Black Entrepreneurs Quotes

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.

I've been lucky enough now in my life to meet all sorts of extraordinary and accomplished people - world leaders, inventors, musicians, astronauts, athletes, professors, entrepreneurs, artists and writers, pioneering doctors and researchers. Some (though not enough) of them are women. Some (though not enough) are black or of color. Some were born poor or have lives that to many of us would appear to have been unfairly heaped with adversity, and yet still they seem to operate as if they've had every advantage in the world. What I've learned is this: All of them have had doubters. Some continue to have roaring, stadium-sized collection of critics and naysayers who will shout I told you so at every little misstep or mistake. The noise doesn't go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.

We’ve all been in positions where we felt out of place or not accepted for whatever reason. For me, that’s been my life. I’ve always been that person that stood out. And what makes you an outcast is what makes you unique, and you should harness that. Being a black sheep gives you creative license to do sh*t differently.

If you sincerely want to be successful in life, all you need is one person to believe in you, and that one person should be YOU. As long as you genuinely believe in yourself, you can and will be a success. Your mindset is a powerful force! What you think and how you think will be the ultimate factor of your journey’s end.

But crime bills have never correlated to crime any more than fear has correlated to actual violence. We are not meant to fear suits with policies that kill. We are not meant to fear good White males with AR-15s. No, we are to fear the weary, unarmed Latinx body from Latin America. The Arab body kneeling to Allah is to be feared. The Black body from hell is to be feared. Adept politicians and crime entrepreneurs manufacture the fear and stand before voters to deliver them—messiahs who will liberate them from fear of these other bodies.

Instead of working to break down the walls of segregation and the poverty trap they had created, the ghetto would be sent entrepreneurs.

Busy Building FUND$ While Y’all Have FUN.

The story of the hunt only favors the hunter, until the lion tells the truth!

You won’t accomplish or reach your greatest potential in life if your main focus is on what other people think of you. No matter how great you are, some people will form their own negative opinions of you. Don’t give your haters your time or energy! People that are negative, jealous, and envious of you aren’t worth your future. Go after your dreams with purpose and unwavering belief!

when the Vietnamese came to the United States they often faced prejudice from everyone—White, Black, and Hispanics. But they didn’t beg for handouts and often took the lowest jobs offered. Even well-educated individuals didn’t mind sweeping floors if it was a paying job. Today many of these same Vietnamese are property owners and entrepreneurs. That’s the message I try to get across to the young people. The same opportunities are there, but we can’t start out as vice president of the company. Even if we landed such a position, it wouldn’t do us any good anyway because we wouldn’t know how to do our work. It’s better to start where we can fit in and then work our way up.

For black Americans…the more the federal government provides so-called “free” services and hand-outs paid for by taxpayers, the more blacks are incentivized to be dependent on the government. With this system, fewer blacks are likely to get an education, work hard for their families, and become entrepreneurs, professionals, and business leaders. With this system, fewer blacks will stand with pride and dignity. Again, look at our inner cities. Do you like what you see?26

They wanna know what team I’m on… TEAM SUCCEEDING.

Coz Black...is Beautiful!

Being intentional about the way you begin each day sets the tone for how you will perform, perceive, and respond to your experiences for the remainder of the day.

The “reform” movement is really a “corporate reform” movement, funded to a large degree by the major foundations, Wall Street hedge managers, entrepreneurs, and the U.S. Department of Education.

Success requires planning, structure, and consistency. If you step out into the world armed with only a vision, enthusiasm, and good vibes—you will encounter every challenge imaginable on the way to attain it.

In advanced societies it is not the race politicians or the "rights" leaders who create the new ideas and the new images of life and man. That role belongs to the artists and intellectuals of each generation. Let the race politicians, if they will, create political, economic or organizational forms of leadership; but it is the artists and the creative minds who will, and must, furnish the all important content. And in this role, they must not be subordinated to the whims and desires of politicians, race leaders and civil rights entrepreneurs whether they come from the Left, Right, or Center, or whether they are peaceful, reform, violent, non-violent or laissez-faire. Which means to say, in advanced societies the cultural front is a special one that requires special techniques not perceived, understood, or appreciated by political philistines.

