Hollywood Actress to Investor: The $10K Bet That Made Sophia Bush Millions

0:00Actress, activist, and co-partner of Union Heritage Venture, Sophia Bush. You can do well and do good. Do good for your community, not just because you should, but because you want to. The lost little party girl became the girl on the wall of honor. I'm Sophia Bush, and welcome to The Burnouts. How did you get started in your first acting role? It was sort of by happenstance. It wasn't my plan. I wanted to be a heart surgeon. I was really on the pre-med track and I think, you know, very cultured in the mom's mom came through Ellis Island on a boat into America. My dad came in the 70s to go to art school in L.A.

0:44So even though he's an artist, there was still a lot of very intense like you come here and you work hard and you can be a doctor or a lawyer or a lawyer or a doctor. Like that was the whole thing of all my New York. Where are they from? My mom's whole family is New York, New Jersey. So it was like very serious about that. And then I had an arts requirement and I had to do a play. I was very pissed about it. I was like, my best friend Betsy is a theater kid. I'm not a theater kid. Then I did a play and I loved it and then just kept doing theater. And then senior year told my parents I wanted to go and aim for a BFA.

1:18What was the reaction to that? It wasn't great. I was playing volleyball in the spring and I thought, oh, well, I'll just leave the play until the spring semester. And then because I'm going to play volleyball, I won't have to do it. And it was my first lesson in personal responsibility and accountability. They were like, you chose this and you have a requirement. One is an elective. So you do your requirement. And it wound up changing the course of my life pretty significantly. How did you decide you wanted to do it as a career? I think I just loved the creative expression of it. I loved being with people.

1:53So I went to USC and, you know, got in to their BFA program and that was kind of the runaway train of it. The irony is when my mom had an absolute freakout and said to my dad, you turned your artistic hobby into a career and now she thinks she can do it too. What are we going to do? My dad's response was, look, she loves this, but she's too smart. She's going to go to theater school. She's going to be bored and she'll transfer out. And by my sophomore year, I was so bored. But instead of going back to medical school, I decided that I wanted to transfer into the journalism school. And then as things would have it over the next three years, I think I was training theatrically and as a journalist.

2:37And there was something about that combination that was just good for me. And then One Tree Hill came along and I picked up and moved to North Carolina and spent the next 10 years locked in a soundstage. And walk us through how did you land that role and how did it change your career? We were still in very traditional pilot season timing for the TV industry. So January, February, and March, the population of L.A. would grow by like one or 200 ,000 people. People would move out. You'd just pound the pavement. You'd be going to sometimes three, sometimes five auditions in a day. And I remember going in and reading for this part.

3:18I would say it was like a more similar to a parenthood or a seventh heaven was a family drama didn't go but that same production company had made the one tree hill pilot which I remember reading and the role that they had sent it to me to read was for Peyton and I was like I'm not this cool I'm not like an edgy punk rock kid and a couple months later it comes back around and they say you know one tree Hill's going to go to series. But they realized when they made this pilot, they don't have like a comedian character who can stir the pot and they want you to come in and read for it. And I was like, I'm funny and awkward.

4:02I don't know. Sure. And so I went in to read for the show and then the feedback was, yeah, this girl's funny, but she's also supposed to be kind of at Vixen and we just don't know if Sophia's sexy. So can she come back and like essentially prove that she has sex appeal? So I, you know, I was 20. I was like, what does that mean? I guess I need to wear a mini skirt. So what did you do? I, I mean, I went in and like a way edgier outfit because I was like, well, I'm not a Peyton, but I also know what kinds of characters these writers are writing. So I was like, I'll rock and roll it up a little bit and like wear more eyeliner and whatever.

4:42And then the feedback was too much. And I was like, what? And I think now it's funny to me as a person who's been working for as long as I have and who produces and everything now. I'm like, that's the job of a wardrobe department. If someone can act, you can make them look any way you want. Third time was the charm. I went to test for the network. I got the outfit exactly right. And then I moved to North Carolina like 12 days later. And it was surreal because I got there. You know, I'd gone from chairing philanthropy work at USC to going to work on my first ever regular television job. And I walked into a space where all these people had known each other since the spring.

