Before
No college degree. She worked as a tour production coordinator for touring musicians, doing logistics and scheduling, with no background in finance or technology.
The move
She taught herself the entire craft from books and interviews, then ran pure volume outreach, sending emails in dozens at a time and cold calling, while homeless and sleeping in the San Francisco airport and on friends' floors. The thesis was the underrepresented founders every established firm was structurally missing, which gave the outreach a reason to exist beyond persistence.
The turn
A twenty-five thousand dollar check roughly five years into the effort, which she describes as the moment her investing career started. Backstage Capital grew to around twenty million dollars across roughly two hundred companies.
Timeline
- Around 2010 to 2015 self-education and cold outreach while homeless
- 2015 first check, Backstage Capital founded
- Grows to roughly 20 million dollars and 200 investments
- 2022 pauses new investments, cuts staff from twelve to three
- December 2024 steps down as managing partner into an advisory role
What this route cannot do
Persistence and self-education opened the door. They did not, on their own, produce fund economics durable enough to keep it open. She has said she personally funded operations for two years before the 2024 restructuring, and framed the handover as reaching the limit of what she could do alone. A 200 million dollar fund with 360 Venture Collective was announced for 2025; no confirmation that it closed could be found. Any version of this story that stops at the 2015 first check is not telling you the useful part.