Our Team
Startup Executive and investor passionate about doing business in a radically new way. Deep understanding of investing, operations, and soulful connection. After 20+ years of growing and scaling companies, I’m excited to co-create abundance with intuition, intention and fun!
Angel investor who also calls on Archangels. Former investment banker, private equity investor and Stanford MBA turned Spiritual Teacher. After working in male dominated environments, some of which were fairly toxic, I’m thrilled to my tippy toes to reclaim investing as a joyful, easeful, feminine act.
Our Story
We met working in investment banking in NYC at Morgan Stanley. We became fast friends, and roommates while we each went on to work in private equity, Vanessa at JP Morgan Partners, Celina at Hicks Muse and KKR. We both went to Stanford Business School after which Vanessa continued working in private equity at a mid-market firm in San Francisco investing in consumer products companies while Celina took on various operating roles at early stage companies (name any startup executive role, she’s probably had it).
We’ve talked about starting a business together for ten years and joked that we wanted to build a product or service that would help us get out of patriarchy (no big deal). In 2009, Vanessa had a spiritual awakening, quit her job in finance and dedicated her life to bringing tools to expand consciousness, focus energy and shift mindset to those in the business world. She’s been leading online courses, retreats, leadership development programs, team off-sites and keynote speaking and recently wrote The Soul Solution: A Guide for Brilliant Overwhelmed Women. While Vanessa was helping people grow (from the inside out), Celina was helping companies grow. After five years learning the fundamentals of operations and management at a retail company, she went on to hold a variety of leadership roles at consumer-focused, growth-stage startups., where she drove revenue growth, built high-performing teams and executed strategic initiatives across marketing, merchandising, product, operations and finance. During this time, Celina saw how investors’ needs were not always aligned with an entrepreneur or a company’s vision and long term needs. Celina had her own spiritual awakening in 2019 and began studying with the same teacher as Vanessa. We both have a foot in each world, the spiritual and the business. We enjoy shifting our consciousness and working with energy in addition to action to bring our desires into reality.
In the spring of 2023, Vanessa had a vision to raise a Goddess Fun+d from women to invest in women run companies and women run funds. She knew Celina would be the perfect person to bring this vision to life. It was a big, clear YES for both of us.
Our intention was to reclaim investing as a joyful, easeful, feminine act. The Goddess Fun+d has far exceeded our wildest dreams. And this is just the beginning.
