Gigi Brett grew up in the African bush wanting to one day be a female Tarzan or the head of the United Nations. She ended up somewhere in between, as a founder turned investor who spent her early career studying conflict resolution, shadowing mediators, and quietly developing a thesis that the most important thing you can do in any relationship, any company, any room, is lead with honesty and a little love.
As head of investments at EWOR, Gigi spends her days backing founders on business fundamentals and the full human complexity of what it means to build something with other people. Here are three things we learned from sitting down with her.
Yes, TAM matters. Yes, unit economics matter. But at EWOR, the primary lens is the founder. Specifically, is this someone who can build an intergenerational company? Do they have the grit to stay in the arena long enough to give themselves a real shot?
Gigi's definition of EQ in this context isn't the soft, surface-level version. It's resilience, self-knowledge, the ability to push past limits while knowing exactly where those limits are. She's looking for the people who get a hundred no's and still come back for the hundred and first; relentless in a way that's rooted in something real.
What she loves most about the investor seat is that these are the kind of people who light her up. Weird, wonderful, deeply passionate, doing things in totally unconventional ways with one consistent through line: They refuse to take no for a final answer.
Cofounder relationships, like marriage, all face conflict. Conflict is inevitable and can be healthy. The mistake is not doing the hard alignment work upfront — figuring out whether you both want the same exit, hold the same values, and are willing to put in the same level of work before you're too far in to course correct. Resentment quietly destroys companies when one co-founder is doing 75% of the work and the other 25%, with equal equity and no framework for addressing it.
Gigi's mantra is to disagree and commit. Whoever has authority and responsibility over a decision gets to make it. The other person can push back all they want, but once it's decided, you commit. No "I told you so." And alongside that: regular check-ins, clear ownership structures, and overall scaffolding of good communication is important.
Gigi described a moment in one of her companies where she had to let go of a significant portion of her team and keep the rest moving through what she called touch-and-go circumstances. Her instinct, like most leaders, was to protect people from the reality of the situation, keep it close, and not let them see how bad it was.
She did the harder thing instead by telling the truth. Gigi directly informed her team that the next six months were going to be inevitably hard, that it was going to require a lot from everyone, and that she believed they would get through it together. What happened next? People stepped up fully without hesitation. The dynamic shifted the moment she stopped trying to manage their exposure to the reality they were already living in to truly being transparent.
She's carried that forward as a core belief: Leading with authentic vulnerability isn't a liability. It earns trust. People can feel when you're withholding. And when you give them the truth, even the hard truth, they almost always rise to meet it.
Gigi's hope for the future of work? Humans. She sees the existential fear around AI and understands it. The pace of change is genuinely disorienting. But her faith in the human ability to figure it out is, as she put it, is unwavering.
Jill and I hope listeners walk away from this one a little more willing to bet on humans as a whole and also to say the hard thing: to a co-founder, a teammate, a friend, or to themselves.
Listen to the full episode of Work Made Human to hear more from Gigi Brett — including why she almost went into conflict resolution professionally, what "disagree and commit" looks like in practice, and why she thinks love might just be the most underrated leadership strategy there is.