that has delivered over a million manicures, massages and blow dries to front doors across the UK, Switzerland, France and the UAE. She can tell what treatment you'll book just by looking at you, and she built her company pitching male investors an economy they didn't know existed.

In this episode:

◼️ Why you should know your numbers cold and check them every single day

◼️ How to hire slowly: the wrong people are the most expensive mistake you'll make

◼️ Why investing young beats almost everything else, thanks to compound interest

◼️ How a standing money meeting makes hard conversations with your partner easier

◼️ Why taking on an investor is a professional marriage, and the red flags to spot first

◼️ Why beauty is armour, not frivolity

Subscribe for new episodes every week.

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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.

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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

Subscribe for new episodes every week.

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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

Subscribe for new episodes every week.

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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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