Its going to be a rocky relationship you are going to have with your business, don’t marry it if you don’t love it! Its going to be rough sometimes, but navigating through the lows allows you to create something beautiful!

Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations. Where mob violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens periodically, the return of forced labor as a fixture in black life ground pervasively into the daily lives of far more African Americans.

I had this whole world of creativity inside of me, but I wasn’t able to use any of it. I felt like I was almost choking on my own creativity because I had to be in a suit and tie and very formal. Everything was black and white, and I needed some color in my life.

People will doubt you, money will come and go, and the unexpected will happen. Still, your commitment to the manifestation of your vision must remain intact because you exist for a specific reason. Your voice and your purpose matter—we need you to live as boldly as possible!

The strength of the computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs was precisely in distrusting market research and focus groups— those based on asking people what they want—and following his own imagination. His modus was that people don’t know what they want until you provide them with it.

Black female entrepreneurs don’t make excuses, we find solutions. We’re leaders, resourceful, ambitious, hardworking, and creative. We’re powerful, unstoppable, confident, smart, and fearless. We’re Exquisite Black Queens that represent Black Excellence… We are success! There’s no denying it… Black female entrepreneurs are resilient and we rock!

People buy products that say something about themselves. Paying twice the price for Bulletproof Coffee versus the competitors says that the person is a high performer. On the other hand, drinking Black Rifle Coffee, which we mentioned earlier, says you shoot guns, or that you don’t care about the opinions of other people. The product (coffee) is almost exactly the same, but the person is completely different.

Never stop pushing for what you want! If something is truly important to you, stay diligent and find a way. Depending on whom you ask, the answer may be different. Never settle for the first answer! Do your own research, ask different people, go above other people’s head if you have to. Sometimes it’s necessary to push the envelope. Some people will purposely give you the wrong answer to try to stop you and/or hold you back. This, unfortunately, is a reality. Some people’s intentions are all wrong. Be mindful that not everyone will have your best interest at heart.

These cultural generalizations, perhaps correctly, reduce the history of immigration to a binary. When immigrants come into this country, whether they join the labor force, like the Irish, Mexicans, and Central Americans, or they become small-time entrepreneurs, oftentimes in Black neighborhoods. Regardless of their choice, their economic asesion will depend on their relationship with Black Americans. If you accept this analysis, Black people are the only race in America. Everyone else is either white or on their way to becoming white. The new Asians, much like the Jews and the Irish before them, will one day be white, and their dream of generic Americanness will be achieved.

When I started my marketing company, I fell into the same trap most entrepreneurs do in the early stages of their business. Desperate for sales I created page after page on my website, offering everything and anything from logo design and email marketing to Google AdWords and SEO. It was only when I stripped all of this noise away and focused almost exclusively on Google AdWords and PPC marketing that things started to happen for me. It was easier to rank my website on Google because the whole website was optimised around specific niche keywords. It was easier to close customers, because they wanted professional PPC services and I could demonstrate with little effort that I was a PPC specialist. In most cases I didn't even need to demonstrate this point because 5 seconds spent on my website would tell the client that my whole business was Google AdWords PPC. By making it look like the only thing I specialised in was PPC consultancy, I cornered the market in every channel my services were advertised.   But

overcome. Seth Godin calls these inevitable obstacles The Dip. In his brilliant little book of the same name, he describes the intricacies of knowing when to quit and when to stick—and why it’s so important to learn how to do this effectively. Seth gives a pertinent example of the entrepreneur-wannabe: Do you know an entrepreneur-wannabe who is on his sixth or twelfth new project? He jumps from one to another, and every time he hits an obstacle, he switches to a new, easier, better opportunity. And while he’s a seeker, he’s never going to get anywhere. He never gets anywhere because he’s always switching lines, never able to really run for it. While starting up is thrilling, it’s not until you get through the Dip that your efforts pay off. Countless entrepreneurs have perfected the starting part, but give up long before they finish paying their dues. The sad news is that when you start over, you get very little credit for how long you stood in line with your last great venture.[31] Quitting isn’t always bad, but it needs to be done for the right reasons, and never for the wrong ones. It’s never black and white, but it always comes back to passion. Read The Dip. It will help.

