In Episode 1 of Season 4 of BITE BIG, recorded live in London, Amber Bonney sits down with Vanessa Sanyauke — Founder and CEO of Girls Talk Global, a community marketing agency that has connected over 60,000 women across 37 countries to brands who want to reach them in ways that actually matter.
Vanessa's personal mantra is "Failure is not an option." And yet her first social enterprise ran for five years and failed. What she did next is what makes this conversation genuinely worth your time. She didn't reframe the failure, she used it. Got a Masters. Built smarter. Launched Girls Talk from scratch, doing free events in city venues, asking people to speak for nothing, growing a community purely on the value of connection, before a product, before a revenue model, before a pitch deck.
Two years in, the women in that community were turning to Vanessa and asking, "Can you work with my company?" That movement became Girls Talk Global. Brands like Apple, Meta, Visa, Zalando and Beats by Dre have since activated with her platform delivering up to 9x ROI on event activations. Because when you build trust first, commerce follows.
In this episode, Vanessa and Amber unpack the messy reality of entrepreneurship, the feast-or-famine cashflow, the toxicity she experienced inside UK Parliament, the colleague at a global bank who told her she saw her as competition (in the DEI team, of all places), and why Vanessa thinks the companies rolling back DEI commitments have already lost, they just don't know it yet.
Vanessa also shares something deeply personal, her experience as a survivor of domestic abuse, and why she chose Refuge as her Bite Big charity.
This is a conversation about power, community, conviction and what it means to keep going when failure feels like the only option on the table.
At The Edison Agency, we believe in the power of female leadership, values-led brands, and the kind of creative bravery Vanessa embodies. We’re proud to champion voices like hers—because they’re shaping not just brands, but the future of work.