5:26But I didn't know anybody. I literally got picked up from college and dropped on a TV set and was like, what is this place? What do the unit economics of being an actress look like? I mean, not great. Part of the reason they like to make teen television is because they don't really have to pay young people very much money. Because I had been an added character, even though I'd be a series regular, it was essentially, I was essentially told this is all we can afford to pay you and take it or leave it. And it's never going to get any better than this. And, you know, you want to work. So you say yes, but when you make money and 10 % goes to your agent and 10 % goes to your manager and 5 % goes to your lawyer and then, you know, you have to buy into your union and you have to figure out how to incorporate a business.

6:19And it's just, it's a crazy kind of baptism by fire in the financial space. I certainly learned a lot, but it was really stressful. I mean, having to move, pay rent for a while. I threw cash at friends who had a sixth floor walk up in the West Village. My two best friends from college moved into, and it was a two-bedroom apartment, and I would sleep on the pull-out couch on weekends when I'd fly up here. People are like, oh my God, you're the star of a TV show, and there's billboards everywhere. And you're like, I'm terrified about how I'm going to pay my rent. Did you ever renegotiate your contract?

6:54We weren't really given the opportunity to do that. Um, they, they would always tell us we were on the verge of getting canceled, I think, so that we wouldn't try. You think that's common? Yeah, I think it is. But I will say I owe a great debt of gratitude to my wonderful legal representation because when we got into the fourth season of our show, they just said, listen, we know none of the girls are making what the boys are making. but you cannot pay her a third of what the woman making the least amount of money on the show is making and they like really went to bat for me so in our fourth season I was finally brought up to being paid equally to the second lowest paid woman on the cast under a fifth so under 20 percent of what my male co-star was making on the show.

8:06And I know you talked about sexual harassment and also the Me Too movement. How did kind of those power dynamics play into the set? It was tough for us to really understand what was going on because we were 20, 21. And, you know, our boss was in his early 40s and technically old enough to be our dad if he'd had a kid at 20, but had real, like, cool guy, big brother sort of energy. And I think at first we all thought, like, wow, we're really going to have a family. You hear about that on sets. How cool. And then it just started to shift. And all of us at one point or another were put in really uncomfortable positions.

8:53And in a way, I'm really grateful that it happened to me pretty early because I was so headstrong and I knew nothing about the business. And I didn't know how risky it was to tell the man who held my working future in his hands to go fuck himself. you know like he came at me and my reaction was to hit him and then it turned into this like I found out eight years later because at the end of our eighth season we found we thought we were going to be done we didn't know we were coming back for a season nine so one of the writers said to me oh I'll never forget like you know you Heismaned him in front of like all the producers and everyone and he came back being like who does that entitled little bitch think she is just like screaming that I'd rejected his advances apparently.

9:42And one of the writers said, well, maybe she thinks she's entitled to not get her ass grabbed by her boss. Yeah. And our boss threatened that writer's job in the room in front of all the other writing staff. And I didn't find out about this for eight years. And I was just like, oh my God, everywhere. It was bad. But in an interesting way, I think because I'd had such a bold reaction to it, I mostly got left alone after that. I got written in compromising positions. Creepy guys who want to hit on pretty young girls. Yeah. Who literally can hand you a script and you have to do what they write for you.

10:17It's like you don't want to take. Disgusting. Yeah like it was gross and it was by the way it was gross for all of us and I and I do have to be really clear it was worse for other women on the show but at the end of the day we really had to build a little network of us to protect each other and like when new girls would come in to warn them and to try to help them out as best we could it just felt like it was really common it felt like it was the industry nobody really wanted to help so we helped each other and I think that's why the great sort of shift when people started to tell their stories and you heard about it everywhere but I do think it's been important for people in our industry to use the privilege of these platforms to talk about this because by doing so we were able to uplift women in sports we were able to uplift women in academia women in the medical field who go through this kind of harassment in hospitals and in med school you know women who don't necessarily command microphones that reach as far or are heard as loudly as ours.

11:27I love that you talk about this too. Like the majority of people are good, like trying harder people. But it's about that we had this cultural acceptance of predators or people who were harassing. I think it's also really important to understand that when we hear about a situation someone's been in, it seems very black and white. But your life is incredibly colorful. It's just not that simple. You know, there were times as we were processing this, especially so many of us, where, yeah, we were frustrated with some of the other adults in the room. And then you sit down with those people who should have protected you, who should have spoken up, who, by the way, were legally required to, and still to hear that their jobs were threatened, that they were scared for their kids, that they felt like they were really between a rock and a hard place, that they felt like they assumed that because this person had the courage to go talk to them, they would also go tell their agent or they would also go tell the next person and they didn't know they were the only person that this young person had shared their harassment with.