Ohio hadn’t gone through the same real estate boom as the Sun Belt, but the vultures had circled the carcasses of dying industrial towns––Dayton, Toledo, Mansfield, Youngstown, Akron––peddling home equity loans and refinancing. All the garbage that blew up in people’s faces the same way subprime mortgages had. A fleet of nouveau riche snake oil salesmen scoured the state, moving from minority hoods where widowed, churchgoing black ladies on fixed incomes made for easy marks to the white working-class enclaves and then the first-ring suburbs. The foreclosures began to crop up and then turn into fields of fast-moving weeds, reducing whole neighborhoods to abandoned husks or drug pens. Ameriquest, Countrywide, CitiFinancial––all those devious motherfuckers watching the state’s job losses, plant closings, its struggles, its heartache, and figuring out a way to make a buck on people’s desperation. Every city or town in the state had big gangrenous swaths that looked like New Canaan, the same cancer-patient-looking strip mall geography with brightly lit outposts hawking variations on usurious consumer credit. Those entrepreneurs saw the state breaking down like Bill’s truck, and they moved in, looking to sell the last working parts for scrap.

Bibb Steam Mill Company also introduced to the county the ruthless form of industrial slavery that would become so important as the Civil War loomed. The mill acquired twenty-seven male African Americans, nearly all strapping young men, and kept them packed into just six small barracks on its property. The Cottingham slave cabins would have seemed luxurious in contrast.51 The founders of Bibb Steam, entrepreneurs named William S. Philips, John W. Lopsky, Archibald P. McCurdy, and Virgil H. Gardner, invested a total of $24,000 to purchase 1,160 acres of timbered land and erect a steam-powered sawmill to cut lumber and grind corn and flour.52 In addition to the two dozen slaves, Bibb Steam most likely leased a larger number of slaves from nearby farms during its busiest periods of work. The significance of those evolutions wouldn’t have been lost on a slave such as Scipio. By the end of the 1850s, a vigorous practice of slave leasing was already a fixture of southern life. Farm production was by its nature an inefficient cycle of labor, with intense periods of work in the early spring planting season and then idleness during the months of “laid-by” time in the summer, and then another great burst of harvest activity in the fall and early winter, followed finally by more months of frigid inactivity. Slave owners were keen to maximize the return on their most valuable assets, and as new opportunities for renting out the labor of their slaves arose, the most clever of slave masters quickly responded.

