How Missy Capone Became the Angel on Women’s Sports’ Shoulder

When spending summers down the shore on New Jersey’s Barnegat Peninsula, one of the better ways to beat the traffic snarling boardwalk towns like Point Pleasant Beach and Seaside Heights is to take the Garden State Parkway’s Exit 89A to Route 70 east toward Brick Township and catch Mantoloking Road all the way across Barnegat Bay to the bungalow-dotted coastal drive along Route 35.

For decades—just off the road in Mantoloking Plaza among Dunkin’, sub shops, and Italian ice stands—Al Capone’s Restaurant and Pizzeria assured vacationers “We Bury the Competition With a Menu You Can’t Refuse.”

“The product of over a million pizzas,” Missy Capone grew up around her family’s shop in Mantoloking and was a born Jersey Shore swimmer—keeping herself and others both literally and figuratively afloat. A lifeguard in Belmar just up Route 35, Capone would race in ocean life-saving competitions and became a strong enough swimmer to turn it into a four-year varsity swimming career at Lehigh University.

“I wasn’t even supposed to go to college,” Capone said. “We were so working-class, but I could swim, so sports changed my whole life.”

Graduating with a degree in supply chain management and marketing, Capone initially took a marketing position with a health club chain in New Jersey before making her presence known at a Nike store in Honolulu during a vacation trip and eventually taking a job there. For 17 years, Capone worked her way from a retail marketing position to marketing manager for the Hurley brand, regional brand manager for Australia and New Zealand, and brand manager for Nike’s soccer division at its headquarters near Beaverton, Oregon.

Capone finished her Nike career with a nearly five-year stint as the company’s global brand director for footwear. When she left, she set out to invest in people improving the world around her—knowing that return on investment may not necessarily be financial.

Much as sports changed her life, Capone is hoping that her funding of the women’s sports-focused sports bar franchise The Sports Bra, the International Women’s Sports Film Festival (IWSFF), athletic health data platform Femmi, equity-based sports apparel brand Goal Five, and inclusive gaming studio Wicked Saints can help others fulfill their purpose.

“It’s been a wild transition out of Nike because I thought I would work there forever…they made all of my dreams come true,” Capone said.

She traces her big swings to a feeling she’s carried since leaving Jersey: “I’m like, ‘Well, I’m surely gonna get found out and have to be sent home, so I’ll just take this on and this on.’”

Send me an angel

While still with Nike, Capone received her first experience as both an investor and founder when friends from the company asked for help pitching their startup idea to venture capitalist and former Nike exec Mel Strong. Known as Merify, the proposed employee hiring and retention platform focused on skills over job title and tenure.

Strong liked the idea, and Capone left Nike and joined Merify as a co-founder—leading the team’s pitching and fundraising.

I was like, ‘Look, I love what I’m doing, but like, you’re gonna change the whole world… will you take my tuppence, and can I just be on this ride with you?’

Missy Capone, angel investor and founder, Capone Cousins

At a conference to meet with investors for Merify, she saw Jessica Murrey of Medford, Oregon—who had previously worked in conflict resolution through digital and social media for global nonprofit Search for Common Ground—pitch her Wicked Saints Studios and its games built around inclusion and global activism. Capone’s mission shifted almost instantaneously.

“I was like, ‘Look, I love what I’m doing, but like, you’re gonna change the whole world… will you take my tuppence, and can I just be on this ride with you? I want to learn from you,’” Capone said. “When I made that investment, I didn’t consider myself an investor: I just knew she needed money to keep doing what she was doing, and I wanted to be a part of it.”

Wicked Saints is now going into its initial Series A venture capital fundraising round, while Capone has since amassed a portfolio of similar investments. When Strong couldn’t make it to an investor presentation from Sports Bra founder Jenny Nguyen, Capone agreed to fill in based on the involvement of former Nike director Kate Delhagen—who served as The Sports Bra’s business advisor for three years.

Capone decided to invest in The Sports Bra. While Capone saw room for improvement in the pitch, it struck a tone that resonated immediately.

“I heard enough about creating spaces for people to gather and connect in person over women’s sports and feel safe,” Capone said. “That’s all I needed to hear.”