12:32And it's not that it's okay, but it's that I think we have to make space for people to be human and fallible and to know how hard it is and to get that everybody at the end of the day wants to put food on their kid's table. That's why we have to do the work to make the system better. Because if we don't, there's way too many points of contact where help or change gets stopped because of fear. But I love what you talk about, about using your platform and using your microphone to then bring that to women in health care, women in sports. And I want to talk about kind of like the transition after, you know, you continue to have an incredible acting career.

13:10But after that, moving into entrepreneurship and the stuff you're doing now to spotlight other female entrepreneurs. Can you walk me through opening a salon in Detroit? Entrepreneurship came when I decided that I didn't need to always focus on work. I really wanted to focus on life. And I wanted to follow some curiosity that didn't have to do with my day job. And so when a lot of people were using hiatus to go take meetings and go audition, I was like going to nerdy conferences. I was going to UN Nexus. I was, you know, traveling around the world meeting with climate change scientists and amazing social justice leaders.

13:50And it was at a conference the year that I was 27, I think, that I met my best friend Nia. She cracked a joke about why the girl from TV was taking notes like a court reporter. And I was like, oh, I went to journalism school. My notes are very good. Do you need a copy? As you should. We've been best friends ever since. We started doing a lot of entertainment industry adjacent, large philanthropic programs and projects together. And one of the things that drove us crazy is that we felt like we could do anything. And if we were going to go to an award show together or we were going to go to, you know, some big event together, we couldn't get our hair done together because Nia's a black woman and I'm a white woman.

14:35And we were looking around going, you know, it's the future. Like Barack Obama's the president and a black girl and a white girl can't get their hair done together. And when you look at the history of, you know, racism and discrimination in the beauty industry, we just thought, well, we should do something about this. And we came up with this business plan and we had this thesis around an inclusive salon we wanted to build and how the employees would be incredibly diverse and they would go through six weeks more of training. And we could ensure that any person could come in for any service in our salon and be treated in a way that would make them feel beautiful.

15:19And so we launched it in Detroit in this incredible post-city bankruptcy flourishing moment where JP Morgan was coming in and investing. And at the end of 2019, we put our plan together to go out and do a raise and go national and like actually take this out there. And then COVID hit. And we had to make the really hard decision to sunset the business. for fiscal reasons. It was this moment that was so hard for us, but we knew it was the right thing to do. And it's part of why she and I, in all of our financial work and all of our philanthropic work, really want to reframe for people that so many of the things we look at as failure aren't.

16:00We knew what was coming. And it enabled us to kind of gather ranks in the great groups of women and men that we love, that we know. And it led to us being appointed as strategic advisors at the First Women's Bank. It led to the launching of the First Women's Bank. It put us in this space to really look at how we could shift financial resources for people. One of the things that we realized, most women don't know a lot about venture. A lot of women don't work in venture. It's part of the reason we do, because we know if we're going to change who gets the allocation, We have to change the allocators as well.

16:36So many women also don't know. They've never been taught how to write a business plan. They don't know about different options for financing. So when people come to us, sometimes with interest in the venture fund, we will say, you don't want, at this stage, you actually don't want venture investing. You should go traditional. Let us introduce you to the First Women's Bank. And there are some people who come to the First Women's Bank, and we have such an incredible staff there. who will look at your application and not just say no if it's not right. They'll say, here's why you wouldn't get approved for a small business loan.

17:14Come back with this. Here's a resource for you because nobody tells us this stuff. Nobody told me. Like, I was 21 and on a TV show and nobody was talking to me about money. I will never forget the first time I got a check thinking I knew how much it was going to be for. and like I thought I was getting a dollar and my check was 20 cents and I was like wait what where did all that money go I didn't know anything about what it would really look like the commission structure and the fees and the things and the taxes and all of it and so when I think back to it I don't think it's an accident that Nia and I are here that you you gals and I are here that we're talking about this and making sure other people know even what questions to ask or where to go to ask them.

