The tension between a mantra that sounds bulletproof and a career built on knowing when to walk away is exactly what makes Vanessa one of the sharpest operators in the room. In Season 4, Episode 1 of Bite Big, recorded live in London, Amber Bonney sat down with the Founder and CEO of Girls Talk Global for a conversation that was by turns funny, frank and deeply real.
Vanessa didn't start Girls Talk Global with a pitch deck. She started it with a problem: there was no space in London's financial district where women could simply come together and talk about their careers. So she created one. Free events. Free speakers. Free entry. For two years she ran it on goodwill and graft — no revenue model, just a belief that if the room was right, the rest would follow.
It followed. Women in those audiences started turning to Vanessa and asking if she could work with their companies. "It was more of a movement that turned into a commercial enterprise," she told Amber. Today, Girls Talk Global connects 60,000 women across 37 countries to brands that want to reach them in ways that actually land, delivering up to 9x ROI on event activations, with brand partners including Apple, Meta, Visa, Zalando and Beats by Dre.
The lesson for brands is uncomfortable: trust cannot be manufactured. "You need to think about women as people," Vanessa said. "They are a collective of individuals. Think about what type of community would actually want your product, rather than trying to speak to the masses." Brands that treat women as a monolith — soft girl era, beauty and hair, trad wives — are leaving money on the table and respect on the floor.
"You as a brand have to think about what type of community would want your product rather than trying to speak to the masses."
The mantra arrived this year, during one of the hardest stretches in the business. Vanessa came across the phrase when she needed it most and claimed it. Not as a declaration of invincibility, but as a commitment to staying in the game.
"I'm comfortable with things not working out," she said. "I just don't like to call it failure. I've sunset certain projects, shut down a startup. But the overarching failure — walking away from entrepreneurship — that's the one I'm saying is not an option."
What makes that reframe powerful is the science. Vanessa started her career studying Biomedical Science before she discovered her real calling in corporate responsibility. That scientific training left a mark. In a lab, you're always failing. You run hundreds of experiments and the failure is the data. "You try to curate a vaccine, you are failing so many times," she said. "That's the intent. And then you get — right, it works." Failure, in that frame, isn't the opposite of success. It's the method.
Vanessa has worked in UK Parliament, global banking, international law, and the startup world. She's advised a Prime Minister and a Mayor of London. She's been in rooms most people never get close to. And she's been treated like she didn't belong in any of them.
At Parliament — bureaucratic, toxic, and apparently only survivable in two-year stints or thirty-year stretches — managers saw her ambition as a threat. At Standard Chartered, a colleague told her directly: "I see everybody as competition." This was inside the DEI team. "How ironic is that," Vanessa said. Amber didn't miss a beat: "Of course, there's only space for one talented woman in a large organisation, isn't there."
As a Black female founder pitching brand partnerships to global companies, the room hasn't changed much. "There's not many, if not any, Black women when I'm pitching," she said. "I really wish I had a white male co-founder. I just didn't find one. I really feel it'd have been easier. There's a lot of underlying bias, a lot of questioning around whether you can really deliver."
She said it plainly, without self-pity and without softening it. That clarity is its own kind of power.
"The most powerful people ain't got a clue. I wrote the Speaker of the House's speech. He's the most powerful man in Parliament — and it's like, I wrote the speech."
The conversation around DEI in 2025 is brutal. Vanessa didn't hedge. "I just realized, they don't care." The companies abandoning DEI commitments aren't just failing their employees, they're making a catastrophic long-game error. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are watching, and they won't forget.
"You thought you were gonna save a couple of quid," she said. "To undo the damage, it's gonna cost them times five." The companies holding the line — Apple, JP Morgan — understand that diversity is why they're trillion-dollar businesses. "Now I know the companies that don't care. I don't wanna work with you anymore. Very transparent."
Bite Big donated to Refuge, the UK's largest domestic abuse organisation, on Vanessa's behalf. She sat on their board subcommittee. She's also a survivor of domestic abuse herself, from age 16 to 18.
She shared it simply, without drama, as someone who has long since turned that experience into fuel. It explained everything: why Girls Talk was always more than a business, why community is personal, and why the work of connecting and protecting women is never just a strategy.
Vanessa Sanyauke is what happens when someone refuses to accept the version of themselves other people have decided to see. A Black female founder with no male co-founder, no inherited network, and no interest in playing small, she built a global community from free events in borrowed venues and turned it into a platform that moves culture and commercial results in the same breath.
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