Everywhere you look with this young lady, there’s a purity of motivation,” Shultz told him. “I mean she really is trying to make the world better, and this is her way of doing it.” Mattis went out of his way to praise her integrity. “She has probably one of the most mature and well-honed sense of ethics—personal ethics, managerial ethics, business ethics, medical ethics that I’ve ever heard articulated,” the retired general gushed. Parloff didn’t end up using those quotes in his article, but the ringing endorsements he heard in interview after interview from the luminaries on Theranos’s board gave him confidence that Elizabeth was the real deal. He also liked to think of himself as a pretty good judge of character. After all, he’d dealt with his share of dishonest people over the years, having worked in a prison during law school and later writing at length about such fraudsters as the carpet-cleaning entrepreneur Barry Minkow and the lawyer Marc Dreier, both of whom went to prison for masterminding Ponzi schemes. Sure, Elizabeth had a secretive streak when it came to discussing certain specifics about her company, but he found her for the most part to be genuine and sincere. Since his angle was no longer the patent case, he didn’t bother to reach out to the Fuiszes. — WHEN PARLOFF’S COVER STORY was published in the June 12, 2014, issue of Fortune, it vaulted Elizabeth to instant stardom. Her Journal interview had gotten some notice and there had also been a piece in Wired, but there was nothing like a magazine cover to grab people’s attention. Especially when that cover featured an attractive young woman wearing a black turtleneck, dark mascara around her piercing blue eyes, and bright red lipstick next to the catchy headline “THIS CEO IS OUT FOR BLOOD.” The story disclosed Theranos’s valuation for the first time as well as the fact that Elizabeth owned more than half of the company. There was also the now-familiar comparison to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. This time it came not from George Shultz but from her old Stanford professor Channing Robertson. (Had Parloff read Robertson’s testimony in the Fuisz trial, he would have learned that Theranos was paying him $500,000 a year, ostensibly as a consultant.) Parloff also included a passage about Elizabeth’s phobia of needles—a detail that would be repeated over and over in the ensuing flurry of coverage his story unleashed and become central to her myth. When the editors at Forbes saw the Fortune article, they immediately assigned reporters to confirm the company’s valuation and the size of Elizabeth’s ownership stake and ran a story about her in their next issue. Under the headline “Bloody Amazing,” the article pronounced her “the youngest woman to become a self-made billionaire.” Two months later, she graced one of the covers of the magazine’s annual Forbes 400 issue on the richest people in America. More fawning stories followed in USA Today, Inc., Fast Company, and Glamour, along with segments on NPR, Fox Business, CNBC, CNN, and CBS News. With the explosion of media coverage came invitations to numerous conferences and a cascade of accolades. Elizabeth became the youngest person to win the Horatio Alger Award. Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. President Obama appointed her a U.S. ambassador for global entrepreneurship, and Harvard Medical School invited her to join its prestigious board of fellows.

Put yourself in situations where you can catch a ride on a positive Black Swan. Become an artist, inventor or entrepreneur with a scale-able product. If you sell your time (e.g. as an employee, dentist or journalist), you are waiting in vain for such a break.

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves.

The irony of the revolution is that it sought to eradicate capitalism, entrepreneurship, but the revolution’s greatest legacy has been the rise of a new breed of Cuban entrepreneurs. The black market thrives.” “So where does Orwell in Cuba fit

Williams was a true entrepreneur and his entire family worked together to create significant wealth.

the immigrants who secure rights thanks to the anti-racist anti-colonial struggle might be securing the right to free capitalist enterprise, refusing to see, refusing to ‘open your eyes’, as the angry black yelled at the post-colonial immigrant. This right to free enterprise is another way to capital accumulation powered by the post-colonial entrepreneur: it produces ‘unfree labour’ and racialized class relations in the name of challenging the colonial rule of difference […] There is a closet Ayn Randian class position underpinning the anti-racism of hyperbolic anti-colonialists – it is then not difficult to see that the non-modern, radical alterity upon which the anti-colonial is premised now stands for the capitalist universal.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries, Crown Business, September 12, 2011 The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbably, Second Edition, by Nassim Nicolas Taleb, Random House, May 11, 2010 Footnotes 1 The Black Swan, Second Edition, by Nassim Nicolas Taleb, Random House, May 11, 2010

The failure of companies in a free market, then, is not a defect of the system, or an unfortunate by-product of competition; rather, it is an indispensable aspect of any evolutionary process. According to one economist, 10 percent of American companies go bankrupt every year.4 The economist Joseph Schumpeter called this “creative destruction.” Now, compare this with centrally planned economies, where there are almost no failures at all. Companies are protected from failure by subsidy. The state is protected from failure by the printing press, which can inflate its way out of trouble. At first, this may look like an enlightened way to go about solving the problems of economic production, distribution, and exchange. Nothing ever fails and, by implication, everything looks successful. But this is precisely why planned economies didn’t work. They were manned by intelligent planners who decided how much grain to produce, how much iron to mine, and who used complicated calculations to determine the optimal solutions. But they faced the same problem as the Unilever mathematicians: their ideas, however enlightened, were not tested rapidly enough—and so had little opportunity to be reformed in the light of failure. Even if the planners were ten times smarter than the businessmen operating in a market economy, they would still fall way behind. Without the benefit of a valid test, the system is plagued by rigidity. In markets, on the other hand, it is the thousands of little failures that lubricate and, in a sense, guide the system. When companies go under, other entrepreneurs learn from these mistakes, the system creates new ideas, and consumers ultimately benefit.