18:03You started angel investing also early on in your career with her. Walk me through for other people who might be in entertainment or an actress, how do you pivot and start to do and diversify kind of your business income? I think we have a lot more access, even just to information now. At the time, I got into angel investing because I was going to really nerdy conferences. I was in rooms with people that were starting companies that at the time a lot of financial institutions didn't think would work, but they became Warby Parker. They became Uber. They became Instacart. I was going to say you and Angel invested in Uber.

18:44I did. How did that happen? I knew the guys building it. And literally, as luck would have it when I said like well you're all you all get to invest in this thing like why do y 'all hit us up for checks for your non-profit galas but like when do we get to write checks into the company and they literally carved out a ten thousand dollar allocation for me like it wasn't even that's a lot of money but when you think about investing it's not like the money you hear about people raising funds or like putting crazy money in or the money that you know someone like an Ashton Kutcher, who was making six figures an episode on TV, could put into something in that era.

19:23Like, I wasn't making money like that. That was the one investment I did that year. It was a lot of money to me, but it was hugely successful. How much money did you make on that? I invested in the B round, so I did well. But like, again, not enough money to change my life. Yeah. But enough money to make an impact in a moment of my life, certainly. Would you suggest angel investing to people who have like 10K set aside? Absolutely. And I think what's really exciting now is you have organizations like AngelList. You have syndicates being built in certain cities. You can get in on the ground. I really think that you should make sure you are investing in the S &P, certainly.

20:07Like, just be smart. Also, buy yourself some bonds. But look into these angel networks and start to get into them. I mean, you know, normally to buy into a sports team is immensely cost prohibitive, especially for women. But because you had so many women who came into that ownership group who'd been angels, we knew what it meant to build an SPV. We knew what it meant to take allocations in a team and get us all in the door. because we don't have the money that someone who already owns the Patriots or the Celtics has. But we knew we deserved to be on the cap table. And it's something I'm really proud of having been a part of with Julie Ehrman and Carrie Fleishauer.

20:49I mean, we spent so many years working so hard to bring that to fruition. And, you know, prior to the Liberty valuation this year, we had the highest valuation of any women's sports team in the world. And that was pretty major. Walk me through what do you think are some of the best decisions you made early on to set yourself up for financial success? So asking questions was really important to me because when I was in this early conference space, we were showing up to these things, paying a lot of money out of pocket, wanting to be in rooms with people working to change the world. And they were philanthropists and they were activists and they were scientists and some of them were entrepreneurs.

21:33yours. And I am an incredibly curious person. So I'd be like, well, what do you mean? What do you mean the deal looks like this? What's the deal structure? So learning about what was emerging, what was developing, and the questions people were asking was big. Because then when I started picking people's brains about how they invested, who was getting into rounds, how they were doing it, the first time I heard somebody talk about sweat equity, I was like, wait, that's an option? like you don't have to take a check you can take equity in the company to work for the company oh i want to restructure my my investment here oh i want to figure this out and now you know when someone asks for introductions into a world or they want me to walk them into a space i say well are you asking for these introductions because you want me to be in an advisory role in your company and what does your advisory board look like and what kind of equity are we talking about you know let me understand how much work you're expecting me to do up front I didn't always do that in the past but I learned that I helped some people raise a lot of money for a company because I thought the company was cool and then I found out that a guy friend of mine who was doing the same took three percent of every one of those investments so he made money on all the money he raised and I did it for free and I went oh I'm not doing that anymore but I also think one of the greatest pieces of advice I was ever given by a friend of mine who built every major tech platform that we know of.

23:03He said, you will be told by certain people that your job, that your Hollywood career is a bonus. A lot of people in these rooms are going to ding you for it. They're going to think you think you're hot shit. So prove that you can create value before you ask for value. and I was like oh okay and I liked the challenge of that as well because I did a lot of work without asking for anything other than advice until I had built relationships that people knew they could trust and then it was like I've paid my dues I've done my time now I want to be invited to the table.

23:53You were early on a lot of big trends and emerging industries. What are trends that make you excited now that you're an investor? In 2019, Nia and I were the keynote speakers at the Forbes 30 Under 30 Conference in Detroit. Great fit. We got to bring people through the salon. We threw some great parties. It was like, it was awesome. And her dad came to see us talk and was the person who sat us down and said, you girls keep talking about yourselves as angel investors. You are investors. You are strategists. You build media. You build media strategy. You are not valuing yourselves at the level you should be.

