my week summarized by the best content i consumed (in no particular order)
“The portion of the beauty industry that caters to Black women generates about $4 billion in sales a year. Much of those sales are rung up in small beauty supply stores, which are ubiquitous in predominantly Black neighborhoods. The stores seem like a natural answer to the numerous calls from policymakers and corporate America to create more Black-owned businesses after protests over systemic racism broke out this spring.
Yet fewer than 10 percent are owned by Black women, said Tiffany Gill, a history professor at Rutgers University. Instead, many of them are owned by Korean immigrants. Korean Americans also lead some of the largest wholesale distributors that import the hair products from China.”
2. Transitions
“I feel unsure about how others will react. In venture, doubt isn’t respected. I am confident some, especially in VC, will inevitably view my story as a lack of grit. Would their perception of me be better if, instead of helping CircleUp pivot and leaving three years later, the company had failed in 2017? Maybe my experience means some VCs will not fund me again. Maybe it means I now have more empathy for entrepreneurs. Could I have stuck it out if not for the personal issues? I think so, but I can’t know the answer to that any more than I can know how people will react to this account. My only hope is that it might help other founders feel less alone.”
3. Curators Are the New Creators
“In my view, however, the business of influencer bundling has only just begun. Curators are the new creators, and as consumers, we’re going to be willing to pay someone with good taste to help us sort through the ever-growing mass of information at our fingertips.”
“So as I said at top, the changing dynamics of work are emblematic of the larger trend: the commodification of non-market areas of life. When the mixed market and non-market transactions (like buying bread from a local grocery) become pushed further and further towards being purely market transactions, we gain new efficiency and productivity but we do risk losing something.”
5. Community leaders deserve better: An open letter about community software
“Our belief is that every niche will form a community around topics of shared passions and learning; during COVID, there is a greater need than ever before for online spaces that facilitate those communities. Yet while the appetite for online communities grows, the accompanying management toolkit still largely misses the mark. At the end of the day, a community platform should have a feature set that accomplishes two key goals: (1) to make the community leader’s life easier, and (2) to improve member experience.”
“As we talk about Bon Appétit, El-Waylly’s mood darkens. She’s still processing what happened, because it raised existential questions of value — who deserves what and how much. Sometimes she wishes she had never taken the job. “This stuff really gets in your soul,” she says. “My husband, he’s half Bolivian and half Egyptian, and we’ve been talking about how we’ve internalized these things. That we really think we are worthless, so you don’t want to ask for more.””