We found ourselves in a lovers’ arrangement common in cities, when you see each other after midnight, once a week or so, sometimes dinner if he felt up for a date. I wanted more, but he had just gotten free of a long relationship, and I’d never been in one. We dated other people. I gravitated to people who reminded me of him, quiet, reserved, people who moved with diligence and discipline in their art. Masculine, but soft. When I couldn’t bear our arrangement, I cut myself off. But I wanted to smell him. I traced his scent back to the source, the Brooklyn Bangladeshi-owned oil shop Madina on Atlantic Avenue, an institution. Named for one of the two holy cities in Islam, the word al-Madina simply means the city, and the shop’s visitors include Black and Muslim entrepreneurs, fragrance aficionados, folks who want to smell good for cheap, imams who sell the oils to the prison commissary, making perfumes available to inmates. I would purchase five-dollar roll-on bottles of oil to smell him in those periods we were off-again.

Black Swans being unpredictable, we need to adjust to their existence (rather than naïvely try to predict them). There are so many things we can do if we focus on antiknowledge, or what we do not know. Among many other benefits, you can set yourself up to collect serendipitous Black Swans (of the positive kind) by maximizing your exposure to them. Indeed, in some domains—such as scientific discovery and venture capital investments—there is a disproportionate payoff from the unknown, since you typically have little to lose and plenty to gain from a rare event. We will see that, contrary to social-science wisdom, almost no discovery, no technologies of note, came from design and planning—they were just Black Swans. The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.

The shortest distance between two people,” said the celebrated Chicago Black youth advocate and entrepreneur Darius Ballinger, “is a story.

Above men like Kennedy, White, and Franklin, at the top of the pyramid of players in the rural forced labor networks, were large landowners, entrepreneurs, and minor industrialists—just as they had been in the years before the Civil War.

As late as December, the President signed an agreement with an entrepreneur of dubious character for the settlement of 5,000 blacks on an island off Haiti. (Four hundred hapless souls did in fact reach île à Vache; those fortunate enough to survive returned to the United States in 1864.)

The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky,

On a less public stage he meets a few times a month with Canadian technology entrepreneurs. He grants each visitor about an hour in a session that is part speed dating, part talent show. In these encounters, he plays the tough judge, brusquely challenging their technology, strategies, and financing as a way of preparing them for the kinds of predators that once threatened RIM.

most merely took advantage of the opportunity to turn hard work into cold cash. Jim Crow laws prevented them from shopping in the white businesses of Tulsa, so entrepreneurs turned this fact into advantage and built their own shops. Money that filtered into Greenwood from workers in white Tulsa stayed in Greenwood. They spent their money with their own. In a relatively short time, many Greenwood residents enjoyed such prosperity that they became known as “Black Wall Street.” They were living the American Dream.

It is probably worth stating here that nobody wants to fail. We all want to succeed, whether we are entrepreneurs, sportsmen, politicians, scientists, or parents. But at a collective level, at the level of systemic complexity, success can only happen when we admit our mistakes, learn from them, and create a climate where it is, in a certain sense, “safe” to fail.

So, You’re Rooting for Everybody Black, Right? Yeah right! Some of my Brothas and Sistas be straight up frontin’ and lying to themselves. Let me be clear about what I’m talking about. If you were TRULY rooting for EVERYBODY Black, you’d be celebrating, supporting, and buying from people that you personally know. People like your OWN family members and friends. Instead of hatin’ on them being entrepreneurs, business owners, college graduates, or just overall successful in their lives, try supporting their endeavors and being genuinely happy for them. Stop speaking empty words! And remember… jealousy and envy are toxic to one’s soul. I am Stephanie Lahart, and keepin’ it real is what I do!

