Introduction
Chenelle Ansah quit a job in investment banking after six months with no backup plan, no interviews lined up, and a family who did not understand why she would walk away from stability. She left the building, leapt into the air, and felt free. Everyone around her called it insane. She has done it several times since, each time trading a role that looked impressive from the outside for one that actually fit who she was. Her story is not a straight line from fashion school to founder. It runs through a father's ultimatum, a trading floor she had to be catcalled through every morning, a cold email campaign that got her into consulting, and a burnout so complete she once described herself as twenty percent of who she used to be. What survived all of it is a clear idea of what leadership actually means, and how much it costs to hold onto who you are while building something that matters.
A childhood that was fearless, until it had to be useful
Ansah describes herself as a young child who would run into the living room, uninvited, to perform a dance routine for her parents' guests without a flicker of fear. She wanted to be a fashion designer and had sketchbooks full of designs, some of which her mother kept without her knowing. That changed at eighteen or nineteen when her father sat her down and told her the "creative fun thing" phase was over. It was time to become an accountant, a stable career that would give her a future he could trust. She switched out of the London College of Fashion and into a business and accounting degree at Brunel University, and, notably, she was not devastated by it. She says she never resented the pivot because she went on to genuinely enjoy the study of how businesses are built, even if the accounting itself never grabbed her.
The trading floor that taught her about her own risk tolerance
A university sandwich course placed her in an investment bank around 2010, in the aftermath of the last recession. She was offered a full-time role before she had even graduated. The realisation that the job was not what she thought came fast. She was one of three women on a trading floor of hundreds, and the only black woman. Getting to her desk meant walking through the floor while being catcalled and whistled at, every single day. She stuck it out for six months before quitting, again with no job lined up. Looking back, she separates two things that got tangled together at the time: she thought she hated the job, but what she actually hated was an environment that made the job unbearable. She names a coping pattern she sees in many people of colour in similar spaces, a kind of rose-tinted numbing that lets you get through a day you would otherwise spend furious. That six months, she says, is where she first understood her own appetite for risk and her unwillingness to stay somewhere that did not work for her, even with almost no experience to fall back on.
Cold emails, red hair, and getting in without conforming
Rather than apply through conventional channels for a role in management consulting, without a background from a top university, Ansah tracked down the owners and CEOs of consulting firms and wrote to them directly, telling them plainly that they would love working with her. The founder of State of Flux, the first firm to respond, called her approach "ballsy" and met her on the strength of that alone. She turned up to the interview with red hair, describing herself as "full Hackney," and made a deliberate choice that would define the rest of her career: she was not going to conform to fit the room. That authenticity, she says, is what got her through the door in the first place, so she saw no reason to abandon it once she was inside.
Recognising boredom and leaving anyway
State of Flux ran like a startup with global reach, and Ansah thrived leading international development projects. When she stopped learning, she moved to Grant Thornton, a much bigger consulting house, expecting a new challenge. Instead she found ten people doing the job she had done alone at State of Flux. The mismatch between startup pace and corporate scale, combined with the timing of the UK's Black Lives Matter movement and a growing sense of not being challenged, pushed her to leave and start her own consultancy with no client pipeline and no detailed plan. Her first clients turned out to be the founders building Tandem Bank, at the exact moment the UK's neobank wave was taking off alongside Monzo and Starling. Being early and visible in a tight-knit niche meant referrals followed naturally.
From consulting to investing, driven by who wasn't in the room
Ansah's move into venture investing was not a career strategy. She noticed she was consistently the only person who looked like her in rooms full of founders building banks, and started deliberately bringing other women into meetings with her to normalise their presence. Eventually she set an explicit intention to work with more black and brown founders and put it out into the world without a concrete plan for how. Months later, Cornerstone Partners reached out. She joined with no formal investing background, telling them plainly she knew how to build and run organisations, not how to invest. Two or three months in, the firm asked her to lead it while others focused on raising its VC fund. She calls it a baptism, and says it was exactly that.
The cost of being the organisation with all the answers
Cornerstone Partners became the first UK investment firm focused on backing black and diverse founders. Then the pandemic hit while the firm was twenty-eight people strong, and shortly after, George Floyd's death put every organisation like Cornerstone under sudden, intense scrutiny. Corporates and press wanted answers Ansah did not have, on behalf of a community that is not monolithic. She was navigating her own team's personal crises, including deaths among colleagues' families, while being expected to represent a fix for a systemic problem. By the end of 2021, she says plainly, she was broken. She estimates she was operating at twenty percent of herself. She booked a ten-day holiday to Barbados and did not return for six months, because that was how long it took to feel whole again. She knew she had recovered when her outlook on people and the world turned positive again, and the things that had been consuming her stopped having the same grip.
What she is building toward now
Ansah continues to run Cornerstone Partners, but she is also deliberately early in a new area: climate and sustainability investing. She is candid that she is not yet an expert, and treats that openness as part of the work rather than something to hide. Her stated mission is to "bridge the gap," providing access to capital and space for founders who are otherwise overlooked, whether that gap is racial or environmental. She manages the scale of that ambition by refusing to dwell on the size of the goal day to day. Instead she focuses on small, repeatable actions and trusts that the compounding effect will be visible only in hindsight, in years rather than days.
Leadership as something you can leave behind
Asked to define leadership, Ansah does not describe authority or decision rights. She describes the ability to tap into people's potential so thoroughly that they keep showing up and doing great work even after the leader has stepped away. The measure of good leadership, in her framing, is what continues to function in your absence, not what depends on your presence.