24:29And we were kind of like, OK, dad. You know, Derek jokes that he has a bonus daughter and a daughter. I didn't grow up in a family with any kind of financial knowledge. Like, my dad's an artist. You know, he's a crew. He's wonderful and built a beautiful career for himself. But, like, he's a crew guy. Anyway, so I don't think I understood what he was saying at the time. And I think she had no desire to go into the family business, you know. And so through developing our work with the bank and then asking Nia's dad for a lot of advice, he was like, are you listening yet? Can you talk about your focus in femtech particularly?

25:05When you look at crises, any kind of crises, by the way, war, it could be an environmental disaster, a climate catastrophe, women and girls suffer first. And so when I think back to when Nia and I met and we were working on building primary schools around the world to ensure that little girls got educated. Yes, the little boys were going too. But when girls get educated, the world changes. When girls get educated, they have children later. they have children more safely they have fewer children it's it quite literally changes their lives they have more access to jobs and to health care um and that's also true you know not just in developing regions in the world but that's true everywhere and when you see you know if we think about our present moment rollbacks to our rights rollbacks to our health care access women are being killed.

26:02Just yesterday, Time magazine published an article about how none of us are shocked. We're paying attention to politics, but how abortion bans actually increase domestic violence, increase the deaths of women. So we have to get really clear about the fact that if we want to build a healthy society, if we want women to be able to plan their families should they want them, if we want them to survive for the children they already have, they have to have access to health care and they have to have access to abortion. I also think one of the great learnings for me in showing up for especially young women's education was learning about the drop-off numbers once women got their periods.

26:46There is so much period poverty around the world, and there is so much period poverty here in America in our own backyards. I remember the last time I did a period poverty campaign, there were 134 ,000 girls in New York City who missed school because they didn't have access to period products. It's just not acceptable. And so when you think about how all of that activism from our rights to our health care to what you've got in the bathroom has informed our adult lives for Nia and myself, we were so excited to invest in all sorts of femtech, but in AntFlow in particular. You know, our founder, Claire Coder, is amazing.

27:26She had a typical experience we've all had, got her period early, was at a collegiate event and went into the bathroom and was like, what the fuck? Like, we tap with our phones now. Who has a quarter? Where do you even get a quarter? What even is this rust-covered machine? And like, why do I have to pay for this? Toilet paper is free. Paper towels are free. Why aren't pads and tampons free? It just simply shouldn't happen. And so she set out on a mission to change it. She created an incredible, non-toxic, easy, easy to access both tampon and machine. The machines are free. And she's gone out and advocated.

28:09You know, she's helped get the laws changed in red states like Utah. For us, we're just like, yeah, we want to help you do that. Through your career, you've talked about doing good and doing well don't need to be mutually exclusive. What advice would you give for people who want to make profit while also really pursuing their purpose? I think we're at a really important moment to talk about this. Not only do we need to be talking particularly to women about money and not gatekeeping information and not acting like it's, you know, inappropriate, but I also think we have to start having saner conversations about money and success.

28:45Like when we look at what's going on with, you know, attempts at an oligarchy being built in our country and like people who could solve world hunger doing like a vanity space race instead, like what are we doing? Part of the reason I think it's important to talk about is because it's those people who've done this really crazy binary of like you're either going to be a broke philanthropist who's trying to make the world a better place or you're going to be like an evil rich scrooge mcduck and i don't think that has to be it i think you can do well and do good i think you should absolutely start investing young and i think by the age of 25 you should think about what you want your philanthropic participation in the world to look like and you should reanalyze it every five years and if that means you're giving three dollars a month while you're in college to an organization or you figure out by the time you're 30 how to take you know two and a half percent of your annual earnings and make sure they're going to charity like whatever it is think about it and think about the impact that you have think about the things that you invest in think about the things that you represent and know that you're never going to be perfect, but that you can be thoughtful.

30:06You know, how much money do you need to feel secure? Can you actually self-interrogate and analyze your relationship to it and maybe live a better life with a little less if you recalibrate your priorities? I do think that there is responsibility that, yeah, you should give back your money too. I love that we have so much access to information now. That's the great side of the internet. I think part of the problem with it is that it looks like everyone's doing better than you all the time. And most people aren't. And most people live paycheck to paycheck. And most people in this country are an unexpected$400 bill away from bankruptcy.