Not only did Capone’s investment join other “Backing the Bra” supporters, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and his Seven Seven Six venture capital firm, but last year it led Nguyen and Portland QDoc Film Festival co-owner, co-executive director, and co-programmer Molly King to ask Capone to consider helping out with a new film festival in Portland based around women’s sports. Capone said yes, and this May she served as the IWSFF’s executive director and shared tennis star Rosie Casals, sports media figure Coach Jackie J, and 16 films featuring women in sports with Portland audiences.

Though not the exclusive focus of Capone’s investments, women’s sports have become increasingly entwined with them. Capone was drawn to not only Femmi’s data-driven app, but its mission to build athletic training, coaching, and education around women’s bodies and cycles. Goal Five’s women’s athletic apparel is built around the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 5: Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

Even an investment in biotechnology firm Kapha Bio is tied to Capone’s desire to work with its co-founder Sue Levin, who led the commercial side of biofabrics firm and Patagonia partner Bolt Threads when Capone interviewed there but didn’t get the position.

“It was so cool to be able to bring another way for people to connect in person and learn about other dimensions of women’s sport [at IWSFF], but also protect this investment that I made,” Capone said. “But I could say something like this for every single one of my investments now because it’s really neat… they’re all seemingly unconnected, but like now they’re all connecting.”

What’s at stake

Each time Capone invests in a new person or business she said she views it as an opportunity to learn about that person or the company’s industry.

While she recognizes that such investments may look risky or unwise from afar, she notes that, for her, they carry the same risk as using those resources to go back to business school and earn an MBA. Capone doesn’t view herself as a linear thinker and gets frustrated in academic environments learning from an expert. However, if she’s learning from someone with slightly more experience or a peer who’s figuring out the subject with her, she’s far more comfortable.

Roughly a year after she began her angel investments, Capone opened her Capone Cousins production studio and consultancy focusing on helping companies with strategy and counterculture and boosting underrepresented artists. The firm represents Portland-based singer-songwriter, drag performer, party producer, and performance artist Atlas and has produced the documentary Seraphim about Capone’s friend, the late Portland artist and queer activist Eric Marcoux.

When the Portland Cherry Bombs of the USL W League began their first season in the city this summer, Capone not only hosted player Kgotlelelo Malefo, but is providing support as she embarks on a professional career.

It’s a hands-on approach to humanity that Capone traces back to the pizza shop in Mantoloking, where her father made pies, her mom worked in the back, her aunts worked the front of the restaurant, her grandfather delivered pizza, and she and her grandmother looked after the rest of the kids. In that intergenerational environment, she learned to connect with people at every age and uses those lessons to listen to her friends in Portland over 65 talk about their lives in art, education, and business and to be on her game when she flies back to Jersey to see her family’s gaggle of kids under 9 who don’t want to be yelled at.

“I think that’s why with a lot of my investments, every single one of them, there is a bit of a through line around still connecting within a community in person because we’re becoming so detached,” said Capone, who fears technology may be diminishing human capacity to solve problems in person through diverse perspectives. “It’s really fun to ask the same question to my 9-year-old brilliant nephew as I asked to Carol, my 72-year-old OWL—my old wise lesbian—because the answers are different, but also there’s like a through line.”

Those formative family experiences have also made Capone particularly adept at navigating loss. Capone noted that she recently lost six people within a year, helping her mom, uncle, and best friend access their Medicare and Medicaid benefits and facing the versions of herself that regularly screamed at people over the phone.

A friend observed that Capone was basically a death doula after all of her experience helping family and friends get their affairs in order, so she found a program in Asheville, North Carolina, and secured her death doula certification. Capone not only had a better grasp of her own mortality after a four-month apprenticeship, but felt she had become the “joy death girl” through how positively she was helping others deal with both death and loss.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I just know that in this next chapter, I want to be as values-aligned as possible.

Missy Capone, angel investor and founder, Capone Cousins

While she’s performed death doula services for friends of friends—and entertains notions of starting an Omega House end-of-life space of her own—she views the task similarly to her angel investment and consulting/production work. If the values built in that pizza shop along Mantoloking Road and on the beaches beside Route 35 can float someone for a while or teach them to swim, that’s the ideal return on investment.

“I wasn’t doing this to become an investor, I was doing this because I wanted to put that capital towards people that are working on things that I really care about: gender expression, women’s sports, women’s health, peace building,” Capone said. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I just know that in this next chapter, I want to be as values-aligned as possible.”