Brydge Club by Ruffin Mitchener

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 conte...

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&#39...

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 valu...

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...

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 mil...

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...

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 milli...

Welcome to the Brydge Club podcast! I'm your host, Ruffin, and today I'm joined by Amy Moussavi, angel investor and advisor at Malo Partners. Amy took an unconventional path into venture. After studying cognitive neuroscience, with no background in finance, she was early at Snapchat, spent years inside a top-secret product group at Apple, and became an investor at a multi-billion-dollar VC...

Morgan Zanotti built Primal Kitchen from a scrappy, bootstrapped mayonnaise brand into a $50 million business, then sold it to Kraft Heinz for $200 million just three and a half years after launch, signing the deal weeks after having her first baby at 32 weeks pregnant. After five years running the brand inside a multi-billion-dollar portfolio, she walked away to start again, this time as a solo f...

Welcome to the Brydge Club podcast! I'm your host, Ruffin, and today I'm joined by Hilary Coles and Emily Boschwitz, the powerhouse duo behind POCA, a better-for-you coffee syrup that lets people enjoy their favorite café drinks without the sugar crash. Before POCA, Hilary and Emily were on the founding team at Hims & Hers, which they helped scale to a $1.6 billion valuation in just th...

In this episode, I'm breaking down one of the most remarkable stories in modern consumer business: how FIGS went from selling scrubs in hospital parking lots to becoming the first company led by two female co-founders and co-CEOs to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2012, Heather Hasson noticed a nurse friend stuck wearing shapeless, uncomfortable scrubs and saw an opportunity every...

Welcome to the Brydge Club podcast! I'm your host, Ruffin, and today I'm joined by Kate McAndrew, Co-Founder and General Partner at Baukunst, a $100 million venture capital fund backing exceptional founders at the intersection of technology and design. Writing first checks of $500K to $2M at pre-seed, Kate was the first institutional investor in Bobbie, the first clean infant formula in th...

Welcome to the Brydge Club podcast! I’m your host, Ruffin, and today I’m thrilled to be joined by Alex Taylor, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Perelel, the first OB-GYN-founded vitamin brand for women offering tailored nutrition for each stage of the hormonal journey. Since its inception, Perelel has made an impressive mark, selling over 48 million capsules in the last year and raising $12 million from i...

Welcome to the Brydge Club podcast! I'm your host, Ruffin, and today I’m thrilled to sit down with Sharon Gillenwater, author of Scaling with Soul and a resilient entrepreneur. Sharon’s journey has been nothing short of extraordinary—she raised $3 million in venture capital for her first business before pivoting to bootstrap her second business, Boardroom Insiders, to a $25 million exit. Now a vir...

Welcome to the Brydge Club podcast! I’m your host, Ruffin, and today I’m joined by Erin Levine, Co-Founder and CEO of Hello Divorce, a platform that revolutionizes the divorce process. Hello Divorce combines self-service software and expert services to make divorce less stressful and more affordable. Erin’s 15 years of legal experience have led her to create a service that costs a tenth of the typ...

Welcome to the Brydge Club podcast! I'm your host, Ruffin, and today I’m thrilled to be joined by Valentina Rodriguez, investor at Wonder Ventures, an early-stage venture fund based in Los Angeles. Valentina has been involved in investments such as Clutter, Tala, Honey, Whatnot, Coinbase, and Bird. Before entering venture, she began her career at Morgan Stanley and founded Cannaves Oliva, a functi...

Welcome to the Brydge Club podcast! I'm your host, Ruffin, and today I’m excited to be joined by Jess Catorc, co-founder of Carry, the all-in-one platform for tax-advantaged accounts, investments, and strategy designed for business owners and high-earning professionals. Jess is an award-winning brand strategist who has helped thousands of entrepreneurs and startups scale their reach and revenu...

Welcome to The Brydge Club podcast! I'm your host, Ruffin, and today I’m excited to be joined by Miri Buckland, COO and co-founder of Landing, soon to be rebranded as Zeen. Miri co-founded Landing alongside her Stanford Business School classmate, Ellie, and together they’ve scaled the product to nearly 1 million downloads and raised over $9 million in venture capital from investors like Cowboy...

Welcome to the Brydge Club podcast! I'm your host, Ruffin, and today I’m excited to be joined by Claire Biernacki, Principal Investor at BBG Ventures. BBG Ventures is known for being one of the most active investors in women and underrepresented founders across the U.S. Claire has been involved in investments such as Zola, Spring Health, and Blueland. Before joining BBG, she earned her MBA fro...

Welcome back to the Brydge Club Podcast! Today we welcome Emily Persky , Co-Founder of ‘ I Have This Friend’ , A curated directory of lifestyle services that allows you to book private chefs, interior designers, photographers, and more. They collaborate with top emerging talent to make these curated services accessible. Before co-founding 'I Have This Friend' with her childhood best friend...

In this episode of Brydge Club, we sit down with Cheryl Kellond , the founder and CEO of Play Money , a groundbreaking investment platform designed to help everyday investors build a diversified startup portfolio without committing to full-time angel investing. Cheryl shares her entrepreneurial journey and insights into the startups she has founded, including Bia Sport, Apostrophe, and Play Money....

In this episode of Brydge Club we welcome Co-Founder and CEO of Bümo , Joan Nguyen !  Joan shares a glimpse of her entrepreneurial journey thus far, highlighting her path to Bümo, offering solutions to the US childcare crisis in 2024, her experience as a childcare provider, pivoting from brick and mortar to starting Bümo, navigating VC for the first time, plans to expand Bümo across the US and muc...

In this episode of Brydge Club, we welcome Tanvi Lal, an investor at Intuit Ventures and the founder of VC Unleashed. Tanvi shares her inspiring journey from consulting to venture capital (VC). Learn about the glaring statistics on the lack of diversity in VC and how VC Unleashed is providing real opportunities for people of color to break into the industry.  Key topics discussed: Tanvi Lal’s care...

On this episode of Brydge Club we are joined by Founder & CEO of Aydn , Elizabeth Russo . We discuss Elizabeth’s journey to founding Adyn, modern issues in prescribing birth control, her personal battle with birth control side effects, her career in genetics, why she became an entrepreneur and much more! More on Elizabeth Ruzzo, PhD and Aydn : Adyn is the first and only test designed to preven...

On this episode of the Play Brydge podcast, we sit down with Ronit Menashe and Vida Delrahim, founders of ingenious his and hers prenatal supplement company, WeNatal . We discuss the modern fertility crisis, the conceptualization, launch and operations of WeNatal, Ronit and Vida’s personal journeys with prenatal supplements, tips on increasing your chances of a successful pregnancy and more! Purch...