Gamers play with vintage video games, including the Atari system developed by the black entrepreneur Jerry Lawson. (Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star/Getty Images)

Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks—changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers.

On top of those challenges, the food industry has long been male dominated, with as much as 75 percent of business ownership in the hands of men, and and an average of 73 cents for a woman’s wages to a man’s dollar across roles. Similarly, the food industry has exploited immigrant labour and that of communities of color, for nearly as long as it has been around, building business models that depend o n the whims of customers (tipping) to meet living wages for front-of-the-house employees and advocating against an increased minimum wage that could change the economic landscape for the back of the house. Wealth and capital still continue to define the ways in which entrepreneurs bring there products to market, a realtty that has particularly grave implications for black and immigrant communities who might aspire to business ownership in a market absent of investment.

This may indeed apply to all concentrated businesses: when you look at the empirical record, you not only see that venture capitalists do better than entrepreneurs, but publishers do better than writers, dealers do better than artists, and science does better than scientists (about 50 percent of scientific and scholarly papers, costing months, sometimes years, of effort, are never truly read). The person involved in such gambles is paid in a currency other than material success: hope.

I loved going to church with Mother Dear (Ruby). The church members declared me the sweetest inside-out Oreo: White on the outside, a woman of color on the inside.

The newspaper encouraged displaced entrepreneurs to open businesses in South Tulsa and continue smashing color barriers. But it also spoke to a larger argument about how the definition of black success had changed from building up your own community in the era of Jim Crow to "getting out" to chase bigger opportunities in the formerly all-white world.

Some blindness to the odds or an obsession with their own positive Black Swan is necessary for entrepreneurs to function. The

Although such an organized criminal gang may enter into many fields, organized crime finds its basic support in black market activities. A black market is any area of the market which is legally prohibited. If left unprohibited, it would be an area of trade involving peaceful, willing exchanges between sellers and buyers. But when government initiates force by forbidding this area of trade to honest men, it throws it open to men who are willing to take the risk of violating bureaucratic dictates and the statutory laws of the politicians. The violence and fraud associated with any black market do not spring from the nature of the good or service being sold; they are a direct result of the fact that entrepreneurs have been legally forbidden to deal in this area of the market, leaving it open to men who dare to ignore prohibitions and who are willing to resort to violence in order to do business without getting caught. Unless prohibited, every market activity is operated on the basis of willing exchange, without the initiation of force, because this is the only way a business can be operated successfully, as force is a nonproductive expenditure of energy.

Nate recognized a similar condition in his friends who had moved to LA and fallen under the spell of the film industry. Down there everyone knew weekend box office grosses. In the Valley, everyone knew whether the latest IPO had met expectations. If you lived in LA, you couldn’t help but envy the studio execs and film stars when you glimpsed them behind tinted windows, gliding down Sunset Boulevard in their Range Rovers. If you lived in the Valley, the cool kids were the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who could sometimes be spotted piloting their humming Teslas into the gleaming, low-slung corporate campuses of Menlo Park, Milpitas, and Cupertino.

Choose to normalize giving best service to other people. Give best service regardless, if those people are black or white. Whether they are famous or not ,or whether they are your friends or not. If you are offering service. Always choose to give best service to everyone, not just your favorite people.

Black Girls… I dare you to take your education seriously! I dare you to stay in school and get your high school diploma. I dare you to go to college and obtain a degree. I dare you to believe in your ideas and become an entrepreneur or start your own business. I dare you to create multiple streams of income for yourself. I dare you to read, learn, and educate yourself. I dare you to save and invest your money wisely. It’s important to invest in YOU. You’re NOT too young to walk into your GREATNESS. I dare you to succeed without apology!

For decades now, the venture industry has been dominated by white men who invest in white men, who are successful and reinforce this idea that it’s this very specific set of people who are great entrepreneurs and who will make money for your companies, for your funds. Now, what would happen if, for a year, venture capitalists only invested in companies run by Black women who went to Tennessee State University, where Oprah Winfrey went? Well, the only companies that made any money for them from that year would be TSU alumnae.

Entrepreneurs should always aim to play the long game. Instant gratification cannot build a legacy.

Don’t be afraid to cut ties or severely limit contact with people who gossip, complain, catastrophize, downplay your dreams, or only choose to see themselves as victims. Wherever you expend a lot of your energy, you also plant seeds. Love yourself enough to plant and protect the garden that you wish to grow.

If you acknowledge your power of choice in your situation, you will instantly boost your self-confidence and open yourself up to new possibilities.

You are not going to suddenly wake up someday when you’ve made it and feel inspired to start being the rock star that you dream of. You’ve got to be that rock star now. Get out of bed and hear the crowd go wild every morning.

They don’t enter a country that trains fire hoses on black people, they enter one that practices affirmative action and makes a special effort to enroll their children in the best colleges. They don’t enter a country that is obviously hostile to black entrepreneurs, they enter one with minority set-asides and small-business loans.

Banks remain twice as likely to offer loans to White entrepreneurs than to Black entrepreneurs. Customers avoid Black businesses like they are the “ghetto,” like the “White man’s ice is colder,” as antiracists have joked for years. I knew this then. But my dueling consciousness still led me to think like one young Black writer wrote in Blavity in 2017: “On an intellectual level, I know that Black people have been denied equal access to capital, training, and physical space. But does that inequitable treatment excuse bad service?” Does not good service, like every other commodity, typically cost more money? How can we acknowledge the clouds of racism over Black spaces and be shocked when it rains on our heads? I felt Black was beautiful, but Black spaces were not? Nearly everything I am I owe to Black space. Black neighborhood. Black church. Black college. Black studies. I was like a plant devaluing the soil that made me.

There’s nothing typical about me… I’m an Exquisite woman, wife, mother, and entrepreneur. I live my life authentically, fearlessly, and unapologetically.

Norton defined a feral city as “a metropolis with a population of more than a million people, in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.”47 This kind of city, Norton points out, has no essential services or social safety net. Human security becomes a matter of individual initiative—conflict entrepreneurs and community militias emerge, Mad Max style. And yet feral cities don’t just sink into utter chaos and collapse—they remain connected to international flows of people, information, and money. Nonstate groups step up to control key areas and functions, commerce continues (albeit with much corruption and violence), a black market economy flourishes, and massive levels of disease and pollution may be present, yet “even under these conditions, these cities continue to grow, and the majority of occupants do not voluntarily leave.

Page 207 In the inner cities of all the major metropolitan areas across the United States, ethnic Koreans represent an increasingly glaring market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the relatively economically depressed African-American majorities around them. In New York City, Koreans, less than .1 percent of the city’s population, own 85 percent of produce stands, 70 percent of grocery stores, 80 percent of nail salons, and 60 percent of dry cleaners. In portions of downtown Los Angeles, Koreans own 40 percent of the real estate but constitute only 10 percent of the residents. Korean-American businesses in Los Angeles County number roughly 25,000, with gross sales of $4.5 billion. Nationwide, Korean entrepreneurs have in the last decade come to control 80 percent of the $2.5 billion African-American beauty business, which—“like preaching and burying people”—historically was always a “black” business and a source of pride, income, and jobs for African-Americans. “They’ve come in and taken away a market that’s not rightfully theirs,” is the common, angry view among inner-city blacks. Page 208 At a December 31, 1994, rally, Norman “Grand Dad” Reide, vice president of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, accused Koreans of “reaping a financial harvest at the expense of black people” and recommended that “we boycott the bloodsucking Koreans.” More recently, in November 2000, African-Americans firebombed a Korean-owned grocery store in northeast Washington, D.C. The spray-painted message on the charred walls: “Burn them down, Shut them down, Black Power!